<%@ Language=JavaScript%> Lilley Street - Dan Beeston



you love it





How can you afford the time it takes to write cartoons for free? Don't you have a real job?

I work as a web designer (surprise! surprise!) and spend a great deal of my spare time drawing and inking. I spend so much time using a computer to make my art it's kind of nice to sit down with a mechanical pencil and get that tactile feedback. I just wish my pens had an undo function.

Do you really think you're funny? What kind of sicko-freak are you?

I find stuff that my brain does funny. Although you've got to realise which organ it is that is telling me that it's funny. I like to think of myself as a fairly open minded guy so if you're reading various racist/sexist/etc overtones I don't mean it at all. I do, however, enjoy mocking stupidity, narrowmindedness and zealotry. Also Roleplayers and Goths (but I'm only human).

Where do get your ideas from?

I get them 'Mail Order'. <musical sting> The characters in Lilley Street are real people and so I simply have to sit down and think about what they've done, and what they'd do in certain situations. They keep me updated on what they're doing and what scenarios they have for the characters. I'm simply a conduit.

What are your influences?

Comic-wise? Calvin & Hobbes, Far Side, Dilbert, Sluggy Freelance, MegaTokyo, Chopping block, Real Life. I'd imagine everyone else reading this probably has the same list in their bookmarks. I grew up enjoying a lot of absurdism, The Goodies, Monty Python, Ren and Stimpy. As my taste grew I found that I tended to embrace more subtle forms of satire. Check out Spinal Tap and FrontLine (Australian Current Affairs Comedy). I used to love punning but it wasn't funny so I stopped. People accept me now ;)

I'm using Netscape 4.5 and the cartoons look dark or don't appear at all. Don't you check your site in Netscape?

BITE ME YOU SICKO LINUX FREAK BOY!!!

Sorry about that, but I'm not allowed to say that to my clients at work. Netscape is my daily bain, if not for their obscure implementation of table backgrounds and their shoddy stylesheet support I could do things faster and easier at work. In this, my private site, I've gone nuts to make sure that lots of people can view the site quickly. Netscape 6 works (through some twist of fate) and IE can display it (tested since version 5). You should still be able to view the comic if you've got quicktime installed for net4.5. It will just look a bit odd.

UPDATE: I've managed to overcome the Net 6 bug that caused the background colours to display incorrectly.

I want to draw like you. How can I?

Get some tracing paper. Stop grinning, I mean it. I started out tracing Garfield then, after a while I could draw Garfield badly without tracing paper. Before long I could draw Garfield well without tracing paper. Then I drew about a foot of drawings (upwards, not sideways) and I read a lot of 'How to Draw Super Heroes', 'How to draw humans', 'How to draw comic books', 'How to draw clothes and fabrics' type books. Occasionally I even look at naked woman and draw them. (You've just got to be careful not the wake them up)

Was that a joke?

Yes. Sorry.
I'll go now.