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-Richard Hoover

The End? Not Likely
By Richard Hoover

"You should kill off all the characters."

That was the suggestion I received from one reader of the Cubes semimonthly comic strip. Despite the perennial inclusion of the standard disclaimer on each comic, some people choose to believe that the characters can be substituted one-for-one with real life people.

    

That said, the actual suggestion I received was to kill off all the characters I no longer worked with. There were two issues with this suggestion:

1. I don't recall hearing the bit about just characters I no longer worked with (although there were witnesses so clearly its my memory that's faulty :-).
2. Since the characters don't match any people I work with, it amounts to killing everyone off anyway.

All writers draw upon the experiences of their life to help flavour their writings. It is true that when I first created many of the characters I incorporated traits from people that I knew. However, when one of your characters is a super hero, one of them's a ghost spawned from the discarded refuse of failed projects, and one of them can warp reality with his imagination...well, it clearly becomes difficult to say that's based on real life.

    

In any event, whether the characters were initially based one-for-one on real people or not, that's become irrelevant in the over-six-years since the comic first began. The characters have grown and evolved and are truly distinct from any real world personas at this point.

Hence following up on the suggestion to kill them all off. Hey, I was just giving the readers (well, reader) what they wanted.

    

And clearly I should have done it much sooner! Within only a couple days of the first installment of the Spaced Out story arc, I had received more feedback than at any other point in the history of the comic strip.

Of course, there was never any intention to really kill the characters off. I love writing and drawing the Cubes too much to do that. But it was fun to tweak people about the idea that it maybe--just maybe--had really happened.

    

Some people caught on right away that it was a dream or fantasy. The first two installments in the story arc were drawn completely in the shaded pencil technique that's always been used when Max gets to daydreaming. As Max himself states in the third installment, "...this is just a daydream. That was rather obvious from the start."

I always have fun with the pencil drawn comics. It makes for a nice break from the typical comics, both visually and in how the comics are put together. Having the opportunity to do three in a row was a great bonus.

Of particular note was the first part of the story arc, The End. Here the characters are gathered about as famous astronomers waiting for the arrival of Asteroid Vicky (nicknamed after the reader who first suggested killing the characters). To accurately draw the characters in pencil, it was necessary to work on them at full size. They were then scaled down and placed into the comic. The full size images now adorn this very article you're reading.

The Cubes characters have grown and evolved from their initial beginnings. Numerous story threads dangle in the breeze to this day. To put people's fears to rest, the Cubes have been here, are here, and will be here for a long time to come.

For the people who saw through the daydream, I hope you enjoyed it. For the people who didn't see through it, I at least enjoyed your rampantly wild speculations.