Early Shit Happens - the three-panel dealies

This is the very first incarnation of the Shit Happens comic strip. I did these three three-panel efforts as a test to see how they'd look in sequential form -- they make me laugh, but it's a weird direction I'm probably glad I didn't go in with the comic. Note the art, especially -- Shakra has a mouth and normal eyes instead of no mouth and pinpricks for eyes.

The idea was, at this stage, that I'd do six of these three-panel dealies a week, Monday to Saturday, then I'd run a full-page, full-colour strip on Sunday. That... didn't work out too well. Three panels is a really hard space to work in. Anyone who tells you that three panels are easier to do than a whole page is either lying or thick. In three panels, there's very little room for throwaway lines, for cheap shots, for fucking around. To do three-panel comics well, you need a strong punchline with a good set-up, or else it just doesn't click. That's why Penny Arcade is so successful, since the creators have become incredibly talented at doing the three-panel form. The high-point of the three-panel form, for me, is Bill Watterson's 'Calvin and Hobbes,' which remains probably the greatest humour comic of all time, something made all the more amazing by the restrictions placed upon it by the fact it was a strip for family newspapers. (I still love the story about how some papers dropped the strip following the use of the phrase 'Thermos of phlegm'.)

To do three-panel strips well you need to be able to cut your script down to the bare minimum -- something I'm very bad at. I hate having to cut even the stupidest throwaway lines, but sometimes it has to be done. That said, sometimes I'm aware that I've written what would be a perfect three-panel script and then padded it out to make it a full page. That's just the way things happen.