I don't really write a lot of comics. I only passed the 200 barrier in August 2008, having passed 100 in 2005, 50 in 2003 and made my first comic way back in 2001(!). I've never been the most prolific writer of anything, and have found that since graduating from uni I've written next to nothing, save about four pages of dialogue for a piece my friend and I have been working on for, well, the best part of a decade now, with little success.

So, as a little writing aid to jump-start my brain, I've decided to write one joke a day for as long as it takes.

I've long used comics on this site as a tool to break down more complex ideas and observations into smaller, managable chunks which can then be played around with more easily, using the constraints of the medium to trim any excesses from a joke to get it down to its bare bones - the bits where the humour comes from. The thing is, I'm sure I have at least one idea like this per day, and if I don't then given the task of needing one idea a day my brain might start making more of an effort to analyse my surroundings, which can only be a good thing as I feel I've been going through life on autopilot for far too long.

So, one comic per day (or at the very least one explanation of how a paticular joke can't be made into a workable comic per day) complete with notes on cues and inspirations.

Starting... last week:

14/4/09

/comics/lima/460529/

Notes

Brazil once had a star player nicknamed Socrates. He was, as well as one of the greatest footballers of the eighties, a qualified doctor and a campaigner for democracy, and therefore awesome. The fact that he was called Socrates is ripe for obvious philosopher crossovers which I'm sure have been done before.

15/4/09

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Notes

I wrote part of a quiz for a pub I used to work in and question two was 'What is the shortest three-syllable word in the English dictionary?' after having read somewhere that it was 'Area'. I realised 'Aria' was also viable halfway through the quizmaster reading the quiz out. Some medical students also proposed 'Urea' (Pronounced to rhyme with 'Your here', hence the joke...). I wrote this comic after remembering that night.

'USA' isn't a word (its barely a country...) but I needed an ending :)

16/4/09

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Notes

We had a cheap copy of 'Connect 4' at a pub I used to work in, and me and one of the regulars became obsessed with it for a couple of days during quiet business hours. We started borrowing chess jargon to make the game sound more important than it was. 

17/4/09

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Notes

A true story that had happened a few days before I wrote this. I'd recounted the tale to a couple of people and they laughed, so I transcribed it into comic form, where it works less well.

18/4/09

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Notes

One of the first episodes in series one of House is called 'Occam's Razor'. The basic principle of Occam's Razor is "Of two equivalent theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred." The obvious irony of Gillette and Wilkinson's products being so complicated hit me a lot later than it should have.

18/04/09

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Notes

Aylear mentioned the Kuiper Belt in one of his comics, which made me think about the Oort cloud. In my mind the nearest thing to the Oort Cloud is Barnard's Star (In my mind, astronomers), which I know predominantly as an easy place to trade goods in the 1992 computer game "Frontier Elite II", which I played as a kid. This joke has kind of limited appeal. The one I wrote after it has slightly broader appeal...

/comics/lima/461197/

...but only slightly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_Belt

I'd voted most of these good already, but it pleases me that you're planning on making comics regularly. I've already told you you're a top favourite of mine on this site.

Another thing I found interesting was you mentioning you'd at least be trying to think of ideas daily and, failing to condense them into a three panel strip, at least explain the failure. I had previously been toying with the idea of posting some of the stuff I've been working on during my comic making process that didn't work out, or (obscenely often) just wasn't funny (albeit, to me, interesting), but I figured few enough people read my comics as it is; why should I post my brainstorming? At least when I'm posting comics in my thread I'm hoping someone will enjoy them.

I'll still be reading yours, though. No question. I'm not sure how that works, but it does.

20/4/09

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Notes

I made a few football-themed holocaust comics during the 2006 World Cup in Germany, so why not make an apartheidt one for South Africa? The last panel came to me after about ten minutes, and works quite well.

If you didn't know, Gerrard, Lampard, Beckham and Rooney are white, Heskey, Ferdinand, Defoe and Walcott are black, and Neville is shite.

