I’ve finally finished the comic I’ve been slogging through for the past couple of months. The quality is, I must admit, variable.

I started this thing back in 1999. For the longest time I had the first five pages on my site, and eighteen or nineteen more pages inked and ready to scan. At about this point I came down with tendonitis. I set aside all my projects for a while while I recovered.

I recovered in a few weeks. I didn’t pick them back up. For various reasons, mostly bad, I drew hardly at all for about five years.

This year I registered a domain name and tried seriously to get back to work. Part of that effort was resurrecting “Bob vs. Elves.” This may have been ill-advised. The art I completed five years ago was terrible, and mostly had to be redrawn. It’s still not so good in the middle, partly because I was lazy and used some of my old art in spots.

The writing is worse. I’m writing surrealist humor here and much of it deliberately does not entirely make sense, but “Bob vs. Elves” is especially tenuous and arbitrary. Despite having a rough draft of the last few pages, it’s no longer clear to me where I was going with this thing.

It may give you some idea just how sloppily I wrote this thing when I tell you that, halfway through coloring it, I realized that one of the characters had absolutely no purpose in the story at all. How useless was he? I was able to delete him from the story simply by skipping one page, erasing him from the remaining artwork, deleting a couple of speech balloons, and assigning the rest to other characters. That’s it. His removal had *absolutely no effect on the plot whatsoever*.

On the bright side, after “Bob vs. Elves,” there’s nowhere for my comics to go but up. And, honestly, I still think those first few pages are pretty funny.

Here’s the discarded page, for curiosity’s sake: