The first year of Robot Friday comic strips were entirely black and white, even though I always knew that I would primarily offer them online. I could have used color from the very beginning, but I didn't because I was doing the best that I could just to make the characters look the same from strip to strip, and since I was drawing comics in Adobe Illustrator, drawing the strips in color would have taken three times longer - and I was trying to do a daily strip. Did I mention that?

They say that the first 100 comic strips you make are your "building" strips. These are the strips that are going to most likely be bad in both writing and art, but you have to keep pushing through them to get to the good strips later on. I agree and disagree on this statement, it is true that Robot Friday's look changed a lot in the first 100 strips and I flailed around a bit to find my "voice" in the writing. But I also think there were some really funny, and some of my favorite, strips written during this time. The fact they were in black and white sort of helped the comedy be more of the focus at times too. There were a lot of mistakes made, but that's the building part of things and that's why I keep the strips online, they show me how hard I worked and how far I've come.

Though, technically, there were only 75 black and white strips, they still make up the bulk of my "building" phase on the first 100 comics. It was during this time that I experimented the most with not only the design of the characters, backgrounds and the comic strip overall, it was also when I was trying to nail down who these characters were and what they'd say and how they'd act as well. If you look back on the first 100 strips you will see that Thomas and Gary act very differently than they do much later on in the comic. The two main characters were more crude with dialog and the situations they found themselves in were pretty mundane. During this time I was influenced heavily, as most budding artists and writers are, by "succcessful" comics aroud the internet so I pulled a lot from those comics - and pop culture in general - and tried to mimic what they were doing. Fortunately, in the process of writing, I eventually found a more charming and fun direction to go with Robot Friday that was all my own.

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