Month: July 2020

I did not intend to create this strip. It kinda created itself. What follows is a verbose account of what happened. It has very little to do with this particular strip. That’s not to say there won’t be something said about this strip, but it’ll be embedded in my ramblings. Read on if you like.

I was creating new Perk at Work strips and had decided to make them square (for Instagram) and on 8.5” x 11” paper. The paper I was using was 14” x 17”. Riveting stuff, right?

In any case, I cut the paper in half (into 8.5” x 14” pieces) which meant I needed to trim some off each piece. So I did. Which left me with two 8.5” x 3” pieces of dross.

But they were not dross.

Instead of tossing them, I kept them on the side of my work table. After staring at them for about a week, I decided to do a comic on them. I started out doing what I called “Two Minute Turtle.” I allowed myself only two minutes to write a gag and draw it. Needless to say, that’s not a lot of time to creat quality material.

But did I need to make quality material on what was going to be trash? Not really.

And this was liberating.

I dropped the two-minute thing and told myself that I should just make a comic that I enjoyed making. This comic on this post was that comic. I felt great making it. There was no pressure and no reason to make it fit into any universe. With Perk at Work, things have to be believable in the physics of the comic. In this new throwaway comic, there were no rules.

I kept on making comics. They were fun. Still are! The earlier ones I put in envelopes and sent to friends and family for fun. As I started writing and drawing more, I began to keep them in a photo album, just for fun.

I hope you enjoy this and subsequent Bark & Grill comics. I sent them out for syndication but if they don’t get syndicated, well, that’s ok. I’ll still do them for fun.