Commentator: Today I'd like to introduce my friend, Bill Barnes. Yesterday was the eighth anniversary of his comic strip Unshelved about libraries. He has many books out about this comic strip . And five months ago Bill started a comic strip about the software industry. It takes a special kind of person to understand his snarky one-liners and he's lucky to have found me because I'mof his friends who does. I find him delightful.
And I had, I had left and then come back to the software industry, but as I was preparing to leave again, I actually felt I had enough perspective and I started to spin up the next comic strip , which has become "Not Invented Here" which will be launched on September.And that was an interesting process. I started taking notes about these characters and what I ended up doing it reaching back into that comic strip that I did in, in college, the
And then, I think Paul was like, I'm just going to see how far I can push this. Huge fan of the comic strip .
and dimensional, and more camera movement, because we're in Snoopy's imagination. And the comic strip was kind of suggesting that. In Charlie Brown's world, it's a more formal composition that really is derived from the comic strip .
really want to do. It's a comic strip about living pastas or whatever. And you're like, I'm going to do that as soon as this thing is done, and I just have this huge vista of time.
the Dark Shadows, the vampire. And it was a comic strip called Barnabus The Wonder Dog and it was really just about him and my family and our adventures, sort of slightly fictionalized. And I had the most fun doing that stuff. And so I did that for years through high school. Sometimes I would print it out for other people to see and sometimes I would just do it on my own.
And you'll see why I'm showing this particular one. Here's a Krazy Kat comic strip -- a daily comic. Three panels from about 100 years ago during prohibition.
And then, I think Paul was like, I'm just going to see how far I can push this. disapproving of the content of the comic strip .
Now it's on pi Day at Tau Time. Tau made it into the iconic geek comic strip , "xkcd," with a pi versus tau proposed compromise to the pi tau dispute.
Yeah. It's a comic. It's the fourth-best comic strip . As voted for by who?
The red button? Well, for those of you who don't know, there's a little red button with a bonus panel on each comic. How do you determine whether a particular comic strip is actually not that complicated and easy to understand for a lot of people?
We see Snoopy flying in the Halloween special, and so forth. We see him in the comic strip . But we've never really seen what goes on in his mind.
he used, and then Lucas Sound went up and recorded those pen line movements that are just exactly like my dad would have done, as he was drawing the comic strip . And we recorded ice skates.
and so forth. So we explore that journey in Charlie Brown's world, of what it would be like. we have characters from the very first comic strip .
and so forth. So we explore that journey in Charlie Brown's world, of what it would be like. So we knew that the comic strip was sacrosanct.
And one day, Dennis Hopper, he's hanging out at the Ferus Gallery, on La Cienega, and he sees this comic strip . And why is there a comic strip on a wall? It's liked framed as art.
He's a frequent advisor, commentator on NPR and other news organizations. He wrote gags for Woody Allen's comic strip for seven years. He notes that this raises expectations he will not meet in the talk you're about to hear.
And other cartoonists I know have comic strips that are broader and I think much better than ours in, in every way, it's just that they can't go to a conference and do that. And one of my favorites is a comic strip called Sheldon which is about an eight year old billionaire and his pet duck who talks and it's, is really the most beautiful, heartwarming, funny thing. It's very nerdy too, but he, there's just not that boy billionaire conference he can go to to find his audience.
us on the journey, watched me, watched me learn to draw, watched me jump off the cliff and, and build my parachute in real time . After I'd been doing the comic strip for awhile people said, "Well aren't you gonna do something about the software industry? You worked there for like 20 years." And I, I, I, I wasn't even interested for awhile. Like I would, I'd been doing, I mean I was doing it for a while, I was doing both for awhile. And the last thing I wanted to do was kind of
Most of you probably remember it if you've been gaming for a while, and it was a pretty big deal at the time. I remember they posted a little blurb saying that they were looking for a cartoonist to do a comic strip about video games that they would then run in the magazine. Jerry Holkins: But here we have to emphasize how things have changed. Because we all know about the Internet. Right?
junk okay hey Dad getting started on that comic strip about you I was hoping to come by the house and take some photos for reference sure this is so much more insane than when I
it's the color line teacher." Everyone around the country had reason to believe that Jim Jeffries would win, because they had been convinced that So this idea of beauty that he interrogated in the comic strip is an incredible thing to see looking back.
and so forth. So we explore that journey in Charlie Brown's world, of what it would be like. We would never have somebody even think about drawing the comic strip .
So, I started looking into it a little harder. He's actually one of the characters in my old comic strip .
Comics started - anyone familiar with "The Yellow Kid?" The Yellow Kid was sort of the first popular comic strip . He looked not dissimilar to this. I used to, I, I, well sometimes do pictures but I know this is gonna go up on YouTube.
