#oneaday Day 695: Where Are They?

Longtime viewers of this blog are probably wondering where my cast of stickmen characters has got to (besides the top of the page and the sidebar, obviously). Newer visitors are probably wondering why on Earth there is a parade of stickmen at the top of the page and in the sidebar.

You’ll be pleased (or disappointed) to know that I will be resurrecting the stickmen images for posts starting in the New Year. I haven’t yet decided if I’ll do a comic every day or only on certain days, or if I’ll simply use individual images. I’ve tried both over the course of the last while, and both have their pros and cons.

I’m not going to make any excuses as to why I’m not doing them at the moment — they may not look like very much, but those images and comic strips take a surprising amount of time to put together, and since getting a lot busier I just didn’t have the energy to keep up with doing them and a blog post every day, to be frank. To put it in a simpler, arguably more honest way, I couldn’t be arsed.

Now, however, I’m twiddling my thumbs in anticipation of potential new work which may be coming my way from several sources from the New Year onwards. As such, it’s got me thinking about flexing my creative muscles a bit more. I’ve already mentioned that half-finished novel sitting in Google Docs waiting for me to 1) figure out where it’s going and 2) finish it. And indeed I’ve been doing sporadic bits of work on that — though haven’t yet got into the “habit” of working on it regularly. Alongside this, I’ve been experimenting with making YouTube videos of bullet hell shooters — fun, though I anticipate my audience being somewhat limited! And, since I invested a fair amount of my own time, effort and soul into those silly little characters you see at the top of the page, I figured it’s time to bring them back.

Creating characters is an odd experience. When you create a character, whether it’s a comic book stick figure, a character in a novel, a roleplaying character in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign or any other persona, you can’t help thinking of them as your own “children” in a way. You become attached to them — though not necessarily to the degree that you want them to always succeed, particularly in the case of novel characters prone to attracting disastrous situations — and you feel like you “know” them.

Such is the case with the stick figures. There’s obviously me, though my abstract representation resembles me in the most superficial manner possible my emphasising what I consider to be my most prominent characteristic — my beard. And from there the others sort of took on a life of their own.

Alex didn’t originally have a name and existed purely because I wanted to put a redhead in there. She’s often there to provide a splash of colour to an otherwise monochrome scene. Her name came from me asking on Twitter what I should call her, and a (male) friend named Alex politely requesting she be named after him. Alex is relatively normal, though the character trait that she only reads Grazia, not books, was set relatively early in the characters’ lifespan as “speaking parts”.

Lucy, first seen in this post, originally had black hair, but her overexcitable nature was present and correct. She didn’t show up with her blonde hair until considerably later. (I think. I admit I didn’t look that hard. But after a cursory glance, that appeared to be the first time Blonde Lucy showed up.) From this we could arguably deduce that one of those is not her natural hair colour. That or I simply decided she’d look better as a blonde, particularly as her dizziness as a character conforms to the “blonde stereotype”. (Note: I don’t actually believe the blonde stereotype. But Lucy does, and is happy to conform to it.)

Phillipe (don’t you dare call him Philippe or he’ll hurt you) was an odd one. His distinctive, fixed facial expression came about from how my buddy Edd and I used to draw stickman characters shouting, screaming or generally being noisy back when we were at secondary school. The idea to have him permanently stuck like that coupled with a predilection for getting his knob out at every opportunity was alarmingly quick to occur to me. He’s generally used to say things that are a bit closer to the bone (no pun intended) than the other characters might. His name is the result of another Twitter poll, and privately amusing because his personality is pretty much the exact opposite of the person he’s named after.

Those four are the main cast who have been present in pretty much every crude drawing on this blog in one form or another. Other recurring characters such as the Money-Bot (originally introduced as a pun on the term “monetization”) and Des (whose existence is explained in great detail here) have come and gone and, like the “core four”, have taken on something of a life of their own.

So yes, they will be back. As I slowly piece my brain back into some semblance of order — not particularly helped by recent setbacks relating to employment — these facets of my personality (because that’s what they are, let’s face it) will be making a resurgence. Because for all the pain in the arse it is to draw them every day, having them there is oddly comforting; creating them strangely cathartic.