About the Author, John Bintz

John Bintz has had an on-again, off-again relationship with Webcomics ever since 1999. when he first put his slice-of-life humor comic Coswell on Campus up on the Web. That ran for about 100 strips when it died a fiery death, the extreme horribleness of the comic causing its own self-immolation. I considered it a lesson in learning how to write, draw, and market a Webcomic, back when the idea of a Webcomic was still pretty new. That comic definitely wasn’t an all-ages comic. It’s not even fit for human consumption.

After that, around 2002, I tried another Webcomic called The Trail. That ran for about 40 strips…and no more. My complicated characters-crossing-into-the-lives-of-other-characters concept fell flat on its face after I wrote the first story without planning how the remaining six stories would be told. I considered it a lesson in how planning is essential when embarking on any big creative project. That comic could probably pass the all-ages muster.

Around 2005, I tried an experimental Webcomic that I may resurrect someday. It involved a funny use of words. That comic definitely wasn’t all-ages. The new one might be for ages 14+ or so.

But starting back in 2003, my friend Steven Fischer convinced me to try telling this big complicated story that I had in my head, one about a young boy and his middle school adventures, in comic format. I ruminated on this…then decided to make the first minicomic of A Moment of Clarity and proudly bring it to Small Press Expo 2005 and show it to everyone I could.

Putting A Moment of Clarity on the Web came about when I started work on the second graphic novel, Candynomics. I knew it would take quite a while to finish this full-color 243 page book, so I figured I might as well try to build a following so that, when the book came out, I’d have a bunch of fans ready to pick up a copy. It also gave me a chance to start interacting with the Webcomics community through my involvement with the ComicPress project, specifically by writing the ComicPress Manager plugin.

A quick note on my process: I have the entire story written up front, I draw each page on paper w/ non-photo blue pencils, scan the pages into The GIMP, ink & color in Inkscape, and use a heavily modified copy of the minicomic script to build the Web- and print-friendly images. The pages are then batch-uploaded using ComicPress Manager and displayed in my very heavily hacked version of ComicPress.

If you have any questions or comments about A Moment of Clarity, feel free to contact me:

• by email: john@claritycomic.com
• on Twitter: johncoswell