101 Facts (sorta)
Meet the CAST
MEDIA
 2003: The first picture ever made. Acrylics on huntonite. |
WYyRD-HISTORY Introduction |
| Prehistoric stuff... So where did it begin? Oh, I dunno, long ago. Probably all the way back to the time I made my first strips in 1996. Most likely it goes even further back, but this is when I first remember latching on to the idea of comic strips. I basically spent a summer learning how to draw Beetle Bailey, and redesigned the series to look like my family, only in a military setting. I did this because my brother was in the army at this time, and he was a big comic buff. Anyways, this was what first got me into making comic strips. When I finished junior-high I started on an arts course in high-school, and it was here I started making comic gags again. I had a folder where I just made lots and lots of strange gags and comic concepts, just for the fun of it. During this time I made a small strip based comic called “Hybeldyr” (Eng. Apartment animals), which stopped at roughly 12 strips. This comic just featured myself and three of my friends from junior high, and was pretty pointless. |
 2004: Prototype strip. |
 2004: Early Falk. Vector version. |
The summer after I finished high-school I
did a revamp of “Hybeldyr”, where I changed the setting and
some of the characters. One of the new characters I introduced was a cocky,
go-getter goth called “Falk”, so this was the beginning of
him, in one sense. At this point he was absolutely nothing like the Falk
we know today. This small series only reached 20 strips before I put it
away for good. No more than six months after this series was shut down, I created a new one. Still based on actual events, and featuring actual people and settings, this one was called “Morten the Misfit”, and lasted for about 10 strips. The reason why the last two concepts were so relatively short lived was because they were competition pieces, and thus spur-of-the-moment series that I didn’t really feel for, and this does leech into the spirit of the thing, not making it as good as it could be. |
| It begins... For a relatively long time after this I didn’t do any comics. Only a couple of one pagers, all of different subjects, and a short graduation story for my school (Fana Folkehøgskule) that was to be printed in the yearbook. While doing this I came up with a concept that I found strangely interesting. The ideas came when I studied an ink blot, and the jokes just naturally appeared during this line of thought. I sat down and quickly sketched down some basic thoughts, and I soon saw that the material I had put together over the last 15 minutes was better than what I’d done over the last seven years. This was the beginning of what was to become “Wyyrd”. |
 2004: More vectors. |
 2005: Falk's look before the series actually started. |
Time went by, and I did not really do much about the ideas I had. (This is who I am. I spend a lot of time producing nothing.) I found that making a single strip took a lot of work (who'd have thought?!), and that I mostly couldn’t be bothered. I used to blame it on me not having any time to do it. At this time I spent most of my time, while sketching, making sketches and concept drawings for a fantasy series I had planned for years, but I soon saw that my fantasy characters frequently got company from this skinny little kid with white skin, a black long coat, messed up hair and no facial features except from some big eyes. I had earlier read a lot of a comic called “Lenore” by Roman Dirge, and his cute, yet horrifyingly gory style of storytelling inspired me when making the look of the primordial Falk and his femme-fatale sidekick that would later become Izzie. It’s probably worth mentioning that I was on my way out of my goth phase at this point, and that this shaped most of what I was doing in general. The sketches and ideas for “Wyyrd” were still tucked away in my desk drawer, but they were just that, and thus close at hand. |
| The First 20 I started on an Arts and Crafts course at the University of Volda, Norway, and just spent that year socialising and being creative. Towards the end of that year we had an upcoming exam where we were supposed to create our own assignment for the exam. This is where I decided to finally do something about those sketches and ideas I’d had for well over a year. I wrote the assignment, and got it approved. I gave myself a final goal of producing 16 finished comic strips, and I set myself a set of dogmatic rules which I had to follow. I always felt it was cheating when a comic book artist used the old “copy and paste” trick when making his/her strips, and I had the outmost respect for the artists that did their strips all by hand, so I made a pledge to myself that wouldn’t stoop to the copyists level, and that I was going to do this as traditionally as possible, sans from the colouring which would be digital. In the end I stretched myself alittle and produced a total of 20 strips. I am a comic buff (no DUH), and a very opinionated one at that. There’s nothing easier than to have opinions about other people’s work, and Norwegian magazines are a veritable horn of cornucopia in the terms of comics. “Pondus”, “Nemi”, “Eon” and “M” are all examples of very successful Norwegian commercialised comic strip concepts. Not all of them are to my liking, some I even have a love/hate relationship to, but they were all very good examples to study when I was making my own comic. I think I spent a month reading comic books as a part of course work, and annotate them. (Fuckin’ high-class that was!) |
 2005: Blue haired, angry internet-chatter. Who'd have thought this once was Izzie? |
 2005: Falk has a way of daydreaming that takes everything out of context.
