Scary Go Round Style Changes

Once desc­ri­bed as being “pretty much per­fect,” Scary Go Round is one of my favo­rite comics. As is the case with most things, I got into it kinda late, and it’ll pro­bably die in the near future, making my week­day mor­nings cold and bleak. I wish I could remem­ber where I lear­ned about it.

One of the best things about it is its art­work. The colors are stun­ning, it’s pep­pe­red with pains­ta­kingly subtle, win­king touches, and there’s a weird jux­ta­po­si­tion of ruler-guided lines and rough, endea­ringly sloppy details like let­te­ring or rows of win­dows. But it didn’t used to be that way; it began as a spi­noff to John Allison’s pre­vious comic, Bob­bins, which shif­ted from hand-drawn to vec­tor art on January 15, 2001, a dis­tinctly digi­tal style that con­ti­nued through Scary Go Round’s first cou­ple years.

It was shortly after I star­ted rea­ding, in 2006, that the comic went “per­ma­nently” (for now) hand-drawn, which to me is far pre­fe­ra­ble, allo­wing for much grea­ter nuance in ges­tu­res and expres­sions, and more equip­ped to carry John’s sense of humor.

Lamen­ting the fact that I didn’t get to watch its evo­lu­tion in real­time, I deci­ded to cata­lo­gue nota­ble dates in its his­tory, cou­pled with con­text from John’s blog and the Scary Go Round forum, because I am curious and anal.

If you still need more, El Santo has a huge write-up on SGR.

Things I’ve lear­ned while put­ting this together:

• phpBB needs a way to sort topics by crea­tion date, rather than last modi­fied date.
• Blog­ger suuuuuuucks.