Don’t forget to read parts one and two of this series first!

Breakfast at Timpani’s was going great for a while, but problems eventually reared their ugly heads. Our buffer of finished strips depleted after about six months, as John and I were both busy people. Aside from settling in to jobs and such, we were also both apartment hunting, buying new cars, and taking care of other such “grown-up” responsibilities. Couple that with family commitments, vacations, and other facets of daily life, and things started to slow down on the comic front.

Sometimes, to be completely honest, our hearts just weren’t in it. We’ve all had long days at the office where we come home and just need to relax for the evening rather than hunkering down to do more work. I’ll admit that my drafting table was not my friend at times.

To help keep the creative spirit going, we’d still have our breakfast meetings at the diner whenever possible, working up new characters and stories. I also made sure to give the site an annual design overhaul. The basic functions and navigation were the same, but the look and feel was changed. For example, the first year featured the Breakfast at Timpani’s logo seen at the top of this post, but year two showcased a design that paid homage to The Uncanny X-Men. For the third year, we went with a Matrix theme, complete with posters aping those of The Matrix Reloaded. (The first Breakfast at Timpani’s logo remains the official one.)

John and I tried to make light of the delays as best we could, often poking fun at ourselves in one-off strips. This one was my personal favorite:

Yes, that’s Faded Glory in his war-era costume frozen in the ice. Guess where that idea came from.

As the years went on, though, it got more and more difficult to get material out on time. Real life responsibilities mounted, and the dominoes began to fall. By the end of 2003, Breakfast at Timpani’s was dead in the water.

Now we’ve gotten to the point where you’re all wondering, “What happened? Why did Breakfast at Timpani’s end”? The answers are coming up tomorrow.

Don’t forget to read part one of this series first!

Yesterday was rife with technical details, so let’s move on and properly introduce the Breakfast at Timpani’s cast. Our main group of five heroes was the following:

	Faded Glory was a costumed hero who served in World War II and the Korean War. After a drunken bender, he reawakened just in time to fight in the Vietnam War…Conflict…whatever. His exploits were covered up by way of the comic book Tales of Faded Glory; whenever news leaked out, people just assumed it was fake footage or a publicity stunt. After retiring in the mid-1980s, Faded Glory grew annoyed with modern society and its lack of patriotism. He continued to fight the good fight in Midsize City, though he often spent more time trying to get his new friends in gear. After retirement, he worked as a security guard. He also had a daughter named Lisa (secretly the heroine American Princess). In case you hadn’t noticed, “Fade” was our Captain America homage, and his current appearance was based on Ed Harris and Clint Eastwood.
	Social Butterfly was so named when she sprouted a pair of wings while dancing the night away at a local club on her twenty-first birthday. Embarrassment nonwithstanding, she was a huge hit, and remained the life of the party. For powers, she obviously had flight, plus a “map-sense” that enables her to instantly recall any location. Social Butterfly’s creation for the team was a no-brainer: we needed a flyer!
	Just-Like Mike has all the athletic prowess of a popular sports icon (without the endorsement contracts)…except that he can’t play baseball to save his life. This is a constant source of amusement for his friends. He carries a flaming basketball for a weapon.
	She-Devil was exiled from Hell because she couldn’t pay the rent, and now she spends her time on Earth, having defected to the good side. A bombshell in her own right, she is the primary object of affection for Chick Magnet; she’s also resistant to his powers, being a demon and all. In addition to fighting the forces of evil, she has started a letter-writing campaign to get all of the CW’s vampire shows canceled. She-Devil has the usual array of demonic powers (flame blasts, teleportation, summoning spells), and her design was heavily influenced by Coop‘s devil women.
	Chick Magnet is a real ladies’ man, even though he doesn’t look it. He’s a self-described player who can exercise limited telepathic control over women (with the aforementioned exception of She-Devil). His ability to sway women in his favor has earned him quite a reputation. He continually hits on She-Devil (much to the consternation of Social Butterfly, who has a huge crush on him). His arch-nemesis is the Feminazi. Yes, Chick Magnet could be interpreted as a date rapist, but we made sure not to go too far over the line.

