Cartoons
From April 21st, 2015 through June 25th, 2018, I maintained a comics blog called Comics By Will. My goal was to produce a comic every week. For a while, I was able to do this. Then I grew weary and gave up.
But now I'm gonna finish what I started!
Comics By Will featured many characters involved in unrelated storylines. The blog only makes sense if you start at the very first post and go forward. To make it more confusing, there are several one-off strips that are not related to anything. I wasn't concerned with making the blog organized or searchable. This website seeks to fix that. Below are all of the Comics By Will comics, arranged in the appropriate order by series. I will be adding new chapters as I (finally) finish each story.
Please note that the art style is subject to change without any warning. I drew the Comics by Will strips of the 2010's on my iPad. First I used an app called Paper, which made everything look really nice but the drawings took forever to do. Then I switched to Adobe Draw which made everything much easier but made everything look, in my opinion, a little too clean. The text has always been added with the most trusty art program of all: MS Paint. I may eventually just start drawing these things with pen and paper. It's just a lot easier that way.
'Nuff talk - on to the fun!
Jane is just your average American robot highschooler with just the average highschooler stuff on her mind: her popularity, her crush on super dreamboat football captain Trent, and the complete destruction of the human race (especially all boys, except Trent). Can Jane convince Trent to take her to the prom? Can she defeat Jackie, her human rival who also wants Trent to take her to the prom? Will Mr. Brooks survive the school year? Will the prom committee find the right decorations for the gym? Will the Spanish Club's authentic food bar be authentic enough for Mexican Fiesta Day? WILL THE HUMAN RACE SURVIVE PROM NIGHT?!?
I have no idea! Let's find out!
Nobody kills it at capitalism like little Jamalam. He's rich! But he's also sad. Sad because money is just too darn easy to make. Why aren't things more expensive? Why can't the competition be a little more fierce? And why can't someone at least TRY to raise his rent to sufficiently price him out of the better neighborhoods in town? All of this comes to a head when Jamalam decides to burn his life savings and then ride the rails across the American heartland. On his journey, he meets professional hobo Scriggs Scarborough. Scriggs schools Jamalam in the hobo code, but it doesn't go too well. Turns out that living at the brink of starvation is a bit more complicated than Jamalam predicted. Can Jamalam make his fortune back? Will he take old Scriggs to the top with him? Is Scriggs ready to live the high life? Who will win the dance-off at the relief camp? Are polecat empanadas as delicious as they sound?
Hey, don't look to me for answers. I, too, am confused.
Panco is an overworked, underpaid, high-anxiety mouse. (But hey - who isn't?) He yearns for something different. Fortunately, his office has a highly flexible time-off policy. Vacation Island, here we come! There's just one problem: Panco has no idea how to have fun. Enter his friend Wilkins - a happy-go-lucky rabbit of inconsistent height with a penchant for anarchy. Together, they embark on a journey full of two-star tropical hotels, colorful beverages, hallucinogenic fruit, pelican waiters, and lots and lots of palm trees. Things inevitably go wrong, though. Horribly, horribly wrong. *Spoiler alert*: this quickly becomes the VACATION FROM HELL. Can Panco find the solace he's been searching for? Can Wilkins complete his secret mission? Will one or both of them completely blow it on the date with the two girls from the hotel pool? Or will Vacation Island's seedy underworld consume them all?
Whatever may happen, there's a solid lesson to be learned from all of this:
Never travel. Never leave home.
While drawing Comics by Will, I decided that one of the series should be a longer graphic novel with deeper characters and a more complex plot.
BIG MISTAKE.
"HUXTR" (pronounced "huckster") is the story of HUXTR, an evil AI computer virus that escapes into the world from its military containment facility and subsequently causes all kinds of death, destruction, and general mischief. But that's only the beginning! It's also, for some reason, about teaching English in Japan. And it's about applying for jobs. And it's about terrorism. And drugs. And the government. And relationships. And aliens. And the space-time continuum. And lots of other things that I realized mid-way through that I am incapable of actually drawing.
If you're curious, here is a plot synopsis. I will do my best to verbalize what this was all supposed to be about, but I can't make any promises.
Someday, HUXTR will become a finished product. Maybe not in graphic novel form, but possibly in regular novel form and heavily simplified. And maybe with a few illustrations. I have had some version of this story kicking around in my head since the summer of 2003 and it eats up a fair amount of my mental bandwidth every single day. It's haunting, really. But I will say this: the HUXTR graphic novel may make zero sense to the reader (and actually makes very little sense to me, the artist), but I was pretty proud of some of the artwork here. Some of the panels took hours to draw, and some of them took days. One or two took weeks. That's the main reason I'm including them here. Don't get too attached to the characters, though. We will never actually know what becomes of them.
May this be a warning to anyone who ever attempts something creative: "HUXTR" is what happens when you have an idea and you just keep adding to it. "Yeah! That would be cool!" and "Ohhh sick, I should add that too!" and "Let's make this one story about EVERYTHING I have ever wanted to say!" These are phrases you should not be thinking. Keep it simple. Make it easy for yourself. Don't let it spiral out of control.
Otherwise, it'll all just make you manic.
Go to the series - if you dare
(C) 2025 by William Carduner