While I don't find all of these particularly funny, I sincerely applaud your efforts to try and pump out a comic a day. It's beyond my abilities, that's for sure.

I found most of them amusing, albeit some too SOCCER flavored for me.

As a lazy writer who doesn't really write anymore, I also applaud your efforts to energize your other writing endeavors by cranking out a comic a day.

I would also like to mention that while I agree with you that America is barely a country (try living here...) we did at various times through history kick your monkey asses and save your monkey asses. Your welcome.

There. I felt patriotic for a moment, but it has thankfully passed now.

quote:

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AngryAmerican wrote:

we did at various times through history kick your monkey asses and save your monkey asses. Your welcome.

---

 This

Someone'll have to dig that 'Success troll is successful' macro out of 4chan for me, as I can't be bothered.

Cheers for your comments, though. Much appreciated.

21/04/09 (It is over here anyway. I'm running about one day and three ideas ahead of schedule so far)

/comics/lima/461318/

Notes

Quiet day at work. This one just popped into my head apropos of nothing, ready-formed in the style of a bad Tim Vine joke. "My mum wants to dig a hole in the garden and fill it with water. She means well..."

and so on.

Just edited it to remove the words "find a doctor to" from panel two and "for him" from the end of panel three. Those bits added an extra level to the joke that it really didn't deserve.

22/04/09

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Notes

Walked past the Royal Observatory today just as a helicopter was passing overhead. Ding.

The aftermath:

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 Almost late...

23/04/09

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Notes

Its been a while since my last comic about life as a monolingual waiter in a restaurant where 95% of the customers are foreign. The above didn't happen today, but I thought about it and it made me chuckle. Doesn't work brilliantly as a comic, but the idea that a frenchman would ask me what garlic was struck me as funny, you know, because of the stereotypical frenchman-in-hooped-shirt-on-bicycle-with-string-of-garlic-round-neck image.

Today is two-for-the-price-on-one, because their both a teeny bit on the average side.

24/04/09

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Notes

Not much to say. The phrase "He didn't just get up and walk away!" is from Loaded Weapon 1, and a I merely transposed it onto another situation. The other one is basic football satire.

25/04/09

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Notes

Uh, struggling a bit now. This is based on a 'witty' remark I said over a year ago. 'Scousers' are people from Liverpool in England. The stereotypical British view of the scouser is a man with a bubble perm and moustache combination, in a shell-suit, queueing for his giro (unemployment benefit) before going out and stealing things

"Why does the river Mersey run through Liverpool? Because if it walked it'd get mugged"

Gotta love stereotypes.

It's funny for Brits. Like Eddie Izzard.

Yesterday's lack of comic was due to life related issues (i.e. I sometimes have one) but I still thought one up, and here it is in physical form, one day late.

"26"/04/09

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Notes

This video is pretty, but it was the one sentence in the info box that blew my mind. The obvious thing to do was write a buggery joke about it. I'll need to check back at this comic at a later date, because I'm sure it could be written better.

A simplified version of the final frame would make quite a cool tattoo. Yes it would be a bit hippy-ish, but unlike a ying yang it has that all important basis in mathematical fact.

quote:

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lima wrote:
A simplified version of the final frame would make quite a cool tattoo. Yes it would be a bit hippy-ish, but unlike a ying yang it has that all important basis in mathematical fact.

---

I should point out that I mean the final frame of the video, not the final frame of my comic.

Oh, and the fact that the dialogue boxes get smaller and smaller was intended, although it doesn't really work.

27/04/09

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Notes

Another 'universey' comic. Not a very good one, mind.

28/04/09

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Notes

Read an article about Swineflu in the paper and started thinking there must be something funny to extract from it. Its called Swineflu for christ sake.

This was the best I could do.

29/04/09

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Notes

First Swatting the Barflies comic for over three years. It's OK, you can be excited.