I had nothin' on them." A lot of times when people find out I do a comic strip on the Web, they ask me why, why it's not more webby. Like why isn't it, why doesn't it have animation in it? I'm like, "'Cause then it would be an animation, right? And I'm doing a comic strip ." I think one of the promises or at least one of the theoretical promises of the Web when
computers, so I went to Carnegie Mellon and I studied computer science. And I had a lot of fun doing that. I, I did a comic strip in college for awhile with a friend and it turned out to be important because that comic strip that I did in college, is now the comic strip I'm doing today. It has, it completely transformed and yet familiar.
know is gonna pay for me and my family." And literally we just had this conversation and the next day I found out that one of my because I don't want it to just be a comic strip for software industry, although I'd be thrilled if it, if it became popular there.
house uh and here's a little background on what I have done in the past um for the last 18 years I've been doing a comic strip called either story minute or waye depending on what year it was um and I'll just go through this one for people who may not be able to see the
tau dispute. Not to be outdone, another iconic geek comic strip , "Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal," or "SNBC," made this comic. The father says, hey, little monkey, can you tell daddy how many fingers is this many fingers?
But it's about really seeing ourselves differently. I tell this story in there about seeing a cartoon once from the "Peanuts" comic strip . And the two characters are Lucy and Charlie Brown.
And we asked them to tell us how they felt about their performance. So a long time ago, I read a comic strip called Bloom County." And as I remember-- I'm not sure my memory is completely
What was the approach to those, the "Flying Ace" sequences? Well, it comes from the comic strip . But I tell you, everything in this movie, the roots of any decision that we made, comes from the comic strip .
and so forth. So we explore that journey in Charlie Brown's world, of what it would be like. Number one, as far as the comic strip , we feel the comic strip was like Picasso's art.
is famous for the "Sock Monkey" series of comics and the syndicated comic strip "Maakies," and he lives down south, but we won't hold that against him.
so we, we came up with the idea that we'd put it on my Website. I'd had, I'd done this a little bit with my other comic strip , very limited capacity. Rob were you getting the, the first comic strip ? The - voice in audience: Yeah. Bill Barnes: Yeah. An old friend of mine and so he was one of like the dozen people who read that first comic strip about the RV. So we did it again with, with what was
And we worked together for a couple of months and he did some stuff that I really liked and then after a while we were both, we were like, "This is not working out." Because he was a professional illustrator and when you're starting something like a comic strip it's a lot like starting a startup. It actually takes a lot of hours, you're not gonna get paid for a while, and you're kind of building up equity and that's about it.
know is gonna pay for me and my family." And literally we just had this conversation and the next day I found out that one of my Comedy writing is actually really hard; writing a comic strip is hard. It's hard to if, if, if you try to be pithy on Twitter you know what it's like to edit your thoughts down
this is called Dad and there's my dear old dad and for some reason this comic strip has really captured the public imagination I get so many emails with this as this comic strip as the subject line but you'll see it's about 11 good morning Dad hi Dave come on
the book, in terms of whether you understood a particular comic strip from XKCD.
That's great. You should do an open mic at the Comic Strip with my mom.
The first misconception is that it turned up all over the internet a couple of days after I put up this little comic strip , all of which
And the "by Schulz" is important, because there's four generations of Schulz. Obviously, 90% of the movie comes from my dad's comic strip . And there's myself, his son, and his grandson, which is my son.
and so forth. So we explore that journey in Charlie Brown's world, of what it would be like. And again, not only did he go to my dad's comic strip , we also did a lot of going to Melendez.
You know, sometimes I tell the story about once having seen a cartoon from the Peanuts comic strip .
and I was recently um interviewed on a show by um a guy named Stan Lee does anyone know Stan Lee the comic strip guy
so you sell strips well what we do signed so to talk about monetization self-publishing a comic strip which
publish those on my Dad's Xerox machine in his office, and sell those. And eventually at a, at an actual photocopy place. And I did that for a few years and that was super fun. But creatively I kept moving back towards the comic strip thing because the superhero thing was kind of fun, but they weren't actually again the stories that I wanted to tell that really moved me. I wanted to do much simpler stuff.
one. Now, Unshelved I, I worked with Gene who writes it and I end up editing a lot of his stuff and then I draw it. And as I started spinning up this idea for the new comic strip I thought, "Well I can work with Gene again. He could help me write this one; I'll source more of
"Well I can work with Gene again. He could help me write this one; I'll source more of the material." And as I looked at it, I just didn't wanna draw another comic strip . I, the drawing has never been my favorite part. I like it fine, but I didn't really wanna double my drawing