Frequently Asked Questions - Read First!

[Shane]

These are questions I'm frequently asked about the comic & such:

Q: You do realize doing a comic won't get you laid, right?
A: FALSE! I actually got a girlfriend by doing JBS, or at least it was an icebreaker.

...No, that's all I've been asked thus far. So feel free to ask some more questions!

[ben]

Favorite sports teams?Based on Jelly bean sniper, Hockey is tampa bay, who is somehow still doing better than Toronto, But what is football and stuff?

[Shane]

My favorite football team are the Buffalo Bills, which I alluded to in the blurb of comic #3. Because of that, I am biased towards all Buffalo-area teams. Sabres and the Bulls (NCAA). This is also why JBS took place in Buffalo.

The Lightning are my 2nd-favorite hockey team behind the Sabres, because they were a huge underdog (though they won the Cup in 2004, right after I started the comic).

As for other sports, I'm a Rays fan, because living in Massachusetts everyone is either Yankees or Red Sox, and I don't care for baseball, so I wanted to tick them off and root for another division rival, and the Devil Rays (at the time) were terrible.

And though I live in Springfield, MA (home of the basketball HOF), I can't stand basketball, though I will usually root for he Nuggets or Hawks because I like their jerseys.

But all in all, I'm a HUGE NFL fan. So I bleed Buffalo blue, no matter how ugly I think those jerseys are. And back in middle school I was a Packers (read: Favre) fan, but still rooted for the Bills (those were the Flutie years).

[wooooood]

How do you manage to draw exclusively with the pen tool? (I guess it might be slightly different in Photoshop than GIMP, but still...) It baffles me to no end when I try to use it, so I gave up and now use about 3 times as many layers when drawing.

It must be quite a jump from hand-drawing and scanning everything.

[Shane]

Well, I got some practice using the pen tool with the few things I did in PhotoShop with JBS. I used a tutorial on www.baka-neko.com to learn how to use it, and after doing a few comics, I'm getting better/quicker with it.

Trust me, it's probably alot faster to use a tablet, but I can't be bothered to learn how to use it - the few times I tried it looked like I was having a seizure. So for me, it's what I'm comfortable with. But I doubt it will make for an entertaining ustream.

And honestly, it's not THAT big of a jump for me. Ok, that's a lie. The effort isn't much bigger, and if anything it's easier in PhotoShop (it took SO LONG to shade May's hair in JBS that I actually gave up in a few and either paint bucketed it or took a sample and copy/pasted). I still draw out the entire comic in pencil first (though it's not 100% done), and use the pen tool over it after I scan it. So while you guys only see the finished, PhotoShop product, I still get the experience. It just costs less money in mechanical pencils and pens.

[Shane]

It took me a week to draw the 4th comic (well, 3rd if you don't include the title page), because I had the 3rd comic finished and would just keep opening it in awe of the fact it came out so much better than anything I did with JBS.

Now that I have a couple month's experience, it looks like dog nuts, but at the time it was awesome!

[superbigmac]

Here's my questions:

#1: Do you like the Twilight version of vampires? Personally, Count F*cking CHOCULA is a better vampire then the twilight one. Same goes for the Sesame Street Vampire dude. He was more spot-on. The best vampires? The Lost Boys. DEFINITELY. They are the scariest mo-fo's EVER.

Which, brings me to question 2: when will the Jelly Bean Sniper comic be continued? I only started reading it after the space between, but I felt it was better, just because of it's medieval start and present-time mix-ups.

[Shane]

To #1 - I refuse to touch Twilight with a 10 foot pole. 16 year old werewolves, a high school girl who wants two people at once, no thanks. I honestly think Keanu Reeves was a better vampire, and we know how bad he was.

#2 - Jelly Bean Sniper only really has 8 or 9 comics left, but I really can't bring myself to finish it because I don't want it to be over. I'm glad you liked it, but for now I'm trying to focus on Space Between to make that as good as possible. I may make a sequel to JBS because I really miss drawing some of those characters, more specifically Rex and Dark Lord Charles. But I can't do two comics at once right now, so it'll have to wait. Unless of course someone wants to pay me to do this.

[awsomesauce1]

why did you name your first comic 'jelly bean sniper' anyways?

[Shane]

I misheard someone at work back in high school and thought she said something about a "jelly bean sniper". So, the name stuck, and I used it to name the coalition of the three comics that me and my friends had - Middle Man (the original name of JBS), Love Ninja, and Uncle Sunshine the Yellow Dildo (it's as graphic as it sounds. It's for some reason still up, just Google search it). But eventually the other 2 comics fell off, and it was confusing having jellybeansniper.com registered with a comic called Middle Man, so I just renamed the comic since I didn't have any readers anyways.

[jflac]

Ok. Typical question I'm sure: Are any of your characters reflections of yourself or people you know? May be a dumb question but as a writer and a fan of the comic I would like to know ha ha.
If your characters are based on people you know...could I meet Sam!? Jk.

[Shane]

I try to avoid basing characters on people that I know - it has failed miserably for me many times in the past, and I highly recommend that no one bases characters off their friends unless it is completely necessary. None are self-insertions, either. Most of the characters carry some of my traits (Jack the football fanatic, Sam has a more exaggerated but similar taste in music, Frank the gamer), but don't think I'm any of those characters in any way. After all, none of them are fat. XD