Luke Surl Comics

Actually, this was my very, very first cartoon, published in my school’s science magazine at some point in 2004. The next year I launched my first webcomic “One Thousand Words” [now fallen off the internet]. Has anyone been reading since then?

So without my noticing it at first, LukeSurl.com turned four on Sunday. It’s come a long way since I uploaded the first few comics over “borrowed” WiFi from a dingy Edinburgh flat in 2008. Four years has involved: 583 cartoons, the gestation of a Twitter account that can’t seem to shut up, a comics club in Cambridge, me entering the “travelling circus” of the UK indie comics scene, a comics podcast and much much more. It’s a hella lot of fun! Incidentally my “real life” has changed quite a bit in these four years (two universities and a job in between), and the comic has actually been one of the most consistent things in there that mix. Thanks to everyone who’s been with me on this strange and curious road.

Looking back reflectively, and looking forward, I think I want to change up how I do comics. I’ve dabbled a bit with writing comics for pals to draw before, and it’s been both well-received and something I’ve discovered I rather like doing. Looking critically at my stuff, people are reading for the gags rather than my art anyways. At the moment I’ve got a small project running with an artist - I’m super-excited to show you some stuff from that soon. I’d like to do more of that with more artists. I’ll post some more specific stuff to that end later, but if think you might like to be one of those alchemists turning words into cartoons, maybe send me an email?

Otherwise, there’s a couple of other personal projects I want to get have a go at. I’ll keep ‘em secret for now as, in all probability, at least one won’t see fruition. Another think I’d like to work on is how I’m presenting the comics, both online and in print, something which is pretty sub-optimal at the moment.

The problem with all this is that it doesn’t leave a huge amount of time and energy for a thrice-weekly webcomic. I don’t want to stop doing these gags entirely, but keeping the previous schedule with the above is probably infeasible. A summer punctuated by a bunch of work trips and maybe even a short holiday was going to throw a spanner into the works anyhow. Therefore [and this is the bit to skip to if you're TL;DRing this post] the comic will have an wholly irregular update schedule for the foreseeable future, updating whenever the planets align in the right way. As most of you are doing already, the RSS feed is almost certainly the best way of keeping tabs on the comic. The aforementioned other projects will also be either hosted or linked to from here, and should hopefully generate some rather funky images too.

So yeah, this is all a bit of an experiment, but hopefully a fun one no? Thanks for reading the silly things I put on the internet so far, and here’s to four more years!

Be happy

L