False Knees 10 Year Anniversary

As of this month, I've been making comics for 10 years! To mark the occasion, I've gone digging back in the FK archives to share a small collection with you.

The one that started it all. It's got vomit and crude language–off to a great start! That hatching on the cat looks familiar though.

I painted my comics in colour right from the very beginning, but I only have black and white scans of the first ones because the newspaper didn't print their comics in colour when I first started. That changed pretty quickly, which I think had a great impact on the quality of my work. 

It seems obvious that animals should be the main characters of False Knees now, but I really didn't want to do that in the beginning. I remember thinking that anthropomorphism was a gimmick used for selling children's stories, and might even have negative effects on the wellbeing of real wildlife. Though my opinions have shifted a bit, these ideas still inform the choices I make.

Haha, I still like this one. Who wouldn't want to dress up like a big cactus? 

I was very interested in steering FK into dinosaurs. I loved dinosaurs as a kid and thought they would be so fun to draw. But I found them quite difficult to draw, and the only reference pictures for dinosaurs are other artists' renditions and I didn't really want to copy other artists. So many attention landed on the natural successor...

This isn't the first comic of mine with a bird, but it does feel a little prophetic for where FK ended up. At this time, I had just moved to live with my parents again after finishing university. I had no idea what I was going to do. I was basically living for the small (but very encouraging) feedback I was getting for my comics on Tumblr and Reddit.

I really like how my coat looks in this one.

This business game comic took me so long to make! I drew it traditionally like all my comics, but painted it digitally. With a mouse. I also probably learned most of what I know about photoshop while making this comic.

I like seeing instances of me experimenting with different media. It's a great reminder that 1) it's just fun to switch things up, and 2) you can achieve a great sense of 'strange' by using new tools.

This one is a great example of a kind of dull idea being painted really well inexplicably? I think my lettering has gotten better though!

There was a long stretch of FK where the speech bubbles are all painted bright, distinct colours. I was also playing around with simpler styles and nonsense ideas during this time.

I was over the coloured-speech-bubble, but had just started organizing the strips into squares (rather than long 1x4 rectangles) to suit the formats of the more popular social media. I had also just started doing brightly-coloured backgrounds, alternating in vibrance, to make them more inviting to look at.

Sometime between the pig comic and this crow one I quit my job(s) to do comics full time. I started to do some comics in this tall rectangle format for a local paper in the hopes that I would get noticed locally and potentially get a paying gig from it. That didn't happen, but I'm glad the comics from that time exist!

Crows doing crow things! I used to paint my crows so pale because I had drawn so many ///LINES/// that I didn't want covered up! This comic also starts the canon that in the False Knees universe, birds chew their food.

Backgrounds were starting to get a little bit more important for me. Artwork overall too, including the appearance of the birds. Have I not made a red-winged blackbird comic since this? I need to remedy that soon.

How did it get those seeds to stick out of its beak like that?

Hey, one of these times it's going to be right. The loud, monologising bird is now a staple in False Knees.

This one was a direct homage to my arborist days where I would regularly find myself facing an incredibly scary tree to climb and cut.

Another pencil crayon one that I like. I should probably do that more often!

One of the first comics I made in lockdown. Can you tell I was trying to distract myself with that third frame?

I had so much fun painting this one. It was super satisfying painting that mud.

I read Uzumaki a little while after drawing this one, making the third frame my favourite accidental allusion.

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Thanks for reading everyone! And thank you for following along with me after all these years. I'm so excited to think about what will become of False Knees over the next ten.

- Joshua