Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Meet Bernard Chrome, Man of Many Failings









Johnny seems to be missing in action so excuse the slight delay in putting up new comics. I am in the middle of making the needed material for another Process post so that's coming soon as well. Also, excuse the lettering, I really don't enjoy it so it might be a bit difficult to make out here and there! Give me my Johnny back!

Bernard Chrome here (Γεράσιμος Τσίγκος in Greek) is a character I had created for a the series of sadistic strips you see above. I considered the strip work I had to do for the paper in some ways more difficult to do than the full-pagers, which goes to show that I'm not much of a strip artist. I haven't uploaded any of them to the blog so far because well... on one hand I wanted to save something for the print edition, on the other, I kinda like the format of the single-pages without the strip breaks which were mandatory to the paper anyway. I kinda like those four though so here they are.

The most defining characteristic of Bernard Chrome is that he is completely without any sympathy from his creator. This isn't a lovable loser who tries and fails but oh well, life is the true lesson, and all that. I detest Bernard Chrome both in his physique and his aspirations and wish the worst for him.

From the four, the Chlorine incident is my favourite. That I didn't have him yelping in pain in the last panel, but instead opted for the horrifying silent scream is a nice touch if I say so myself!

The last one is really kind of an anti-climax, I know, but this string bending fear has been a deeply-rooted one for me so I had to illustrate it at least once in my life and who better to use as a lab rat than the worm itself, Bernard.

Oh, by the way, the grotesque muscle-man in the header of Asides Bsides? That's Bernard's eventual fate. Can you spot any other page protagonists?

6 comments:

skw said...

I spot Helm, Giakoumis (haven't I twisted his name up?) arguing with a random girl (probably ZX's pick), Mr. Chrome, Helen, Babis, RobotBoy (a.k.a. Mr. Red "Destroy Hu-manz!" Robot) and an unknown entity (is this a woman? or the Prince?).

Yeah, sorry! It's me whom you should be cursing now! :) I was off bandwidth for some time (argh, those damned internet providers!) and without MSN for the moment, so we couldn't catch up. Hope you're fine, Helm! There were some things to do, you know, like recording a Lackey-inspired movie (mail me at [jspade at mtv dot pl] if you're intrested in it), being almost beaten up to death and got my American Studies inauguration (yay! again!) and so on. . . Sorry, I should have been around! :)

BUT,

man, brand stuff up there, what are you saying!? I wouldn't make it that good with my fonts! It's just perfect for that kind of deal, you did a great job with that and that isn't brown-nosing, I assure you!

I really have a trouble with picking my favorite, I guess it's the first one? :) Oh, poor little kid! :P

Kudos!

Helm said...

I'm just glad you're alright.

Yeah it's the prince at the leftmost.

Bernard is about 30 years old!

Anonymous said...

Well, now I can't play any more guitar tonight. Thanks a lot!!

I'm afraid I don't really have any comments to add other than that I love reading about THE PROCESS and other things about these comics, so thank you for doing this.

And thanks also to Johnny for doing (most of!) the translations. I've seen many of these already, but it's not the same to alt-tab back and forth between a browser window with the comic to an IRC window with an ascii translation.

theWoodenKing said...

yay! we want more strips! :D

skw said...

thank you!

hah, I thought he's just a kid, you know, the Miltos type. :)

Sean said...

These were sheer genius. I love his expressions!