Spring Cleaning: A Few Old kingolaf.org Comics

I used to run a comic website called kingolaf.org: brought to life when I began college, and maintained off and on for 4 years until eventually getting scrapped after my undergraduate career ended in 2006, kingolaf.org was a brain-dump for juvenile humor. At one point, kingolaf was receiving over a few hundred hits per day.

A recent routine cleaning of my computer unearthed some of the old comics I created for KO. Thinking, perhaps erroneously, that some of you might enjoy these old comics, I began looking through them for the best ones.

But as I browsed through dozens of comic thumbnails, I began to realize something: none of these are good. I mean, they aren’t funny at all.

So, against my better judgment I’ve decided to move in another direction; I’m going to share some of the worst comics I created. Without further ado:

This first comic is a riff off of Sufjan Stevens’ 50 state project; it has a lot of potential. The idea is that Sufjan harbors a deep hatred for some of the states he has to write an album about, but after Frame 1 the whole focus of the comic is lost. For instance, is sodomy really necessary to make the joke? Probably not.

As you can tell, this was my MS Paint phase. At some point I decided doing comics in Paint might make them look original and less polished than sketching them up on my Wacom and editing in Photoshop. Looking at this now, though, I’m only seeing one achievement: a three framed comic where facial expression changes are represented solely by eyebrow raising and lowering. See: “achievement”.

My second offering appears to be an attempt at non-sequitur humor[1. non-sequitur humor has always been a love of mine]. Note that I say “appears”[2. Don't hassle me about the period outside the "appears" quotes - I adhere to the logical quotes school]. In actuality, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t think of an ending to the joke, so in lieu of a punchline, I copied a He-Man drawing and inserted it into the comic. The final line, “This is where I say the punchline. See you later,” is pretty lazy.

I guess I still kind of like this comic, though. After all, it’s He-Man.

A subtle shift to Photoshop? I can’t quite remember, but the gradient background in Frame 1 suggests Yes. I created this comic to make fun of a friend of mine who adores the Post Secret blog.

While I still think Post Secret is a petri dish for sadsacks everywhere, this comic does my disdain no justice. Instead, I decide to use my butt-of-the-joke character – Don Bob (based off an old roommate) – to launch into an incoherent and perverse ranting about cats. My apologies to all the cats of the world.

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Well, I hope you all found this as cathartic as I did. I’m looking forward to producing better material for this blog than I’ve done for other websites in the past, and I think there’s a lot of potential in the direction I’m headed. Maybe I’ll start doing comics again, or at least insert some more humor and lightheartedness into my posts; I probably won’t be making any He-Man jokes for a while, though.

Feel free to leave your comments about my (dare I say it?) art.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 1:55 am and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.