This conversation happened, almost word for word, at work last night. Except for the last panel. In reality he just said "Aye well we all like it like that in Yorkshire" instead of recognising that a pub full of people who differentiate their glasses from each others by decorating them the same way would be ridiculous, and then carried on. Idiot. I don't like it when customers don't RECOGNISE MY COMEDY GENIUS.

30/04/09

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Notes

Its a pun. What else can I say?

Other than 'sorry' of course.

1/05/09

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Notes

...and this is the worst comic ever, but I couldn't have posted it on any other day.

Hawthorns traditionally come out on May 1st.

2/05/09

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Notes

The second dialogue box is something I said last week. Rightly diagnosed as being 'a little bit weird'.

03/05/09

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Notes

Not a true story but might as well have been. Was not worth feeling absoloutely knackered at work today for six minutes of watching a two-weight world champion forgetting how to box. I know Manny Pacquiao is a tremendous fighter but could Ricky not at least have kept his chin down and gloves up? And maybe do something other than move forwards with his mouth open and move downwards with his eyes closed?

Just a thought, and yes I could have done better. I'd have ran backwards in a circle for forty-five minutes with my head in my hands screaming like a girl and still emerged with more respect than Hatton did last night.

And yes I am a little bit annoyed.

4/5/09

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Notes

Struggled to come up with something in time (hence datestamp on comic) so I pulled up a random page from wikipedia, and later babelfish.

05/05/09

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Notes

I need a haircut but don't want to spend money, and so I thought of this. Will write it up as a formal proposition to my hairdresser friend later.

06/05/09

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Notes

The idea of Flavor Flav, wearing a sundial, shouting "We're gonna let you know roughly what time of day it is unless its cloudy" kept me giggling for about ten minutes. Doesn't really work as a comic but I don't care.

quote:

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lima wrote:
Doesn't really work as a comic

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Sure it does. 

07/05/09

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Began learning basic Spanish today. 'A hora' is a bit of a weird one, as it has a definite break in between the first and second words, meaning it takes even longer to say. I thought about how stupid that was for a total of six seconds before I remembered the plethora of words we have. 'Immediately' is one, 'momentarily' is another, and why do we say 'A.S.A.P.'? It takes almost as long to say the acronym as it does the actual words. Pronouncing it 'Ai-sap' isn't allowed.

8/5/09

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Almost killed myself over this one. No ideas were forthcoming so went to Wikipedia random article again. There's about three (well, two and a bit) punchlines in the comic, neither of them very punchy. Didier Drogba and Michael Essien are both outstanding footballers and both from Africa. Essien is Ghanian and Drogba is Ivorian, which is the only information you need for the final punchline. 

9/5/09

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Another comic made out of the 'Random Article' option on Wikipedia. This one was a fairly easy one to make a fairly easy joke out of. 

These comics are not only educational, but socially relevant as well.

10/5/09

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Ate toast ten minutes ago and realised brown bread is awesome. Alternating between cheap white bread (the sort that you can stretch to twice its length without it breaking) and expensive wholemeal bread (with all the nuts and shit in it) is a great way to ensure everlasting happiness on the breakfast front. Doing the same thing with women gives you a similar feeling. Reminds me of a Bill Hicks line.

"To do this shit you need one very good woman. Or, a bunch of average ones"

11/05/09

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I'm actually quite proud of this 'Wikipedia Random Article Comic' series as I'm currently 4/4 on the 'clicks on random article button' to 'comics' ratio. I'm also fairly pleased with the above comic, apart from the fact that the majority of the english speaking world calls it 'PMS'.

Ah well.

12/5/09

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5/5 now. This one came to me within about five minutes. Kind of works.

As you can tell by the amount of Random Article comics that I'm making now, original ideas appear to be a little thin on the ground. Then again, the whole idea was to find humour in places I might not have seen if I wasn't doing this little exercise, so I suppose, technically, I'm still somewhere close to success. Ish.

14/5/09

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Six out of six. 

