Sam and Fuzzy Q & A: Lovin' Feelin Edition
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"In this comic, which version of "Loving Feeling" is playing? The Righteous Brothers, Elvis Presley, Dionne Warwick, Hall and Oates, Neil Diamond? I need to make sure I have the right version stuck in my head." -Sticky

The Righteous Brothers, obviously.

Obviously.

Jeeze.

"You mentioned you use 11 x 14 size paper to draw the comic. Do you scan these yourself, or at a copy shop? I can barely fit my 9 x 12 paper onto my scanner. Did you use all your plentiful t-shirt sales earnings to buy an expensively huge scanner?" -Charles

I scan all my pages myself, using the unglamorous-yet-effective technique of scanning each page in chunks and seaming them back together in Photoshop.

Reassembling all the different scanned pieces of a single, full-page 11 x 14 illustration is a nightmare. But it's not terribly hard to do with panel-based comic art, when the pages are already divided into pieces anyhow. It's certainly workable at least, which is good news for any cartoonist who does not want to shell out more than a grand for a larger-sized giant scanner.

"When you first started Sam and Fuzzy, was it simply your intention to keep doing gag-a-week strips? Or were you always intending the epic stories and started a gag-a-week strip because that was the only thing in webcomics at the time?" -JPV

When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a comic book artist. I was never really interested in becoming a newspaper cartoonist or doing gag strips. Almost all the comics I drew were longer stories, including a lot of the really early, prototypical Sam and Fuzzy comics.

But the version of Sam and Fuzzy that you're all reading today actually started as a strip in my university student newspaper. Putting them here on the website was really only an afterthought! I just figured that, since I was making all these stand-alone gag comics for the paper anyway, I might as well run them online, too.

Once the website started to take off, it became my primary focus, and I started making my comics with less and less regard for the needs of the newspaper format. And over time, I just kind of naturally gravitated back towards the kind of story-based comics that I'd always drawn. There wasn't really an exact point where I made the switchover, but you can see it happen gradually throughout volumes 2 and 3.

Honestly, sometimes I feel like I have the most boring possible answers to these questions. I change my mind. I actually transformed Sam and Fuzzy's focus to long-form stories abruptly and deliberately, in a ballsy attempt to revolutionize the entire webcomic universe. No need to thank me!

That's all for this week! But there is actually one more strip left in the "Big Cheat" storyline. Tune in on Monday for this unusually-timed finale!

-Sam Logan

Woooaah

Exciting times here at Sam and Fuzzy HQ -- all the new swag I'll be debuting at Comic Con next week has arrived! Anyone interested in peering into the future can check out the handful of spoilery photos I've been posting on my twitter feed as stuff has been coming in.

Of course, I'll have a broad assortment of t-shirts with me at San Diego, too, including the Scare Myself and Neville designs. (And Neville will be available online soon, too... just waiting for them to arrive from the printers!)

Hard to believe the convention has gotten so close so fast! But for once, I actually feel prepared.

-Sam Logan

Woooaah

Friends, apartment hunting is hard work! But viewing some of the more lacking suites did help teach me about the things I really look for in a home:

* parking
* stove
* doors
* non-oil-based lighting
* ceiling

But we saw some some nice places, too, and one absolutely perfect place that we applied for. It'll be a couple of days before we find out if we got it, but fingers crossed!

I apologize in advance if reading today's comic leaves you with this song stuck in your head all day. If it makes you feel any better, drawing this comic got it stuck in my head all weekend.

-Sam Logan