The Sense of Sanity – "Rape as a Double entendre"

Here we go again. A new SoS dawns on a new stage. Starting today, and hopefully continuing every monday hereafter, there will be a new Sense of Sanity webcomic posted right here.

First, I had three ideas for todays comic, and drew each of them respectively before realizing I couldn’t make them work right, and went with the script Rey gave me. The art is sketchy at best, and the Photoshop work by myself needs improvement, but bare with me. This is a learning process, and it will get better… now

A brief rundown on just what “The Sense of Sanity” is; Way back in high school, I had to do a final project for my Advanced Graphics Communication class, which was to design a webpage As I had interest in comic art and webcomics, myself and my friend Charlie Cotterman collaborated on a Geocities hosted webcomic we decided to name, The Sense of Sanity. After graduation I continued to work with him on the comic, then hosted on KeenSpace (though they’ve since become something else). But Charlie grew busy with college and had to back out of writing. So I enlisted my friend Don Louey to aid in “bringing the funny”. Don and I did several strips, but my inability to produce frequent comics led to both of us walking away for a time. I later resumed the comic on my own which has been to date, the longest run of series. Around 2003 I dropped the comic for a time, and eventually discontinued the site and the storyline. Briefly in 2005 I toyed with brining it back at Senseofsanity.com, but failed to hold onto the domain, and frustrated, I decided against it. In early 2006 several new comics were produced, this time with the aid of Rey Madrinan but only one made it to net publication before the project was abandoned again. Now, here, I’ve decided to hopefully (pushed heavily by a real editor and real deadlines) resume and continue to produce new issues of my labor of love, The Sense of Sanity.

So what is it? Basically, it is anything that happens to suit the needs of the comic, fantasy or reality depending on the topic. The comic usually features myself and whomever is writing at the time. There has been a revolving door of extras, most notable “The Girls” from the House Saga, all of whom were caricatures of real people I know. To date, the only fictional character in The Sense of Sanity, is Josie the Catgirl. Created by Comic Vince after repeat viewings of the (amazing!) film Josie and the Pussycats. She is also the only character to appear in all three incarnations of the series thus far. And for any lingering fans wondering, yes, she will be reappearing in the Critical Hits Sense of Sanity.

The characters in the comic will often make some form of satirical comment about current news or geek trivia (much like the far far far more successful Penny-Arcade and the inspiration for the original Sense of Sanity Real Life Comics) but there is a heavy sense of continuity that grows between each comic. In the original, when Don came on Charlie was “written off” as having been killed by Vince whilst he was playing Devil May Cry. So when Charlie returned later in the series he was, in fact, a Zombie. While this new incarnation of Sense of Sanity probably won’t feature any existing continuity so as not to confuse new readers, it will more than likely make a reference or two to its original incarnation.

So that’s that. I tend to get waaay off track when writing these kinds of rants (which is why I’m drawing and not writing a column ^.^), so feel free to comment any questions that you have regarding the series.

As for the topic of todays issue, this was all Rey’s, but I happen to agree with him heavily that it seems Marvel more and more is coming up with outlandish ways of fraking with their characters just to try and sell more books. Yet continuing to claim the character is “still the same as they ever were” despite bizarre and destructive alterations to their status quo. So yep…

Oh yeah, I love JMS. Rey knows this. Rey hates JMS (for what he has contributed to said Status Quo of Spidey), Rey picks on me relentlessly for this, hence the sad bout of optimism from “Comic Vince” in the last panel.

There you have it. Sit back and enjoy the ride!