Comics that Never Were - #1 (Patreon)

As you probably know from the blog, Zach and I are not making comics this week. He is helping his partner recover. Until we're back on our normal production feet, I'll be posting these.

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I was going to post some stuff from Thieves Can't Strip (the one-shot jokes we're doing lately), but actually, it occurs to me that most of you probably don't know how Thieves Can't came into being. There are plenty of abandoned scripts from the early inception of the comic and I think they're a bit more interesting than the bits and pieces we have rejected over the last few months.

I originally *hated* the idea of making Thieves Can't. We were making an indy webcomic called Ramen Empire at the time and languishing in obscurity for a very small, but dedicated group of readers, some of whom followed us over here (thank you!) and I was dead set on becoming the next Girls With Slingshots or Dumbing of Age. It was never going to happen, but 2014 Bart wouldn't hear it.

Zach was agitating to make something else. Anything else, he said, but we're both notoriously picky about what we consume as entertainment, and that pickiness absolutely trickles into what we make. He wanted to do League of Legends comics and follow some of those characters through Bandle City. He wanted to do Guild Wars comics.

And I absolutely, 100% did not want to make fan fiction. I wouldn't.

He suggested D&D and I rolled my eyes and acquiesced. 

I began writing very sarcastically. The DM didn't exist as a character, yet, so it was just four morons being problematic at a table, but with visuals of the fantasty. Reynauldo originally died in the first five pages and was going to come back as a lich (if we even committed to the damn project) and the characters were slated to be the same kinds of sex fiends that give D&D a colorful reputation in some circles.

You can see remnants of this, in fact, in the first issue of Thieves Can't. Keelie's "And You're Going to Treat Me Like It!" line from the bar and Candor commenting about her legs going all the way up are like circles in a tree stump for this comic. Once upon a time, they were those kinds of players.

Now, Zach and I have never been super organized. At all. We're better now than we were -- way better -- but we are constantly working from the perspective of the present moment and projects get lost to time because of that. I sent him the script for this. It was called "Silliest Dungeon" as a working title. I assumed it would be lost to time like so many of our wish-fullfillment side projects.

And I was a little sad, because when I finished the "Silliest Dungeon" script, I was actually a little proud. It needed a LOT of editing. After all, it basically had a goddamn rape joke in it (thrown in to show Zach why this would never, never work, because I was a creature of spite and only dimly aware of why those sorts of jokes aren't really funny)

Then, out of a clear blue sky, Zach shows me the first page of Silliest Dungeon. It's goddamn beautiful, in a wholly new style from Ramen Empire, and all this fun, interesting vertical space. 

The DM was born.

Everything I didn't like about a D&D comic is clarified by the voice in the sky, adding absurdity and outrage and confusion to the player's actions. She's an audience proxy at times, an antagonist at others, and she used the vertical space.

We later published it on the Ramen Empire site under the name Thieves Can't (a pun my wife made while we were brainstorming titles), and that's how we got started.

Here are the very first, original scripts for Silliest Dungeon, aka, Thieves Can't.