About a year ago or so, maybe more, I decided I’d had enough of Chippy and Loopus.I’d been drawing the strip more or less continually for about 6 years and had little in the way of readers or success to show for it. This was my fault, you see, for I initially did Chippy and Loopus as a lark, kind of scribbling it out on little scraps of paper and posting them hastily on my blog. It was big among animators and fans of drawing, but it failed to catch on with anyone else. I worked and toiled away on it, started drawing it more like a real comic with brush and ink on bristol and yet it still didn’t really take off. This was, again my fault for 2 reasons: I wrote the strip as an extended continuity that assumed everyone had read every strip. This meant that the strips often made little sense to anyone popping in for the first time.The other problem was that about 98% of the time, the strip contained horrifically foul language. This meant that most folks would pop in, see a 4, or 12, or 16 letter word, and then click away before their kids, or Mom, or clergyman saw the offending word, or words, never to visit the site again. Those who DID enjoy the occasional off color joke many times could not share the strip with friends and family. Webcomics live and die by word of mouth and sharing, and I had effectively limited the share-ability with my stubborn adherence to dangerous practices that I thought were “interesting” and “funny”.
After a lot of soul searching and even changing the strip so that it was “PG” rated rather than NC-17, I still wasn’t drawing in the readers. I wound up putting the strip on hiatus due to the fact that I had accepted a job directing on the now Hit tv show “Dragons:Riders of Berk”. I did fully intend to get back to it, but I was having my doubts about whether or not I was drawing the right strip. I consulted many a cartoonist friend. After a lot of thinking, I decided to quit the strip and develop something new. I made announcements over Twitter and Facebook, and even on Tom Racine’s Tall Tale Radio. Chippy and Loopus was dead.
Or was it? To be continued.
Hey all! Welcome to the all new Chippy and Loopus site! We are starting fresh. The archives are gone to make way for a new start and a new direction. New strips will start appearing March 30th, which happens to be my birthday. Hopefully, the old readers will like the new stuff, and folks who HATED the old stuff, and there are many, will dig the new stuff too. I’ll write more later about the changes and why they happened. Until then, later. I have to go draw now.
Thanks for stopping by!
John