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.