14/5/09

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Seven out of seven now. A remarkably easy and quick one to write, mainly because at its heart its a totally hackneyed joke.

these are excellent. i liked the socrates one, and the wiki ones are going well. this is the first time i've stumbled into the forum in .. over a year. this note is to say that, see, your "notes" help, adds something, but you can leave your notes as comments to your comics, and they'll be seen more widely. i was doing the comic a day thing back a few years ago but got out of the habit. easier fo rme because mine dont usually try to be funny.

15/5/09

/comics/lima/464109/

Cheers very much for the feed-back Arbi, but I'm going to keep the notes here just because its quicker for me.

This comic was a little bit difficult. I initially tried to make a funny out of how he managed to get picked for Yugoslavia aged just 22, but never made a subsequent appearance even after Yugoslavia dissolved and the likes of Croatia broke away, taking a lot of Yugoslavia's best players with them. 

Thats a bit hard to make into a snappy, three-panel comic though, so I went with the 'he started the Balkans wars because he was a shit footballer' angle.

16/5/09

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Wahay! Hack joke. Better than my original idea which was to insinuate that Thanassis named the club after his favourite hobby: hitting skinny people in Nike clothing.

Panathinaikos.

See? Could have been worse.

A lot of these are damn good Lima. Especially just dredging something up from wiki and spinning it into comedic gold of varying (yet mostly higher end) carat purities.

You make me feel inspired, ashamed, intriuged and vaguely aroused all at the same time.

Damn foreigners.....

17/5/09

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Cheers for the compliments AA. You could possibly also help me with this comic too. If you, or anyone else, can think of owt else that would be exclusively related to the middles of nowhere in Tennessee and Texas that works better than 'NASCAR fans' then let me know. I did try 'Klansmen', followed by the more general 'Rednecks'.

There's probably a hell of a lot of jokes you do about the fact that there's two towns with identical names in Texas and Tennessee that don't appear in the rest of the English speaking world, but this was the first that came into my head.

How about 'Bumfuck, Egypt. Population: Dipshits' because that's what inhabit podunk southern towns with names like that.

Whoops! Forgot to post this one yesterday.

18/5/09

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This one deviates slightly from the Random Article Comic formula, in that there's some clicks through a few internal links there too. Is there a word for when you surf internal links in Wikipedia? There should be. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, I turn 25 on the 21st of May (another year too old to be doing this shit...) and so there'll be no comics for the 20th and 21st. To make up for this, I've done five for the 19th. Five. Just fucking count them.

19/05/09

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Thats a roughly accurate (in that its inaccurate but contains shadows of truth) description of Biyomon.

Torrey DeVitto is not a porn star, nor is she related to Danny DeVitto. If both of those were true the world would explode. 

You haven''t seen the punchline to the third one before. If you have then, well, according to some Germans you're a moron.

There's lots of Poles in Britain. They can mainly be found drinking, digging up roads and holding up telephone wires. 

The insinuation in the final comic is that, while one guy is out stealing the other guy's Tequila, the other guy is stealing his shot glasses to use for his Tequila. You don't need to have 'got' that (its not written well enough for that bit to be obvious anyway) to get the joke. Its about Mexicans stealing. Thats always funny.

22/5/09

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The Heineken Cup (Rugby Union tournament in Europe) final is being held down the road from my restaurant at Murrayfield stadium this weekend. Its between Leinster and Leicester, which are two completely unrelated places in two different countries. Leinster is in Ireland, and so we've had a few Irish people kicking about. Of course, this comic didn't actually happen, but I thought of it as I racked my brain for a comic idea.

The context of the comic is the troubles in Northern Ireland. Drumcree is a place with a large Catholic population yet is also on a main route taken by the Orange Order (proud group of racist triumphalist plods Protestants) on their marches, and thus the root of many conflicts in the country. 

23/5/09

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The punchline in this one is a bit of a cop-out, in that its average yet easy to write.

24/5/09

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Another randomly numbered service from the U.S., and another hackneyed joke.

25/5/09

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From a conversation at work today. My reply should have been:

"Your mum's like a placebo. I take her five times a week whether I need to or not"