by Brian Gott
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
(REALLY, MORE ABOUT THE COMIC)
(For what it's worth, there are a few minor edits to this document other than those that are marked. I was midway through editing it, years after originally writing it, before I decided I should be nice and mark my edits.)Brian Gott's body grew up in Bedford, Ohio. His mind, on the other hand, grew up wandering the Universe via a steady diet of cartoons, Muppets, science fiction, and other escapist fare.
By the time he was finishing high school, his interests had grown to include among other things the field of real, live, down-to-Earth robotics. From this, he was diverted into majoring in Information Systems by a distinct lack of robotics programs in most of the college brochures he was receiving.
Okay, I'm going to knock it off with the third person POV now. That could get really annoying after a while!
A QUICK CAREER RECAP
I graduated from Kent State University in 1995 with a degree in Information Systems. When I started out, there where two computer-science programs at Kent: Computer Science in Business (later renamed Information Systems, and I have no clue what they're calling it now) and Computer Science in Math. I am, to put it mildly, not a math geek. So I chose what I naively thought of as the lesser of two evils.
Following graduation, I spent nine months driving all over northeast Ohio looking for work. I even went as far south as the Columbus area. (One consultant to whom I sent my résumé offered me the helpful advice of "Get some experience," leaving me to wonder what precisely he thought I was trying to do.)
In March of 1996, I found a job at a small software company two blocks from the house where I grew up. Go figure.
That company was Creative Industrial Marketing (then doing business as Nytek, L.L.C.), which still ranks among the best work experiences of my life. However, all good things must come to an end, and CIM ran out of money in the spring of 1999. March 1, they laid off one-fifth of their staff -- namely, me. (This move was not quite enough to save the company from going out of business anyway. Maybe a company needs more than a staff of four and one big time-consuming client. But what do I know?)
After drifting for a couple of months, I found myself in a new job at a somewhat larger database management firm. For the sake of this essay, I will refer to them in Harry Potter fashion as The Company That Shall Not Be Named. Thus began what must be called one of the worst work experiences of my life.
ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
Seriously, a programmer at TCTSNBN could count on at least six things:
1) You will get vague, incomplete, or nonexistent instructions coupled together with unreasonable due dates. These "instructions" will likely be based on the assumption that you are able to read the mind of the person giving them, and that you know the jobs of people in other departments every bit as well as your own. (This, despite only the occasional nibble of cross-training.)
2) Any time you try to concentrate on your work, you will be interrupted by someone who thinks that "I'm getting some error" is the proper way to report a bug. If you're very lucky, that person might actually be able to identify the program he or she is using. (But don't count on it!) You will then spend the rest of the day playing Junior Detective trying to figure out what happened. Half the time it'll turn out to be someone's mistake from six months ago, which has caused no end of mischief throughout the system!
3) If anyone else needs something from you, you are to drop whatever you are doing instantly and make everything better. (Because after all, what could you be working on?) But if you need information from someone, you will wait half the day for it.
4) It will be your fault that you can't read people's minds and give them what they thought they wanted. Not to mention the fact that even if you could, you would still need to be in at least two places at once so that you could actually get your own job done while you were dealing with Issues!
5) If you want to be treated like a human being, they will call it "having a bad attitude."
6) There is no point in complaining, because nothing will change. You will only be told that YOU'RE supposed to be "more flexible." This, at a company whose motto might as well be, "We've Always Done It That Way!"
AN END AND A BEGINNING
In May of 2002, I had been swimming upstream at The Company for nearly three years. Things had come to the point where I was within a few hours of becoming the third consecutive programmer (and last remaining non-managerial programmer) to quit in disgust. But first the two people above me in their too-many-chiefs pecking order stormed in and fired me in the middle of trying to carry out more vague so-called "instructions." (The perpetrator of those instructions had responded to a request for clarification by saying in effect, "Just read my mind and do it!" It's interesting that a senior-type person couldn't figure out what I meant by, "I need this in English," but it's me whose communication skills are "unacceptable!")
They did not completely leave me high and dry, though. They graciously provided me with a severance package consisting of the following:
1) A metaphorical boot up the rear
2) A skill set featuring three solid years of good old dBASE III. I kid you not. (Don't get me wrong, they would make little noises from time to time about upgrading to SQL Server. But we programmers knew better than to get our hopes up. The fact that our superiors weren't running around like decapitated chickens saying, "We need this right now!" was kind of a dead giveaway.)
