The Birth of Joncomics

Jon began drawing hardcore at the tender age of five. Stuck inside evening church services, he would lay a Holy Bible across his lap, grab some crayons, and doodle all over the itineraries until the sermon ended. He usually drew very tall buildings, with Godzilla attacking them real good.

Jon was homeschooled until the tender age of eight, and it was then when he was finally able to unleash his talented art on the friendly neighborhood elementary school. Most kids are pretty creative, but Jon was on a different level. He remembers being scolded for drawing all over the back of his (highly scored) tests.

It was in these years that Jon truly began exploring the comic medium. Essentially, he read a bunch of Captain Underpants and Calvin and Hobbes and realized he could use boxes to tell a story. He began penning classics such as “Billy Fofo and the Terrible Tomatoes” and the “Chao in Space” series (he was playing a bunch of Sonic Adventure 2).

Turning a Spark Into a Star

Years passed, and a teenage Jon continued making silly comics for his own enjoyment. The internet was becoming standard in most households, and Jon spent plenty of time checking out all the cool stuff people were creating online. He especially liked the humor of Perry Bible Fellowship and the crude, simple style of Cyanide & Happiness. While the former is fantastic all around, the latter showed Jon that what really mattered was the jokes. If Jon could be silly enough, the art could, hopefully, be excused.

You see, Jon’s artistic talents never progressed past the tender age of eight. The stick figures of his youth remained in a state of arrested development. But the fine artists at Explosm had struck gold with Cyanide & Happiness, and Jon believed he could too. He began uploading his work to Deviantart, using a Limewire’d copy of Adobe Illustrator as his easel. It went about as well as you’d expect, but then his computer exploded or something and Illustrator was lost.

Instead of re-Limewire-ing the program, which he didn’t really like anyway, he turned to one of the turnkey Windows applications: MSPaint. It was simple, intuitive, and exactly what Jon needed.

Stars Grow Large, Then Die

At some point, Jon began posting in the Explosm forums’ fanart thread. This led to a lot of overly violent, profane, or sexual comics (keeping in the C&H vein), but Jon was finding something he never had before: an audience! People would give feedback, share enjoyment, and let him know when he made a real, real bad comic. The humor turned out to be unique enough to be more than a simple C&H knockoff, and the forum members encouraged Jon to create his own website.

He did, and the comics continued to flow until around 2012. That year, Jon had dropped out of a woefully mischosen college program, begun living in a place without internet, and was generally worried about non-comic-related things. He was an adult, and unfortunately, adulthood had found a way to remove most of his creative drive.

Venturing Into the Black Hole

Life was becoming a struggle for Jon, and things seemed to continue spiraling downward. He returned to making comics briefly in 2013 and then went back into the void. By leaving college, he felt he had inadvertently subjected himself to a life of physical, soul-crushing labor. He was not too tired to draw, but too tired to think of things to draw. He’d pull out his drawing tablet and nothing would appear on the screen.

Jon knew that if he continued this way, he was resigning to a life without real meaning. A weird moment of clarity hit him when watching Monsters University, and he decided to go back to skewl — this time, doing something he actually enjoyed. He graduated and started working in his field, using his mind instead of his body. It was (and still is) enjoyable work, and the pieces he thought he’d lost began falling back into place.

He opened an old notebook, looked through the doodles of yesteryear, and began drawing again. He posted a new comic, three years in the making, in July 2018. Just like when he was a kid, he’s once again making comics for his own enjoyment. Except this time, he gets to share them with all of you.