As for villains, the first few story arcs featured:

	The Mysterious Leader, your typical “big boss” who oversaw such villainous organizations as S.E.X. (the Society for Evil Exploits) and D.R.U.G.S. (I don’t recall if we thought up a meaning for that one). His black costume and question mark emblem was based on the classic “unknown person” image used in newscasts for decades.
	Feminazi, a radical feminist who commanded a group of misandrists. I realize that “feminazi” is a term coined by insufferable blowhard Rush Limbaugh, but there’s a reason for that. In-universe, our character actually took her name from that asshole pundit as a way to fight back and make the term her own, the same way many real world ethnic groups have adapted slurs in the same fashion.
	General Kwang was a flag officer in the Martian Armed Forces. A decorated Assault Trooper, Kwang had turned his fortunate status as an Immune into a play for power. When the republic of Mars was decimated by the cold virus during their war with Venus, Kwang assembled a force of Immunes to capture control of the planet. A coalition of Susceptibles was on the verge of removing Kwang from power, having finally recovered from the cold plague. The outbreak of new infections solidified his hold on power for the time being, propelling the red planet into a new conflict and driving Kwang to seek a new, final solution on earth.
	The Free Agents, genetically engineered super-jocks used by the Mysterious Leader to take over professional football and secure lucrative endorsement contracts.

There were loads of supporting characters, too, some of whom only appeared once or twice (often as the butt of jokes). Not only that, Breakfast at Timpani’s included many cameo appearances from real life people. For example, the staff of the Inkblot Comic Book Museum was based on the folks who worked at Buried Under Comics (one of whom was Moon Freight 3 creator Luke Foster). Other cameos included Dina Simmons, the model for George Pérez‘s creator-owned comic Crimson Plague, and John and I showed up ourselves a few times.

Fictional characters from outside of the Breakfast at Timpani’s universe appeared as well. Ail Man, the star of an eponymous comic strip created by Ryo-Ohki way back in our high school days, showed up as a disgruntled patron of the diner and later was seen on a poster. Breakfast at Timpani’s even had a brief crossover of sorts with another webcomic, because hey, that’s what superheroes do!

As for the actual story arcs, Breakfast at Timpani’s began with the theft of some comics — including the rare Tales of Faded Glory #1 — from Inkblot, which spurs Faded Glory to action and sets up his meeting with the rest of the heroes. From there, the story segued into General Kwang’s plans for interplanetary conquest. Then, the Mysterious Leader created the Free Agents as part of a vast plan to make tons of money and take over various industries.

Breakfast at Timpani’s was off to a great start when it launched in early 2001, and everything seemed peachy.

Next…the thunderclouds on the horizon start to move in.

With all of the history lessons I’ve been providing lately, it’s high time that I tell you the lurid tale of Breakfast at Timpani’s. Okay, so it’s not really lurid. But it should make for some interesting reading, or you can just skim it while you’re on the pot. This was originally going to be a single post, but I wrote so much that I had to break it up into four parts. Each installment will be posted on a daily basis so you won’t have long to wait.

Breakfast at Timpani’s was a superhero comedy webcomic drawn by me and written by John “The Reverend” Longworth that ran from 2001-2003. (Fun fact: I nicknamed John “The Reverend” shortly after I met him in the fall of 1996, as he is wise beyond his years. Many years later, he was ordained as a Lutheran minister, and his nickname became his official title. Convenient, huh?)

I’ve been digging through the Breakfast at Timpani’s archives on my computer lately, posting sketches and other pieces to my deviantArt account. There’s none of the actual comic strips up there, as I may eventually compile the entire run of the series into a PDF file which will be made available for free download. (I refuse to charge for that shit.)

I also realized that 2011 is the ten-year anniversary of Breakfast at Timpani’s, so there’s no better time than now to offer a retrospective on the series. (Wow, yet another decade marker. Ugh.) The Reverend himself is joining me to write this piece, so consider yourselves lucky!

Now…let’s get ready to ramble!

Set your time machines to January 2001. John and I had both graduated from college, and we kicked around the idea of starting up some kind of creative project. Since I had just received my art degree, and John was an accomplished writer, we settled on making a webcomic. John would script it while I would handle the art chores; plus, I had a website of my own on which we could host the comic.

