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Cow and Buffalo Book Out!

February 7th, 2007 by Mike Maihack

Adventures in Sandwich Making

Cow & Buffalo’s first book is here! Adventures in Sandwich Making collects the webcomic’s entire time traveling story-arc from September 2005 to August 2006. It also includes two all-new strips created just for this publication, a special “facts about cows” by Buffalo, original illustrations, and a giant guest gallery including art by Lunchbox Funnies’ own Trade Loeffler.

It is now on sale at Cow & Buffalo’s new store and available for only $10 (shipping included!).

New Characters Spotted In Astronaut Elementary

February 6th, 2007 by Tyler Martin

Actually they don’t have spots, they have stripes. They appear in the latest installment of Astronaut Elementary and I thought I’d catch up with fellow Lunchbox Funnies creator Dave Roman and get the scoop on them.

PSGQ

Hey Dave, what’s with the new characters? Are they some sort of raccoon species, and what’s with the one that looks human with raccoon headgear?

They are mostly Tanuki, which is a form of Japanese dog that look very much like American raccoons. There are few raccoons though and also human kids who wear fake raccoon hats (kind of like in Super Mario Bros. 3) to better fit in.


Members of the raccoon family are known for being clever and mischievous, is this the case with them? Can I expect to see these crazy kids digging through my trash at night?

Like all raccoons they get a bad rap because of the dark eyes and “masked bandit” look, but the kids at P.S. Gamma Q are mostly good kids. Most of the students at Astronaut Elementary get caught up in the infectious nature of inter-school rivalry. Except the newest student, Hakata Soy, who is unfamiliar with the school’s history, so he thinks his fellow students are overreacting and paranoid. The name of the P.S Gamma Q fireball team is “The Midnight Snacks” which is a nod to their reputation for nocturnal dumpster diving.


G for Gamma eh? What’s does the whole PSGQ abbreviation of their school stand for?

Public School Gamma Quadrant. I only realized last week that the Gamma
Quadrant is a Star Trek reference and not a real astrological term!

And such fancypants little school uniforms, were they inspired by anything specific?

Since I’ve already established that the kids at Astronaut Elementary wear different clothes in their daily activities, I thought it would be a good contrast if the rival school wore uniforms. It’s sort of a bit backwards in the future, since P.S. Gamma Q is a public school and Astronaut Elementary is a private school. I specifically styled the uniforms that P.S. Gamma Q wears off a manga/anime series called Negima.


So they are a rival school that was defeated by Astronaut Elementary at the last Fireball Championship, what is fireball? Are the “spears” they are holding used for fireball or are they hunting wild boar?

Fireball is a popular team sport in the future world of AE. It’s played during Spring Semester of school and involves two teams defending a small fort on each side of a grassy field. Usually there are 4 players on each team and they wear mecca-suits for protection/mobility and toss the fireball, using spear-like fire pokers. They try to throw the fireball at the apposing teams fort to burn away at it, revealing the winner’s trophy inside!

PSGQ SketchesWow, I hope they keep firefighters and a burn-care unit on call.

Click here to see some concept sketches of the PSGQ characters.

Alright everybody, be sure to head over to Astronaut Elementary for the appearance of the new Tanuki kids and follow along in the next installments to see what Dave has in store with them.

Silent Kimbly Breaks Out of the Single Panel

February 4th, 2007 by Tyler Martin

Multi-paneled!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?

Original

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!

Friday Night Dance Party!

January 19th, 2007 by Lunchbox Funnies

It’s been such a great launch week, it’s time for some dancing

Astronaut Elementary’s Miyumi San gets funky:

Come see more and post your own in the forum!

Read the rest of this entry »

Thank You Everybody!

January 17th, 2007 by Lunchbox Funnies

We wanted to thank everyone that has been visiting the site and checking out our all-ages comic lineup. Thanks to the many news sources, blogs and people that have linked the site and also to the kind and supportive words said.

We’ll be regularly posting new and fun stuff here on the main page so keep an eye on it. You can subscribe to our RSS feed or our new LiveJournal feed. If you have specific suggestions for what you’d like to see, please let us know.

Also many of you have asked for some link banners: