By the second year of Robot Friday I pretty much had my process, templates and techiques down to where I could, at least, make comics. Not all of the comics were good, mind you, I was still trying to find my voice in the writing and the art was still very much a work in progress, but I was building momentum and still making comics each day and, on the timeline of a budding cartoonist, that was a big win! During year two I started to feel confident enough in what I was doing to sort of play with color a bit in the strip. I was still struggling to nail down the look of the characters in my style consistently from day to day and felt that one place in the comic that I could improve immediately was color and how I used it to express emotion and overall tone from strip to strip.

I decided early on that I was only going to use flat color on the characters. I wasn't going to add shading or highlights or anything like that which would add more time to making the comic and, for the most part, would be lost on the reader anyway. But what I thought would be fun is to use the background color and props as a way to convey a bit more meaning and emotion into the storyline of each individual comic or an overall story arc. I would make backgrounds of panels red if the characters were angry in those panels, or more soft colors if the characters were in a somber or happy mood in those panels. Color works in sort of a subliminal way - like music does in movies - to get the reader to feel some more than they would just by reading the text. On top of using color differently I also started to redesign characters as I got better at drawing cartoons in a style that made more sense to me, I also added characters. Enter Karen.

Karen is a very real person, in reality, in my life. In fact she is so real and important to me that she is my wife! The two of us met when we both worked in broadcast television. Once we started dating I decided to add her to the comic because, after all, I'd added all the other people in the world that I knew at the time. So, why not? But I didn't want to add her as Thomas's love interest, or anyone's love interest to be honest, so I thought the gang needed a central place to hang out (and that I could draw backgrounds for and reuse in a time crunch) and The Cocoa Bean was born with Karen and the creator and owner of not only the store, but the brand too.

I've found that, when writing, most of the time the writer isn't that aware of what form anything he is writing will take shape - at least it's that way for me - and by adding something new, whether it be large or small, that will be enough to open up the storyline or universe of any given story. By adding The Cocoa Bean I then had the backstory for Karen, how she created the brand in college and sold the license to a big corporate entity, then that little nugget of information led to me realizing that she's really business savvy and then that lead to me having a whole new vehicle for a whole lot more stories, problems and adventures in the future.

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