Now, I need to mention that the early 2000s were a very different era for webcomics. Nowadays, they are almost universally motivated by profit, but ours was motivated by shits and giggles. (And lots of coffee.)

These were also the days before WordPress, ComicPress, and other software made it a cinch for any schmoe with an idea in his or her head to dump a scribble on the Internet and call it a webcomic. I had my own domain and website, but in the absence of easy webcomic production tools, I had to hand-code the entire site and manually update everything each time a new strip was ready to go. I can hear modern webcomic creators shuddering in horror.

Anyway, John and I decided that our comic would feature superheroes, as that’s the genre of sequential art that we were most familiar with. We also chose to make things humorous, as superheroes by their very nature are absolutely ridiculous, and professional comics had gotten far too serious.

John and I were (and still are) connoisseurs of diner culture; not a week went by where we didn’t meet up at a local diner to eat breakfast, regardless of the time of day or night. After all, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. With my being unemployed at the time, hitting up the diner was also a relatively cheap way to get out of the house. While chowing down, that’s when inspiration struck: why not have our motley crew of superheroes hang out at a diner of their own? Timpani’s Diner was soon created, and lent itself to the title Breakfast at Timpani’s.

Quite a bit of the legwork on the comic strip was done at the Vernon Diner, which aside from serving excellent food, was close to both of our residences. Over plates of scrambled eggs, bacon, and home fries, John would have his notebook next to him, and I’d come armed with a sketchpad. Even though John was the writer and I was the artist, we created the characters and world together. There were probably a few characters that we thought up independently, but I honestly don’t remember which those were, and it’s really not important; we’ve always shared the credit. Aside from the usual heroes and villains, John and I also laid down some ground rules.

First of all…few to no costumes. Our heroes’ outfits were just everyday clothes. Sure, they happened to be wearing the exact same thing in nearly every strip, but the fact remained that it was just off-the-shelf clothing rather than some spandex getup. The few characters that did wear costumes were some of the villains and a few wannabe superheroes, and we made it a point to make them look ridiculous. (The Cheez Weasel’s cape was a goddamned bath towel.)

Secondly, we made sure that the world our characters inhabited was one where superheroes and supervillains were commonplace, but often ignored. There were no world-destroying plots, and even when the bad guys revealed some terrible plan, the general public was used to it and practically indifferent. We’ve got billionaires and politicians who get away with James Bond-esque scams in the real world; why would it be any different in a world populated with superheroes?

Which leads to our third premise. The world in which these characters lived was a mid-sized city in a fairly generic environment. (Their home was even named “Midsize City.”) Part of the fun of exploring and laughing at the everyday problems of these characters was putting them in a setting that was ordinary apart from the presence of superhumans. New York City, Los Angeles, London, and Chicago are all overrepresented in the comic genre, especially in superhero titles. Breakfast at Timpani’s was a shoutout to people from the “everywhere else” places around the country.

Last but not least, we made sure to break the fourth wall. A lot. In one notorious instance, our primary hero Faded Glory was angry about the way a plot was resolved, so he climbed out of the comic to voice his displeasure to the creators. (Using his fists.)

Breakfast at Timpani’s was a black and white comic with a few color specials appearing here and there. I was much more comfortable illustrating with just pencil and ink as my coloring skills left much to be desired. I lettered the strips in Illustrator and prepared the final product in Photoshop. There, I did some digital inking (filling in large black or gray areas) and added special effects if needed.

The comic debuted on March 14, 2001 with new strips going up every Wednesday night. We had about five strips in the can before we launched it, thus giving us a buffer zone to work with in case any scheduling problems came up. (Which they did. But that’s fodder for a future post!)

(Click for fullsize version)

The first of many.

The first fifteen strips were in a half-page format, but we moved to a full-page format by #16. This gave me a lot more room to draw and experiment with panel sizes, layout, angles, et cetera. Each strip led directly into the next, as if they were pages in a printed comic book. We even included parodies of the legendary Hostess snack ads, using our characters to promote a product known as Crispy Cakes. Each strip even had a clever and/or ridiculous title. These webcomics were a celebration of the style and mood of the fun (if slightly campy) books we grew up on. Plenty of other teams have covered the superhero genre with dark or adult themes.

