Republic Domain Strip 001: Red Meat
July 9th, 2008
I started a webcomic called “Republic Domain” in March 2007. Due to some changes in my life and re-aligning my life with more efficient task management (aka, drop all work contacts except my main one). This will be freeing up much time that I can devote to blogging and continuing the RD strips THREE times a week! They’ll also be migrated fully onto NunoXEI.com instead of Webtertainment.tv. I’ll be reposting/rewriting the original RD blog posts as I go so as to preserve that writing before I nuke the original site.
You’ll also notice there is a new four-panel black & white design. This is to offer more text space and concentrate on what I believe is the most important part of a static sprite-comic such as this one: The text. What lead to this choice of direction? Actually, I started reading Halfpixel’s “How to Make Webcomics” (Dave Kellett, Brad Guigar, Kris Straub, and Scott Kurtz) and I read a bunch of stuff in there that made me relook at Republic Domain and Tough Guys in a new way.
I decided that the time to redesign was now before going forward with either. Oh, oh, and I’m releasing all Republic Domain comics under the Creative Commons License as “By Attribution” so feel free to download the images and use them on your site, edit the crap out of them (make a “construction set”, make books and sell them even, I don’t care–the ONLY condition is that you attribute it to my name (NunoXEI) and site (either “nunoxei.com” or “republic-domain.com”). More info can be found by clicking this link:
Republic Domain by Nuno XEI is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License. Based on a work at republic-domain.com.
The below is all about what inspired the comic to begin with, and thus begins a new era (hopefully)…
Starting this comic was the longest process of all. I had the idea years ago, I even had some of the character archetypes figured out about two year ago, but I had no name for the strip… and um… no art. Until it dawned on me…
Back when I worked with Zac Marshall in a design and multimedia studio–in another time, far far away–-he brought me onto a comic strip called “Red Meat”, by Max Cannon. My homage goes out to him in the first comic strip titled, “Red Meat”.
Better still was the fan-made “Red Meat Construction Set”–-a tool that allowed fans to create their own Red Meat comic strips using drop-down menus to select from a list of characters and text fields to write who was saying what. This would eventually create a Red Meat inspired strip with the click of a button. With this in mind, I set out looking for cool public domain imagery that had enough character of its own to bring life into my new strip.
“Republic Domain” is a name that came by accident while brainstorming out loud in an email to my girlfriend about this idea. I had committed to working with public domain imagery as a base and as an experiment to see how much was possible using it. I came across a treasure trove of imagery from old political anti-communist booklets and I knew I wouldn’t need to go anywhere else! The images were perfect, and the story basically created itself from there. The prefix of “Re-” also signified “reuse”, or “re-appropriation”, so my love of word play and multi-meaning in text was fulfilled and the strip was born!
Now, the layers of meaning behind the title of the first comic strip are three fold:
- An homage to the comic strip that refused to leave my thoughts, Max Cannon’s Red Meat
- The “Reds”, as they are called in some sources (communists, Russians), since many of the characters were “borrowed” from early anti-communist manifest pamphlets of the early 1900s
- And the most obvious would be the topic of the first strip itself.
Related Links: Red Meat, by Max Cannon | The Red Meat Construction Set | PVP | Starslip Crisis | Evil Inc. | Sheldon | Halfpixel
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