The Long-Winded Evolution of Kyle and Josh

One stormy night in the spring of 1998 Kyle Truss and Josh Shoberg sat at Kyle's house making jokes at everything and nothing all the while laughing their fool heads off. This happens whenever the two get together. Everything becomes funny no matter what, gibberish is spouted at an exponential rate, faces and guts begin to ache from the mirth. That night was no different from the rest. Kyle's room was aglow with the luminescence from the computer monitor as it sat unattended and the flickering of the TV as the two played the fighting game Bloody Roar on the Playstation. Kyle would always pick Alice, who could morph into a pink bunny and Josh would always pick the man that turned into a lion. Each match was a fierce battle for victory, usually by being thrown out of the ring, and all the while the jokes, laughter, and various onomatopoeias flew from their permanently grinning faces.

The storm began to worsen, but the two paid no attention to the blustering winds and repeated flashes of lightning, which in turn was followed sooner and sooner by vicious claps of thunder. All at once there was a flash of lightning, a crash of thunder, and the power in Kyle's house flickered and went dark. A tree had fallen on a powerline somewhere and left the two in total darkness with no computer or game consoles.

Neither Josh nor Kyle were discouraged. Candles were brought in to light the room and the two made more nonsense jokes. Soon boredom began to take its toll and Kyle rummaged through his closet and found a game that the two could play; Upwords. If you've never played Upwords the rules are very simple; imagine Scrabble with tiles that you can stack on top of one another to form new words. Very soon after beginning the game, too, turned to nonsense and fake words were concocted simply to make it end. Boredom set in.

At one point Kyle had found some paper and the two began to draw by candlelight. Kyle exclaimed with a laugh that he had drawn a stick figure version of himself. When Josh looked at the paper he also laughed and asked what the giant cigarette-thing was that was floating next to stick figure Kyle. "That is a cigarette," Kyle said. "He looks happy," Josh replied. Kyle laughed and said, "That's his name. Happy the Cigarette!"

So there were two of the characters when Josh suggested that Kyle draw a version of him as well. This he did relatively quickly and somewhere in the middle of everything the suggestion of a comic book was formed. For most of the rest of the night ideas were thrown around as to what the comic would be like, what would happen, who else would be in it, etc. A cover was produced (left).

With the cover done the story just began to fall into place piece by piece. Kyle began taking the comic and redrawing it on his computer where the pictures would generally look better, the words more legible and color easier to administer (left).

Thinking that their friends would perhaps give them a dollar for a copy of the comic the two of them printed out a copy and went to Cub Foods where they made black and white copies. Since the originals were color the black and white copies didn't look all that wonderful, but it was a dollar per color copy at Kinko's so they opted to just do it that way. Kyle was a senior and Josh had already finished so while Kyle was in class Josh hung around the lunch area talking to his friends and selling copies. Before the end of that day the demand had exceeded the copies printed so Josh was forced to make more copies. Sadly, the next day Josh was doing it again and was escorted off campus by Bob the Hall monitor and threatened to be charged with counts of trespassing and solicitation if he came back. Even Bob enjoyed the humor of the comics, although he wouldn't admit it to anyone else.

The end of the school year came soon after that so the distribution would become difficult until Kyle bought a copy of HTML for Dummies. A website was thus created where the first issue could be shown off to others. There would be no hassle of the same kind of distribution and anyone could look at it (I know that sounds like a "No kidding!" statement, but this was back in 1998). Work on issue two began the same as before, but this issue was not colored. Nor was it finished. Kyle and Josh had gone their separate ways. Although they still maintained contact there wasn't nearly as much as before. The second issue sat on Kyle's hard drive all but forgotten. The interest for the two of them began to die.

A couple months later as Josh was rummaging through some old papers he came across a copy of the first comic and the spark to work on it was again ignited. The second issue still uncompleted, Josh began to storyboard a third issue in the meantime. Also the two had decided that it would look much better if not done on the computer, but drawn by hand. Kyle was a much better choice for that idea so Josh left the storyboarded issue number three with Kyle. Kyle however, as his shirt states, is a slacker. It took a long time for him to do much of anything with it, but what he did looked quite nice. It didn't go far before it was all but forgotten by Kyle, but not by Josh.

In spite of Kyle's superior artistic talents Josh gathered all of the Kyle and Josh stuff that Kyle had and began to redraw everything from the very beginning. Josh's version, however, was not done as well as he had hoped. He worked through it quickly, more with the aspirations of getting it done and over with so that he could move on to bigger and better things then the concern for quality. Josh did manage to finish Issue number one, and completed most of issue number two when the monotony of redoing everything began to wear thin and he stopped.