Tomorrow…meet the cast!

Like many comic-readin’ kids growing up in the 1980s, I was a pretty big X-Men fan. Even during my teenage years in the early 1990s, I continued to keep up with Marvel Comics’ merry mutants. As the years wore on, though, I eventually gave up; there were (and still are) just too many damned books.

When I was a kid, there were two X-Men books: the legendary Uncanny X-Men, and New Mutants. (There was also X-Men Classic, but that was just reprints.) Of course, of the two, Uncanny X-Men was the really important one, as that’s where the most popular established heroes were. One of my buddies collected all of ‘em, so I just read his copies. Soon, X-Factor came along, reuniting the original five X-Men. I wasn’t a huge fan of that lineup, but X-Factor joined my reading pile in the 1990s when Havok took over and built a new team. (Havok and Multiple Man remain my favorite X-characters.)

Speaking of that era, in the early 1990s all things X just exploded beyond measure. X-Men was launched, which everyone and their mother bought. (Seriously, issue #1 sold over eight million copies.) There was also X-Force and Generation X. At this point, I was beginning to feel a bit of X-fatigue, even though the books were still enjoyable. Four books is a lot, but there was a ton of ground to cover with lots of very different characters.

Unfortunately, X-Factor slowed down pretty quickly after writer Peter David left. If you thought the amount of books was bad in the late 1990s, it only got worse as time went on. The line branched off into X-Man, X-Men 2099, Astonishing X-Men, X-Men Reborn, X-Treme X-Men, X-Men Forever, X-Nationals (guess which of these I made up)…the list goes on and on. There’s also been countless miniseries and event tie-ins, plus enough retitling of existing series to make your head spin.

In college, the only X-book I actively collected was Mutant X, the successor to X-Factor. I even own a few pages of original art from the series. As I said before, Havok was one of my favorites, and the alternate timeline premise intrigued me. (This was before that concept got beaten to death.) I read friends’ copies of X-Men and Uncanny X-Men when possible in order to keep up, but rarely if ever got to read the piles of related books. It was like trying to fight the tide.

Post-college, I read Ultimate X-Men for a little while, but dropped it once the comic crossed over into other books. The entire purpose of the Ultimate Universe, at least early on, was self-contained series. Marvel broke that promise, and therefore lost my subscription.

The last X-book I read on a regular basis was the current X-Factor series, which I collected in trade paperback format. I recently stopped collecting it as it was just getting boring, which I had previously thought impossible for a Peter David book. I guess nobody’s perfect.

The long-running Uncanny X-Men is ending soon, and will be relaunched with a new #1. (Because that’s the in thing these days.) I’m considering picking it up, but I’m hesitant to dive back in. I’m sure it’ll be a perfect jumping on point for new and lapsed readers, but it’s only a matter of time before it gets mired in another crossover where it’s necessary to buy a huge stack of issues from other series. (I spend enough on comics as it is, especially with Marvel’s bullshit prices.)

DC Comics made headlines for their “Drawing the Line at $2.99″ initiative last year. They promised to keep the prices of regular monthly comics locked at $2.99. Obviously, trade paperbacks, special issues, and the like are exempt, but that’s always been the case. Story length was also shorted to twenty pages (from twenty-two), but it’s a small price to pay. Comic prices are exorbitant

Marvel Comics also dropped stories down to twenty pages, but their pricing scheme is far worse. Sure, there’s tons of $2.99 books out there each month. However, if it’s a popular book like The Invincible Iron Man…it’s $3.99.

That’s fucking insulting. Because the books’ high sales makes more money for Marvel, they turn around and charge you more for them? What kind of nonsense is that?

Before you berate me with “there’s nothing wrong with paying more for quality,” let me ask you this: don’t you think that all of the publisher’s books should be top quality? Marvel is one of the Big Two, after all.

And if all else fails, you can hold up DC as an example. They’ve got mega-popular books, but they don’t charge more for them. There’s no excuse for Marvel to be pulling this kind of shit. It’s shady, and a poor way to treat your fans.