So… a little explanation as to what’s going on.

Before it was digital DnR, it was hand drawn DnR, which appeared for almost a decade… mostly in single panel cartoons and the occasional multi-panel. No extended storylines: it was all very self-contained within each episode.

Truth be told, I’m not a very good artist. More than one critique of the earlier comic described the artwork as “crude” — and they were right to do so. But I enjoyed it. The readership enjoyed it. It raised a lot of money for various charities around the world. And that seemed enough. When I stopped it the first time, around 1998, I felt it’d said everything I wanted it to say. There was also the increasingly nagging ache of actually drawing the strip that made it physically challenging. But these guys were not to be ignored, and when the opportunity to create them digitally came along two years later, I fairly leapt at the opportunity. They got fine tuned out of their 80s appearance into something… well, slicker. More polished. More toony. I was able to take them to places and situations I never could before, simply because I lacked the skill to do it.

But a lot of the readership was not happy. And they told me so. Gently, but they did. So I hauled out the old sketchbooks to re-acquaint myself with the style and then set about drawing characters I havent drawn in well over a decade.

To call it challenging would be an understatement. It’s like learning a foreign language all over again. These are still rough sketches, by the old standards, so see them as such. And we’re gonna let these two worlds collide a bit, for purposes that will seem clear soon enough. But for now — enjoy the way they were. (Cue Babs!)