Interesting Times is, as the little sub-title so briefly describes it, a journal comic based loosely on my real-life adventures and/or ideas. While many of the comics are wildly exaggerated (for comedic effect, or to make my life seem less boring) I can assure you that they are almost all based on either something that happened to me OR something that I was thinking about during the course of a normal day.

Who am I? I’m Nathan Fehr, an Educational Assistant at a high school by day and part-time Projectionist at the local Moviehouse by night. I’m 25, and I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Manitoba, with a major in English and a minor in Psychology. As is easily gathered from the comics I am kind of a nerd and a big fan of the Video Games, with a fairly hearty collection of them at home and and an even larger collection of facts, memories and stories about them in the ol’ noggin. I also enjoy reading fine works of fiction, watching movies, and the occasional popular TV show such as Lost or The Office. I happen to think that the Super Nintendo was one of the finest console systems ever devised, and Super Metroid is in fact my favorite game of all time, ever.

Up until February 2007, the comic was created using Windows Journal on a Eurocom T210c Convertible laptop, and while I do not blame it for the slapped-together aesthetic of the comics I will say that at least some of the mismatched lines and poorer-than-usual art can be attributed to this device’s years of service under my brother and his (in his own words) ham-fisted usage of it - meaning, the drawing surface could be somewhat unreliable and sometimes it was a struggle to get even the simplest of stickmen to come across properly.

Anyway, I drew it up in Journal using a three-panel frame I created myself, then copied/pasted it over to Paint.NET (formerly The Gimp but that took longer to load and was kind of…unintuitive sometimes) where it was saved as a GIF file and thereafter uploaded, tagged, labeled, filed, stamped, indexed, processed, and what not all.

Then, the tablet PC went away. Feeling my work here wasn’t done yet, I purchased a Wacom Graphire4 tablet and carried on. It’s a wonderful piece of hardware, and it’s served me well through the various forms of illustration software I’ve worked with. The average comic takes upwards of 45 minutes to complete, shorter if I “cheap out” on the artwork or have a well-prepared idea going in. It’s been a very ‘interesting’ (durr hurr, I FUNNY) process and a fantastic creative outlet over the years, and I can’t really see myself quitting anytime soon.

Okay! That all having been said, you can stick around for the timeline, or just go read some more comics! Use the tags or dates on the sidebar to get started, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoy cooking them up!

SUPPLEMENTAL:
What follows is a somewhat over-detailed breakdown of the different ‘eras’ of Interesting Time artwork, which is here mainly for my own curiosity and record-keeping.

1. June 6th, 2006 (001) until February 20th, 2007 (139) - Windows Journal (w/Eurocom T210c Convertible)
2. February 28th, 2007 (140) until May 30th, 2007 (187) - Corel Painter Essentials 2
3. June 4th, 2007 (18 until October 10th, 2007 (264) - Corel Painter X
4. October 11th, 2007 (265) - Paint.NET, out of desperation after I tried to patch my _*ahem* “extended trial” of Corel Painter X and broke it completely.
5. October 15th, 2007 (266) until January 24th, 2008 (31 - Photoshop CS3, which to paraphrase T.Parker and M.Stone, was like building a sandcastle with a bulldozer.
6. January 28th, 2008 (319) to February 4th, 2008 (322) - CorelDRAW X3.
7. February 5th, 2008 (323) to present - GIMP.

Things to note:

• I’m actually not totally sure when I made the transition from Corel Painter Essentials to Painter X. This date is a Best Guess based on certain half-remembered facts and a “careful” analysis of the artwork.
• #261 does not appear on the site. It sits instead on my hard drive, half-finished and officially a Lost Comic. I was having some kind of trouble with colour selection in Painter X, and couldn’t finish it then (this would lead to my disastrous attempt to patch it as noted above). Roundabout December 2007 I dusted it off and tried to finish it in Photoshop, but the look of the first and second halves were totally incongruous and I ditched it again.
• February 13th, 2007 marked the jump from being hosted on Blogspot to WordPress. WordPress, if I may say, has been much nicer.
• So far, I think the Photoshop ones look the best overall, but that program is expensive. Perhaps Adobe will send me a promotional copy…?
• The CorelDraw X3 era is very short. I paid money for that program, thinking I would “go legit.” I did not do my homework and thus I found to my shock that was vector-based. Fine, I thought, the comic started that way, it can continue that way. However, the differences in both the style and software was entirely too much to get over. On a lark I tried the GIMP (2.4.4) and found that it worked quite nicely for what I want, so away I went.