Instead of finishing what he had started out doing Josh used his time amusing himself with the prospect of different Kyle and Josh things; shirts, working on video game ideas, movie scripts, drawing characters that had not yet come into the story and making an encyclopedia out of it. He was able to scan his Kyle and Josh stuff in spite of the fact that they were done rather shoddy and made a new Kyle and Josh website. Again he made plans to redraw it from the beginning, vowing to take his time and make it look as nice as Kyle's hand drawn versions, but they never happened.

Josh's uncle, Hugh, became a rather big fan of Kyle and Josh and enjoyed reading it whenever he got the chance. To show it off Hugh brought it to his sister's house and showed it to her sons, Rick and Dan. The boys enjoyed the comics quite a bit and Dan immediately made his own entitled The Adventures of Dane the Gunslinger and Dan the Samurai (later he shortened it to just The Adventures of Dane and Dan) which he showed Josh at the next family gathering. At that point he already had four issues drawn out. Josh told him to scan them and e-mail them to him, which Dan agreed to but never got around to doing. Rick also enjoyed Kyle and Josh and made some flash animations with the two, but those were never sent to Josh either.

With no one keeping their word on sending Josh stuff they had created his interest in Kyle and Josh began to fade. It seemed to him that everyone enjoyed the concept and the occasional issues, but never really have much other then a nonchalant opinion. Josh was going out one night and said to his roommate, "You should make a comic." Matt replied,"Yeah right, I have no artistic talent and I couldn't think of anything anyway." Josh told him jokingly that he didn't care and he expected something waiting for him when he returned. He never expected it to pan out, but when he returned home Matt had created a page and a half of his comic and J2 was born.

This incident sparked a new interest in Josh and again he made plans to redo the Kyle and Josh comic. After Kyle had given him full control of it he started to make new versions once again, but by this time it had been three years since Kyle and Josh had first started and he wanted the characters to resemble their human counterparts more then they now did. Josh asked Kyle to redraw his character to look like him and that took a while, but when that happened Josh was set. Then plans were made for Josh to move to Oregon. Kyle and Josh was again put on the back burner.

When Josh finally did move, the only thing he brought with him, other then his clothes, was his Kyle and Josh stuff. With a new life in Oregon, knowing very few people, not having a job right away, there would be a lot of time to finally work on them as he had promised himself many times before. After looking at several other online comics he came to the conclusion that it would be much easier in all areas to make Kyle and Josh into Sunday Funnies-type formatted strips, so he did.

These new shorts looked much better, and it was the first new Kyle and Josh anything in a long time, however there was one problem. With no money it was impossible to scan these shorts in and put them on the page. Josh mentioned one day that he needed to buy a scanner at some point when his new roommate, Nicoal, told him that her parents had offered her a scanner but she had refused it. They most likely still had it, however. So at the next visit the scanner was indeed still there and was given to her.

The shorts were posted on the page and a sense of completion had finally fallen into place, but the shorts were rather lacking. They were colored and reposted in their new format, which was much more pleasing to look upon, but the main part of doing it in the new format was simply a way to kill the monotony of having to do the first issue over and over again. While expanding the first 2 issues into 3-4 panel strips seemed to lenghten the issues and allow for a much faster updating schedule, the style didn't seem to fit with the way the issues were scripted. Something was missing and yet again, interest began to die.

Over the course of the next couple years Josh tried a pencil-shaded version of the comic (left) and yet another attempt at a hand-drawn and inked version (slightly less left). While the pencil-shaded version looked much more pleasing to the eye and the new, hand-drawn version looked better than some of the other incarnations, there was still something missing. What Josh really wanted was for someone who had more talent in the comic book art medium to begin drawing the comics, but the only person he found who was willing to help was so busy there was only one page finished in 3 months.

Simultaneously discouraged and determined to make something out of it, Josh started working again, this time on a version that was once more colored on the computer. Josh began to teach himself the gist of Photoshop and started with the airbrush shading technique before settling on the solid-colored shading technique. This particular incarnation looked by far the best, but it was really just a way to fill the void. Only 9 pages were done in this style before Josh stopped and tried once again to get someone to draw and ink the comic to be printed.

Enter Stephanie Krus to save the day. Josh placed an ad on an internet website looking for someone with artistic talents who was interested in working on the project. In spite of numerous attempts of the same strategy, all of which failed, Josh didn't hold his breath when she said she was interested, but as it turned out she was more than willing to do the job. With Josh doing the writing and coloring and Steff doing the drawing and inking, things seemed to fall into place. After 4+ issues in as many years Steff no longer had the time to devote to the comic and without an artist and regular updates the comic quickly lost its readership.

Approximately a year after the updates stopped the site went away. Dale Shumate, a long-time fan of the comic, had bought a server and with the only reason that he would hate to see something good fade into total oblivion, he set up the site you see before you. As it stands, the site is an archive of all the Kyle and Josh stuff that I've accumulated over the past 10 years and there are no more pages coming in. If someone wants to start drawing the comic again, by all means, shoot me an email!

THE END