Housepets!

Housepets! is a comic created by Rick Griffin. The idea was conceived in 2006 and came to fruition in 2008.

This comic is dedicated to Karishad.

I had naturally made up some test strips when I first thought up the comic, from early 2007. Here they are, for all posterity!

This is the ‘introduction’ comic I had done for both the main characters. If I had done an intro comic it would have been like this, but once I got around to it I decided against it: the fact that my art was crappy from learning to use the Tablet PC was bad enough as it was. I figured that taking forever to introduce all the comic characters the ‘regular way’ (read: boring way) would not actually be the most exciting method of dealing with the comic.

Still, I think this one is funny.

The font I used for the old comics is Spectre Verde, which is okay but was not really the look that I wanted.

This comic was actually the first one that I drew. I may actually go back to making sound effect lettering more physical because that’s more fun that just using a font. Also, note how they’re both crowded in the second panel: this is the reason why I decided not to do the actual comic on physical media, because there’s a certain size I have to conform to. The next comic shows how it comes out when I have to force myself to draw smaller.

This comic was done on a single sheet of paper with the borders measured out manually if I recall correctly. Peanut and Grape look a bit shorter in this because I was not sure how big I actually wanted them; afterwards I decided that they should at least be tall enough to make the human in the frame recognizable as a human.

They used to have a fishpond because their house was somewhat based on the where I lived North Carolina. Then I realized that I barely had any neighbors there. Nice huge yard, in the middle of nowhere, not actually conducive to the setting I wanted.

Yes that is Bino there in frame twelve.