Ten Years in the Making – the Mediocre Origins of Detulux Incorporated (Part 1)
Ten years ago this day, I uploaded a comic strip to my new DeviantArt1 account. It was to be my first foray into producing comics online.
Detulux Incorporated follows the misadventures of Mr. Pain, a white-suited bespectacled arms dealer and his team of misfit henchmen and mercenaries as they find themselves party crashing other people’s stories (based on various films, television, video games, books, comics and other pop culture) in search of new armaments to steal and sell on. On the side, it would explore all the tedious little eccentricities that running an illegal weapons smuggler and seller in a James Bond type universe would bring – the henchmen have unionised, the legitimate business front is so flimsy you could poke holes in it with a finger, and someone keeps leaving body armour and medicine kits lying around the base rather than storing them away properly.
That was the intention, anyway. Unfortunately I got hung up on the first storyline, an extended parody of Resident Evil 4, and ten years later we’re only just finishing this horribly outdated parody due to the virtue of passing art duties on to my long-suffering other half Sam.
However, ten years is ten years (even if some of those years featured no Detulux pages whatsoever). To commemorate the occasion, I decided to mimic something the creative team behind the Escapist’s regular webcomic Critical Miss did recently and look back at the 80+ strips completed thus far. It could only be considered a trip down memory lane if memory lane was a street in Victorian London, covered with human effluence, disease and general scum.
We had enough recorded material for a few hours, so we have chunked it into hour-long chunks2 and placed it in a video3 so I can show relevant comic pages and images to illustrate our conversation. Part 1 covers where the concept of Detulux Inc came from and the first 19 or so pages up to the previously mentioned Resident Evil-inspired storyline.
You can watch part 1 below!
Various links to things mentioned in the video:
- Critical Miss: Five Years of this Shit (this inspiration for the video)
- Sean’s Detulux Inc gallery on DeviantArt
- Sam’s Detulux Inc gallery on DeviantArt
- Detulux Incorporated on ComicDish
- I never know how to capitalise or space the name of this website – it used to be “deviantArt” but sometimes it’s “deviantART”, “DeviantArt”, “DeviantART” and, occasionally, “Deviant Art”. It’s especially difficult now that DA is now represented by some sort of green twig that was apparently designed specifically with the angle of 65% in mind for some reason (or something). ↩
- It’s the first instance of me actually taking the time to clean up audio, remove all the “ers” and “ums” and generally make the audio more listenable, unlike previous attempts at recording audio where I used to run the file through Audacity without listening through it all beforehand and just hoping for the best. ↩
- I was going to make the audio available for download too but given the fact that we’re dissecting visual things it would not make for riveting listening, especially when we start mocking artwork that couldn’t be seen in a podcast. ↩
Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | June 25, 2015 at 12:00 pm | Detulux Inc. Retrospective, Podcasts, Villains | No comment
Tags: comics, Detulux Incorporated, Sean seems to think anatomy and proportions are optional things that other people do, webcomics