One of the main themes —and interests of mine— for this site is comics, specially those published on the web. The online comics phenomenon is soaring and gives us access to artists we would not have been aware of otherwise. One of my favorites is Derrick Fish, who self-publishes the Dandy and Company comic strip since 2001 and has just unveiled a new site design.
For those new to web comics, think about your typical newspaper comics page (if your paper still carries them)… into a web context, with thousands of artists worldwide delivering their wares. But since there are no format or color constraints on web pages, web comics can adopt any shape or dimensions the creator desires - although many of them stick to the traditional, rectangular-shaped newspaper strip format, perhaps looking forward to catch the eye of the syndicates that can get them published in print and reach a massive market (read: a lifetime paycheck). However, very few of them ever get so lucky, not to mention the fact that, with many newspapers across the U.S. or shrinking their comics section or nixing them alltogether, the appeal of getting syndicated is waning fast. Some, like Mr. Fish himself, have decided to go through the self-publishing route, by means of his own company, Big Pond Comics.
The Dandy and Company strip revolves mainly around a dog too intelligent, sarcastic and loudmouthed for his own good (Dandy) and his own boy master (Bernard) who is the constant object of Dandy’s endless pranks, yet endures his treatments in a stoic, even naive way. Together, Dandy and Bernard have fought space aliens, pulled jokes into their neighbors, and at least one of them has found his significant other along the way. Orlando, FL-based Derrick borrows many elements of the late Chuck Jones’s school of animation —who Derrick openly admires— into his strip, and the result is a living, dynamic and highly amusing strip in the true spirit of the classical funnies. If you are driven by classical cartooning and love a steady flow of gags in your comics (think Calvin and Hobbes, for instance), you will find yourself at home with Dandy (and company).
Until recently, Derrick (assisted by his wife Melissa) drew and posted the comics in their site, along with daily “Dandy-Grams” all by themselves, in manual fashion. Web designer Jeston Tighchon of toasterdesigns offered the Fishes to redesign the Dandy website by means of using a popular blog CMS (WordPress) to manage the entire site and the strip archives, much in the way this site is managed using Movable Type. The result is really nice - not only are the lots of HTML tables from the previous design gone (It’s all managed by CSS), but it also manages to (almost) validate according to the W3C validator with just a few rather insignificant errors - a primer for a cartoonist’s site, as far as I know. As of this writing, there are still problems to solve while Mr. Fish learns the new ropes of using a CMS to manage his site, but we’re hopeful it won’t be long before Derrick gets back to their “Dandy-Grams”. Kudos to Jeston for being able to pull that out and for contributing to make a great indie strip even better.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Alberto González