So it started much like Scribs did, really — a doodle with legs. I got in an unusual drawin’ mood, and after I did four or six of them, I looked at them and said, hey, I am entertained by this. So I kept going.
I started thinking about how I could put it online, and I liked the continuous presentation idea in my head — not a strip per page with the usual forward/back navigation, but one big page that you scroll through everything. One of my pet peeves about having a comic per page is that I feel like the person dropping in the middle of a story arc might not go back, and miss context. Or if they do, they step back one at a time, which gives them the story arc exactly reversed. The continuous format doesn’t solve it, but it makes it easier to slide around the timeline.
And I pictured the lazy load effect in my head as well, which I thought was pretty cool. Those images can actually load a lot faster, I have the javascript slow down the image views so you can see the animation. I think it was the idea of the image animation that actually pushed me into creating a website for it. I laughed at myself — ah Christ I’m buying another domain apparently.
But what to call it? I engaged the random generator in my head and “sswhat” dropped out. That dude I’m drawing started as a margin doodle in college, and has kind of an unfortunate name I don’t like anymore, but his initials are S.S. So “s. s. what” is kinda, “okay, this guy, and what the hell?” I was surprised to find there was a six-letter domain still available (even if it is basically nonsense), so that pretty much sealed it.
At the moment it’s on a M-W-F update schedule, and right now I have enough drawn to go through to mid-August. I am tempted to make it a weekday update thing, but…ugh I just don’t trust myself being able to continue making them to keep up with five updates a week. Though if I switched to that right now, it’d be enough updates til July 10…mm. Don’t know. Still pondering.
