Sleep Deprivation Theatre is the necessary result of discovering Comic Life on my hard drive and receiving a free secondhand scanner at about the same time. It’s a stick-figure-based webcomic about life. Not my life, necessarily, but when the idea well runs dry, it occasionally becomes autobiographical. I’d say about half of the strips are based on a true story. The other half I made up. Neither half is particularly wonderful.

SDT is low-quality by design. I can’t say I’m the first person to do a stick figure webcomic (xkcd is cool), but I might be the first person to do a stick figure webcomic that makes extensive use of copy-and-paste. The speech balloons look professional, but that’s just because Comic Life draws them instead of me.

Sleep Deprivation Theatre is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical license. This basically means that, as long as you say that it was originally by me, and don’t make money off of it, you can do whatever you want with my strips. If you’re a newspaper editor desperate for content, or want to use SDT in some other commercial sense, send me an email and I may or may not grant you a special license, depending on what it is you want.

Dramatis Personae

Adam

Adam is me, only a little more cynical, and without any sense of inhibition whatsoever. He’s actively opposed to the concepts of dating, small talk, and really, conversation in general, and willing to go to incredible lengths to get people to leave him alone. I suppose you could call him my dark side, but I’d actually prefer to be more like him sometimes. He has absolutely no control over his hair, and occasionally appears wearing a fedora.

Mike

Mike is a personification of my “normal” side. He’s either Adam’s brother or Adam’s roommate or both. I’ve changed my mind about that a number of times, and ultimately I’ve decided that it doesn’t really matter. He’s Adam’s straight man, whatever other relationships there might be. Occasionally, he makes well-meaning but misguided attempts to socialize Adam or help him find a girlfriend.

Anyone else you see in the comic is unimportant. While it may seem like I have more regular characters than just Adam and Mike, really, that’s just because I’m too lazy to draw more people.

Software I use

…in case anybody cares.

• Gimp image editor. It’s Photoshop for people with a budget of zero. Frankly, I think it’s easier to use than Photoshop, but what do I know.
• Inkscape vector graphics (for strips after #100). When my scanner broke, I bought a tablet and started using Inkscape to draw things. Regardless what software you use, vector graphics are cool.
• Comic Life lets me combine all my drawings into comic frames, arrange them, and add pretty speech balloons. It’s well worth the $25, but if you’re the sort of person who refuses to pay for software, just buy a Mac. Macs come with a free copy.
• A shell script I wrote using the ImageMagick command line image manipulation tools takes the TIFF files Comic Life exports, shrinks them to 800px wide, converts them to black and white, and adds the copyright notice and URL on the bottom.

Parental Advisory

I have never been able to watch my mouth. The comic queue includes the words w*nker, f*ck, and three occurrences of *ss that I’ve found so far. At one point, Adam flips the bird. I don’t even notice it, nor do I realize when I write it. I use naughty words all the time, as do most people I know, so it doesn’t occur to me most of the time to sanitize what I write. Nevertheless, anyone over thirteen should be able to read SDT without getting warped, although people young enough to have never attempted to get a job or a date probably won’t get most of it.

You can bet that all your “parental controls” software does is teach your kids how to use regedit, but if you’d prefer to stay naive and believe you’re actually protecting your kids, feel free to block my site for all the good it’ll do.