Previously: MY COMIC STRIP CLUB IS ONLINE!

Well, so far, so good! As I said, my original plan was to post one new original comic strip every Monday for one year. For the first three months of January through March, I’ve managed to not only do that, but also post a couple of extra strips, on other days of the week. Including this installment of BOSS FROM HELL on Valentine’s Day, a strip called COLORBLIND on St. Patrick’s Today. And starting off this fourth month, I’ve posted a special episode of BOSS FROM HELL for April Fool’s Day. With this accomplishment, as I’m taking a break from this particular strip, I thought I’d showcase them here, and explain my thought process behind it.

As I said before, the character of DJINNX, originally known as DJINNFINITY, was originally created by me as a possible comic-book superhero. But then two months after wracking my brain on what kind of comic strip I wanted to do with Samax, I suddenly got the idea to use her as my comic strip premise. I saw someone post a joke on Facebook about bad wishes, where a man finds a genie and wishes to be “irresistible to women,” so the genie turned him into a puppy. And from there is was just…Boom! (or I should ZING!), that’s a great idea for a comic strip! I could do this strip where DJINNX goes around granting people’s wishes, but always with an ironic twist. And I immediately came up with 3 ideas, which is how I knew that I was on to something. Again, coming up with a premise for a comic strip is relatively easy, it’s then coming up with the stories for the strip that’s the harder part. So when I first came up with 3 stories, within that first day, I knew this was a premise I could work with. And, in the beginning, this wasn’t something I planned to be a regular project. I think at most I thought I wanted to get 4 strips done, and then I would post them here on this blog, one each week (either on Mondays or Fridays) for a month. And then maybe other strips just every now and then when I got an idea. It was a bit later that I got the idea to make this a separate ongoing project.

As I was getting ready to send my info to Samax, I then came up with this idea, to start it off. So this first strip, is actually the 4th idea that I had:

I figured it was good to start at the beginning of Djinnx’s story, so we see her being released from her magic lamp, and get started on her task of granting wishes. Although I wasn’t originally thinking of doing any type of “continuing” stories, but this just worked out this way, as I then brought this unnamed man back for the 2nd strip:

This was the very first idea I had, that a man would ask for a “big cock”, and she’d give him a rooster. I think I originally was planning for the man to actually say it, but I thought it would be a bit funnier if we just see him whispering it to her, and then the rooster appears and he shouts “That’s not what I meant!” and I’d let the audience figure out the joke on their own. I just had to trust that I was obvious enough. I also thought it was more effective if we show that as soon as she grants a wish, she just disappears. So it’s too late for the wisher to take it back or ask to try again.

This was another relatively simple idea, an old man wants to be young again, so Djinnx turns him into a baby. Although the inclusion of the nurse, and her thought balloon about changing his diapers, was a last-minute addition that came to me as I was sending the details of the strip to Samax.

This one was sort of a riff on that first joke that I heard. I just switched the details around, instead of a man asking a genie to be irresistible to woman, he asks for a woman who finds him irresistible. But instead of “woman” he says “stripper”, which is the loophole Djinnx uses to present him with a male stripper. I also thought about having him use the phrase “bikini model”, but then figured that “stripper” is easier.

Now, there is one more strip that’s been published, which I’ll get to in a later post. And I should note that, so far, DJINNX appears to be my most popular strip, in terms of views. Tumblr isn’t that great in the way it shows audience activity, certainly not compared to WordPress, but it’s clear that views and clicks shoot up each week that a new DJINNX strip is posted. It could be that there’s something about the character, and the premise, that just connects to readers (who hasn’t occasionally dreamed of finding a genie that can grant your fondest wish?), or perhaps it’s as simple as the fact that Samax has more followers across Social Media and his various websites than I or the other artists I’ve worked with do, so therefor he reaches more people when he shares the new strips?

We’ll see when our next strip premiers. Yes, as I said, for now we’re taking a break from DJINNX as Samax and I work on new strip, featuring another “mythical” type of character. This I hope to posting online in May, and I’m really excited to see how the reaction is to it, as I think it could be even better than DJINNX. But for the fans, don’t worry, I do plan to commission more DJINNX strips from Samax in the future, so she will be back. You can bookmark THIS LINK to keep an eye out for it. But, in the meantime, be sure to keep checking out My Comic Strip Club to see the other new strips that I’ve got planned.

And, hey, if you’re a writer who can’t draw but would like to see your own strip created, hit up Samax HERE, and get started!