I've had this idea for an online comic strip about the misadventures of a bunch of superheroes for well over a year, but I've been dragging my feet on actually making it happen. Rather than keep putting it off, I've decided to start posting minimalist versions of Local Heroes strips. You can check out the first three strips at www.LocalHeroes.us.

The strips are pencils only--no inks or colors. Maybe someday I'll go back and polish them up a bit, but for now the pencil-only versions will have to do.

There's a few reasons why I took so long getting this strip going.

First, I was too much of a perfectionist about the main characters. I knew I wanted to incorporate many of the half-completed characters, organizations, and plotline ideas I've come up with over the years. Squire would be young Teddy Doucette from the Heroes Incorporated comic I created years ago. Legion was one of my favorite Champions RPG characters, and his UNIONS super-franchise would be the hero organization that would allow me to pull virtually any hero I created from my past into the storylines. I wanted the other main Local Heroes characters to be archetypical hero-types, each one representing various eras of comic books, but to "do it right" I kinda needed to make them from scratch. I sketched, researched, modified, and tweaked them since I first came up with the strip idea. I'm pretty happy with the characters now, and in a way am glad I put off creating the strip because I feel they ended up being more fleshed out and archetypical than if I started publishing the strip a year ago. Problem solved!

Second, I wanted to use Movable Type's capabilities to take care of both the news portions of the site as well as the comics archives. One benefit would be that all postings would be in one entries archives, making searching through past posts of any category way easier. This all-in-one archive concept was a big deterrent, because I'm pretty sure it couldn't be done a couple of years ago (without doing some hardcore modifications of the Movable Type scripts). A few months ago I found some MT plug-ins that were perfect for what I needed. Problem solved!

And Thirdly, while I may be eager, expeditious, and even aggressive when I am helping with someone else's project, I have no sense of urgency when creating something of my own. I actually had a close-to-final first storyline script done pretty early into development, kept dreading going through the various steps required to properly make a fully-inked, full color strip. So recently I decided to just go with pencils and letters. Problem solved--well, sort of. Maybe some day I'll get an inker and colorist to help. Or maybe just become a creative director and publisher.

Now we'll see how long it takes for me to put up a new strip. :]

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