TimTomTimmy (2014)
TimTomTimmy is born from an idea, a desire to tell a very specific type of story: that of a peculiar character that lives out of all norms and conventions. Eventually, the comic arose as an appropriate media to get this character out of my head.
The character was Tim, and the style of the comic was a simple as it gets. Four or six panels headed by a brief text that describes the strip. Stick figures and basic shapes and textures. The focus was never on the style but on the idea, so the goal was to keep it as simple as possible to be able to illustrate each idea as quickly as possible.
Tim's behavior was extravagant and weird, the ideas coming from the deconstruction and reimagination of day to day activities. However, those first strips seemed at the time vacuous and undefined. While there was a general tone to them, each individual strip did not stand on its own, and I just thought something was missing.
In my search for that something that would complete the comic, I turned to the webcomic community to see what the most popular strips were doing, and let myself be influenced by it.
I decided the comic needed a last panel that would consistently provide some final, funny twist. I reckoned Tim could not support the comic on its own, and designed two partners for him: Timmy, a little mischievous kid that's always unsuccessful in his pranks, and Tom, a fellow that always tries to do things right to an absurd extreme.
I went all in with TimTomTimmy. I gave it its own website through the ComicFury platform. It had a Twitter account, a Tumblr and a Facebook page. The strips were posted to Imgur and Reddit. Everybody that was into webcomics at the time must have seen at least one of my strips.
And yet, the comic was not getting any love. A few upvotes here and there, a few followers, but overall a rather cold reception. In some cases, even worse.
The truth is that the comic was not very good, and I was aware of it even as I made it. I hadn't been able to develop the original idea into something meaningful, and forcefully adding extra characters and punchlines only made it worse. After a few months, 43 comic strips, and an uneventful time in the webcomic scene, I decided it was time to abandon TimTomTimmy.
Looking back, it was a fun and interesting project. To this day, I see the potential that the ideas behind Tim's character had, and I now realize the mistake of not exploring them in more depth and instead veering off towards a different tone and style.
TimTomTimmy was a fascinating introduction to the world of webcomics, of which I knew nothing at the time. To my surprise, there were multiple artists making a living exclusively from comic strips uploaded to the Internet and the associated ad and merchandising revenue. Infiltrating into this territory was a fun experience. Creating the strips, sharing them, waiting excitedly for feedback, watching the comic grow, experimenting different ways to promote it.
Overall, TimTomTimmy will not go down in history as one of the greatest webcomics out there, but it was an incredible learning experience and I like to think that it was different from most of the other strips out there and had a unique charm to it. It was also refreshing to embark in a project that evolved around ideas, free from the confines of stylistic perfection, whose pressure I had felt in previous projects.
The website still stands — a testimony of a little fun project now dead. Here I present to you: TimTomTimmy. Don't judge it too harshly, please.
- Josema Cruz
