Capes-n-Babes

Naming Comic Strips…

When Matt Stout and I were recording our podcast, The Lightbox Podcast – Illuminating Webcomics, in one episode, we talked about naming strips. I have heard from various people that this is something they tend to dread but I could never understand why. Maybe it was my creative writing classes I took in college or just the fact that I wrote a LOT in high school, but coming up with titles for short stories was always a fun thing for me. It added a little extra spark of creativity to whatever I was doing.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I thought it would be interesting to tell you all that the title of this strip almost turned out to be something else. Originally, I was going to title it “Should have been obvious…” but at the last minute, I decided “Ultimate Answer” was better and there’s a couple of reasons why.

First, the title is more indicative of the theme of the strip. Second, the original title seemed to have a sort of “third voice” to it. Back when I was writing and drawing my weekly “CMX Suite” for Community MX, I did this a lot. I titled a lot of my strips as an extra punch line or, as if I was commenting on the joke as well. Back then, I thought this we pretty ingenious as nobody else was doing it. The only problem was, nobody was getting the extra little joke either. Instead of adding something, it took something away from the strip. Since I started Capes & Babes, I decided to do away with that ingenious bit and try to name my strips more in line with television show titles and things like that.

So, in a nutshell, that’s why I changed the title to today’s strip. It just felt a little too “CMX Suite-ish” for me. Besides, I liked “Ultimate Answer” much better anyway.

PS: I am also still looking to start up another webcomics-related podcast or join an already established . Tovias, are you out there??? If anyone is interested, send me an e-mail, Twitter post or Facebook message and we’ll get your people and my people together for lunch…