This one was probably influenced by both anime and marvel characters... |
A few weeks into the project it was clear that this wasn’t just
any old project for me. I was being far more critical and attentive to
detail than I usually was and I also produced a lot of work while figuring
out my concept. Falk changed his look two times over this period, and
finally he looked like the Falk from the first strips. I felt I had to
change the look, or at least try to, since this was a university project
and I had to show progress. It was a weird decision changing Falk’s
t-shirt colour from black to red, and doing the same with the smiley on
his shirt. Never quite felt right, but I still stuck to it. His hair also
grew longer and became more uniformly pointy instead of just a random
mess (the original idea was to make it all from inkblots). Izzie was more
closely defined as well. When I began I had made some concept drawings
where she had blue hair and dark grey clothes. She was pretty much well
defined personality wise at this point, so all I had to do was to take
her that extra mile to revamp her a little bit. In the end she ended up
with the blonde hair, blue eyes and a slightly trash gothy clothing style. After defining the characters, I spent ages defining my technique. There were mock-ups made for every single strip where I used different traditional techniques, and in the end I sat down and analyzed them, and finally settled on a technique to use for the making of the final strips. Excessive? Yeah, I know, but it looked good in my back up work. |
| The final creation took me roughly a week. Having all the strips laid out and planned it was “just a matter of redrawing them.” At an average I produced four strips a day, over a period of five days, and then I set them up and coloured them digitally over the next two days. This would in many cases explain why the first 20 are as shabby as they are. At least they have this handmade charm I guess. In the end there was the exam exhibition, which I don’t really remember too much about as I was overworked, probably hung over and in a daze. I do remember getting several flattering comments, and the grade of “A”, so it was a fairly good day! |  2005: Yet another prototype strip.. |
 2005: Trying to evolve our heroes... |
The Hang Over… I was pretty happy with what I had now, and felt pretty optimistic (and slightly arrogant) about it all. So I naturally tried to pursue a life long dream; to get published. This… did not turn out as hoped. The market wasn’t right, and when looking at what I had at the time, I’ve asked myself, was my stuff good enough in the first place? Slightly disheartened, I did as I’ve always done; I brushed it off, and put my source of misery away in a bag, in some drawer. My intention was to sit on it to some more opportune moment and not share it with the world just like that. While waiting for this amazing turn of the tides, I moved to England to start my degree in Graphic Design. It was a needed change of setting and routines, and I found myself busy worrying about so much else than comics. In fact I didn’t think of “Wyyrd” once, that is before a friend of mine started asking me to provide reference material for her, so she could make a sculpture of Falk for a school project. I was of course flattered and gave her what she needed, and tried to give as much feedback on her process as I could. Not that it was much I could say, she had more control over the look of Falk than I ever did… She finally finished her sculpts, and they were put in a cabinet as examples of student brilliance. They’re still there as far as I know. That Christmas she gave me a present; a painted sculpt of Falk. This was pretty much the turn of the tides for me. I know, pretty sappy. |
| Going digital This Christmas I felt inspired to pick up the pieces. I took all the strips and translated them all (sans one, which I deemed to be less than standard) into English, and posted them on DeviantArt for people to see. What is the point of having a comic that no one is ever going to read?! And to top things off I started to make new strips, now abandoning the traditional dogma of the old strips, and using the equipment I had close at hand; a computer and a graphics tablet. It went incredibly slow at first. And I do mean incredibly. I think only two strips were produced the following 6 months, but the feedback I got from that finally inspired me to do more. The following summer I made a template for my strips, and just started producing. By Christmas ’06 the now 19 originals had become 39 Wyyrd strips. Early 2007 proved a bit hectic, so not many strips were produced. Over Easter I did however decide to join a comic competition in Dagbladet, one of Norway’s biggest newspapers, and for this I redid 12 of the 19 originals into the new digital style, and translated 14 of the new ones into Norwegian. It was a lot of work, over a very short period of time. A lot of work that I could have avoided doing, cause I didn’t exactly get anywhere in the competition. My disappointment subsided shortly, and I figured that “yes, I have very nice drawings and junk, but it’s all really… soulless.” I figured that I’d better start thinking my manuscripts over and brush up on my storytelling. Maybe even start actually DRAWING again (lots of the new ones I made looked more like constructs than comics). |
 2005: Star Wars Episode III was in the cinema, and we were all very excited... |
 2005: Still much in the same spirit as the previous one. |
Wyyrd 2.0 After the failed competition I turned a new leaf, yet again. It was time to have fun, and to create an actual universe. I had all I needed, and I knew where I’d get more, so I did. I introduced several new characters, and I told myself that the format wasn’t important, as long as the story was told. From here on I would try to get more creative with the way I told my stories, and I started playing around with concepts and styles. Currently the idea bank never runs dry, just the time in which I have to do it runs short. And although Wyyrd’s never had an actual storyline, it is certainly moving in that direction now. No one knows what the future holds I guess. Only that adversity spawns diversity. |