Or… the art of self-congratulations.

Yes, today marks the official one year anniversary of the online debut of Capes & Babes. The genesis of Capes & Babes started quite a few years ago and was never actually meant to be an online comic strip. Capes & Babes was always going to be my little foray into the world of self-published, semi-autobiographical graphic novels. But even though I had the idea and most of the characters, I never could complete more then just a few pages. I was always in a constant battle with my inner cartoonist and my wanting to be the next George Perez. And so the project kept stalling.

Eventually though, my “inner cartoonists” finally convinced me to give up the ways of George Perez and other “realistic” comic book artists I grew up admiring. And once I accepted the fact that I am a cartoonist through and through, the idea of Capes & Babes in another form started to fester and grow.

Finally, after attending last year’s Baltimore Comic Con for the umpteenth time as a fan, I finally decided it was time to be on the other side of a convention table for a change. So, at the end of the Con, I went home, took a look at all my previous ideas for Capes and, essentially, threw them all out. Only Joey, Marc and the idea of a comic book store remained. And that night, the first sketches of Roy the werewolf began to form.

Capes & Babes was always going to be the name of my comic book store if I ever ended up owning one. And I loved the name. So those elements stayed. But I wanted to draw something other then a cartoon human - I did that enough with my other strip, “CMX Suite” forCommunity MX. I knew I wanted a creature of some sort but not just a “talking animal”. There are enough strips with talking animals. A few years earlier, I had done a t-shirt design that I called “Internet Werewolf” so I started playing around with simplifying that design and, along the way, Roy suddenly began to form. And, being a huge fan of the original “Die Hard” movie, I decided to call the werewolf by John McClain’s alter ego in the movie… Roy.

In one week, I had already produced 20 complete strips and I could have gone online a month earlier but I wanted to also honor my wife somehow since she has been a huge inspiration and has always loved the idea of Capes & Babes. So, my original thought was to debut the strip on her birthday. The only problem with that was her birthday, November 11th, fell on a Sunday and that wouldn’t do very well for a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. So I compromised and made the strip debut one day later.

And that’s a very Cliff Notes version of how and why today ended up being my one year anniversary for Capes & Babes. For those that have been around since the beginning, I hope you have enjoyed my humor (and keep enjoying it). For those that have just recently discovered me, I hope you stay with me a while and let me know what you think of the strip.

I have quite a few ideas and story ideas I want to explore in the next year so I hope you are as excited to read those stories as I am to start drawing and writing them.

Thanks for reading all of this. Now you know… the rest of the story.

Currently listening to Timberland’s “Apologize”…

-Chris

Tags: "CMX Suite", "Die Hard", Baltimore Comic Con, Community MX, George Perez, Joey, John McClain, Marc, Roy

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