But I took one other thing with me. I took the beginnings of Oswald and his crazy world.
ENTER THE DODO
(In case you're wondering, the characters in the comic are NOT based on my former coworkers. The residents of the Dodoverse are purely the products of my own fevered imagination. No, really. I mean it.)
It was while I was confined to a cubicle outside of an empty office at TCTSNBN (Even though enough offices stood empty for everyone in our wing to get one, offices were only for managers! Pecking order, y'know . . . ) that my ancient interest in drawing a comic strip began to resurface (again). As early as fall 2000, I began to develop the idea for an office-themed comic called Oswald and Monty. (Fun fact: Oswald was originally going to be a snail. Some months later I drew a dodo in the margin of a sketchbook somewhere and decided I liked that better!)
Over the next couple of years, my attention continued to fluctuate between Oswald and Monty, pipe-dreams of syndication, and my long-held SF writing interests. During this time I created and abandoned two entire planets, repeatedly visited a third, and started plotting a future history involving an asteroid collision, which I still imagine I'm going to find time to finish. I also tried to develop other comic strip concepts. But I kept coming back to Oswald and Monty, primarily because it was the one for which I had the most ideas.
(A big problem has always been focusing on one idea long enough to do anything with it. In most cases I'll get an idea, be excited about and focused intently on it for a few days and then it just fades into the background -- usually when the next idea comes along! As of January 2004, Way of the Dodo is the most success that I've ever had with any creative project. And my mind is already beginning to wander from it.)
ONLINE COMICS AND THE ROAD TO DODO
It was probably less than two months after being booted that I stumbled across the world of online comics. A Website to which I had found my way happened to have a link to D.C. Simpson's Ozy and Millie (still one of the best as far as I'm concerned). Since then I've seen Web comics of all shapes, sizes, and degrees of quality. (Not naming any names here, but let's just say that the famous quote about ninety percent of science fiction -- and ninety percent of everything -- applies to Web comics as well.)
As for Oswald, Monty, and their supporting cast, they continued to gel in my mind. While looking for work I planned, sketched, read, and continued collecting ideas.
It wasn't long before I began to see a future online for Oswald. However, my manual drawing skills still proved insufficient to consistently recreate the images I could picture in my mind. I had been messing around with Corel Presentations on and off over the years, so I decided that it was the best bet for creating a CG comic. After some experimentation, I eventually figured out how to create halfway decent JPGs and GIFs from Presentations drawings. (Edit: I got my hands on Adobe Illustrator the following year, but it wasn't until 2005 that I was able to start using it to produce comics.)
One day in early 2003 I went on a "must-rename-everything" binge. Monty became Victor, after comedian Victor Borge. Oswald temporarily became Max, but that name refused to stick, and within a week or two he was Oswald again. I added Oswald's brother Max to the cast after that, in my head if nowhere else. Yes, by the time I started the strip online, Max was already in mind.) Hanna became Anna, who eventually became Hanna again. (One character who has yet to appear in the strip is still in a state of flux. She's Jade one day and Katarina the next. I probably won't settle it until I bring her in, and that's going to be a while yet!) (Edit: I think the question of her name is pretty well settled now -- that is, IF she shows up.)
For the comic itself, I went through a few possibilities before the light bulb went off. For a comic strip about a Dodo, why not call it Way of the Dodo?
Dodocomic.keenspace.com aka Dodocomic.comicgen.com became active at the tail end of July 2003, after the second of two attempts to set up a Comic Genesis (then still called Keenspace) account. The first thing I posted was a hastily conceived tribute to Bob Hope, of whose death I learned while I was just starting to work on the site. (I confused a number of people with this cartoon. It's based on a scene in Road to Utopia. In a saloon, Bob's "lovable coward" tries to pass himself off as a tough guy. He orders a lemonade and then snarls, "in a dirty glass!")
The actual comic began August 18, 2003. I'm still delusional enough to think I'll be able to get syndicated (with Dodo or something else). (Edit: I think Dodo's chances at syndication have been pretty much exhausted. Which doesn't mean I've given up on that goal ... ) But if not, there are always other options. I've got this other idea I'm thinking of ...