So, what's this crap all about anyway? Why on earth did I go and create a comic based on myself and Pat and why is it so stupid?
Well, to answer the first part of the question, it really just involved myself and Pat in the old #8easybits chatroom on IRC messing with people and it's one of those "you really had to be there" things to get, but for the sake of getting it out there I'll go over it anyway. For whatever reason (I'm convinced he was probably high and I was probably drunk) we were recounting completely inane stories of things that never happened and calling them adventures. Something to the effect of:
"One time me and Pat went to the mall to get cellular phones. We didn't quite understand how the rate structures worked so the guy explained it to us. I got a purple phone and Pat got a black one. It was a great adventure!"
Now, I'm not exactly sure if that's one of the stories we used or not (it's almost three years ago now, yeesh), but it immediately sprung to mind while typing, so maybe it was! As you can tell, the set-up is very similar to how a lot of the early
PnP comics play out and it's probably my favorite set-up formula.
In the end, all of this basically led to people believing that myself and Pat were involved in some way or another and I've received quite a bit of e-mail over the course of the last few years asking if we were married or something.
As for how Pat and Polly are represented in the comic, Pat is clearly influenced by his appearance in the
8 Easy Bits Cube-Headed Pat Comics. I had Pat re-draw Cube-Headed Pat himself for use in this comic, and I've copied the hell out of the template ever since. Stick Polly originates from my inability to draw anything at all. Her earliest recorded use is somewhere in September 2005 and buried deep on an external hard drive around here somewhere. She was only used a few times prior to the creation of the comic for some dorky inside-joke Flash movies nobody would get that were between friends. I also like how her dumb smile came out. It's odd crookedness makes it look like she never takes anything seriously and is about to laugh at any time. If you look really close in the early (and some of the later comics) you can see a blue pixel toward the back of her hair. I have no idea how that got there at all.
Going back to Flash for a moment, that's how nearly every
P&P is started. All of the elements that make up all the comics are in one big .fla file and every piece of "art" is recycled to hell and back. It's a cut and paste comic in the truest sense. I've always been a fan of that kinda "so cheap it looks like it's about to fall apart look," which helps because I suck at art! Once all of the panels have been situated and all the characters and objectts are in place, the file is exported as a .png or .gif, depending on color situations, and all of the text and last-minute edits are done in PhotoShop 7.0. Laziest comic ever!
And there you have the really boring story of how
PnP came about. I just wrote way too much about the world's dumbest comic.
