About Republic Domain
July 28th, 2008
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Republic Domain is a webcomic about nothing in specific. Characters from the town of Rheddville share dialogues about death, life, sex, marriage, dating, money, work and all the things inbetween and all-around. Each character represents an archetype that become easy to relate to. Come visit Rheddville and join the conversation!
The Start of the Republic of Rheddville
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 in early 2007. 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.
The Relaunch of Republic Domain
Due to some roller-coaster journeys in the life of XEI the strip came to a grinding halt. Once the turbulent ride was over and my stomach started to settle, Republic Domain was relaunched on this site, NunoXEI.com.
Republic Domain releases three times a week now (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) and the style changes were done retroactively to replace the writing and art style of the previous 40+ strips.
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? Reading Halfpixel’s “How to Make Webcomics” (Dave Kellett, Brad Guigar, Kris Straub, and Scott Kurtz). The book’s content made me re-look at Republic Domain and Tough Guys in a whole new way.
Republic Domain comics are now also completley under the Creative Commons License as “By Attribution”. 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, Nuno doesn’t care–the ONLY condition is that you attribute it to my name (NunoXEI) and site (either “nunoxei.com” or “republic-domain.com”).
Requesting a Guest Strip
I’d like to start doing more guest strips for ANY site out there with a theme I can work a joke around. If this interests you, please contact me and put in a request!
