Alright, if you saw Silent Kimbly on Friday, like me, then you will have noticed that our dear little Kimbly, who is usually quite happy and content in her one little panel, was sporting three of them. Let’s contact Ryan right now and get to the bottom of this…

Multi-panels?! Ryan, what’s going on?

Well, I’ve been getting semi-bored with doing single-panel comics, so for a break I thought it’d be fun to do a paneled comic. Plus Friday’s comic just came to me, and it seemed cute and fun, so I thought I’d try Kimbly in panels. But I wasn’t expecting the HUGE reaction it got. Everyone seems to love it. Which surprised me.

Will you be doing more multi-panel Kimbly?

I’ll be doing panel comics all this week, and then we’ll see, I’ve some more amazing ling bad puns I still want to do… and after drawing Kimbly pun comics for 2 years, I come up with them all the time. So if people like the panel, I’ll probably start doing half and half. A few puns and panels a week.

Just working on panels over the weekend I found it fun to see the characters actually interact. It made them feel more alive to me. And it’s great to get some story in, and not just have to say it all in a few expressions, now we can see how they get to the expressions.

Will your audience be able to handle that? Will their single-panel attention spans be able to make it through all those panels?

Haha… We will see. This week is kind of a trial thing, and if people like them I’ll do more, if Friday’s comic was a fluke and people want puns, I’ll do more of them. But as I said earlier, I’ll probably do both in the upcoming weeks.

So that’s the long-winded way of saying I’ll get back to you about if my fans can handle all these panels!

Does it take much longer to create the multi-panel strips or is it roughly the same since it’s roughly the same area size-wise?

The funny part is the panels are a lot quicker. The reason is, when I create the puns comics, I normally only have the pun when I start, then I spend the day trying to come up with funny reactions to the puns, this takes a while.

Where with the panels, the “joke” is in the expression, and how they change… so once I have the joke, I have the whole comic.

Plus the panels don’t have as much background in them, and the background in the single panel comics are normally what takes me the longest.

Digging deep into your sites I recently stumbled across some old Silent Kimbly comics that were multi-panel, in fact they were full comic book pages. Was this the original Kimbly? What are your thoughts on those? Will you do any more like that?

Yes, those are the first Silent Kimbly comics; originally I thought I was going to conquer the world with awesome Kimbly graphic novels. I spent a whole year drawing a Silent Kimbly graphic novel. Then I started the Kimbly comics as a way to start promoting the Kimbly brand.. But then my book got turned down my EVERY publisher. And the web comic started to take off. So I’ve just continued with the web comic, and the graphic novel is sitting on my shelf.

Finally, I just got to know, how do you cram all that cuteness into the comic? Are you concerned with overdosing your readers with cuteness?

Hahaa.. Not really to be honest I’m always trying to make the comic cuter. I’ve recently stopped inking and now am only using colored pencils for the line-work. I think it makes the drawings softer. I’ve always said I’m trying to make the cutest comic ever. The reason is that I think people put up with a lot of crap every day, and I think of Silten Kimbly as a little escape to some place fun and safe, where everything is cute.

As I said I’m going to be doing panel comics all this week, so let me know if you like them or not.

Thanks!

Yes, there you have it, as Ryan said, make sure to read Silent Kimbly this week and let him know what you think of the mutli-paneled comics!

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