Rich Morris' Comics - YAFGC and The ComixBlog

Heh- I would go with the "famed" theory - the checks with drawings by a famous cartoonist are worth more on the wall, as a draw (pardon the pun), then the amount they are written for. Really good art by someone that doesnt have a daily and Sunday comic in the paper nationwide and worldwide - sadly, they part with the art for the check value.

Methinks you are too modest! Don't get me wrong, I know Charles Schulz is something of an icon, but even I could draw Snoopy by the time I was 10.

Maybe not that famous BK, but definitely that good.

Hilary says you're all living in the House of Plague right now...

Much sympathy, and hopefully no empathy
*eyes growing reports of salmanella in the region with disfavor*
Hope that you send Plague packing on it's white horse soon enough.

Meantime, I'll be listening to Terry Pratchett's Mort adventure on BBC-7 Listen Againhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00b5lx0, as his apprentice tries Death's patience. (I don't know if he's your kind of writer, but I always enjoy Terry Pratchett's stories - the books at bit more than the dramas based on them, but they do have that sort of "beyond the scope of things" absurdity that Douglas Adams was always trying to insert into Doctor Who.)

Heh- I was just thinking, you avoided getting Prof Chronis from Shada into the story <g> but since Douglas Adams went ahead and put the Prof into his other stories with the holistic detective (unaware BBC had released Shada with Tom Baker narrating (mostly reading thru the parts of the script that were never shot) you did avoid one more parallel universe conundrum as well.

Your style of drawing is very attractive. Did you develop it on your own, or is it a specific style? Comics are fun to me, and I'd like to begin making my own, but normal anime/manga doesn't have any appeal to me and I can't draw Western art - it's too realistic. But your style seems perfectly in the middle, somewhat simple to draw, but not completely out of porportion. I was wondering if it had any kind of name I could look up classes for, or if it's something you developed on your own.

I have read a book of his. I did enjoy it, but I found it an odd mix of hit and miss humour. It could just be the time in my life when I read it, but I found Douglas Adams made me laugh and laugh (I first read his stuff in my late teens and early 20s) and Pratchett either made me smile or roll my eyes because it seemed to laboured an attempt (I read it sometime this past year).

As for Chronotis, alas, as I said, I can't get EVERYONE in there. I did think of him, though.



That is very sweet and flattering, thank you. I'm sorry to report, however, that my style is one I've developed on my own. It sometimes delights me and sometimes frustrates me, but it's mine and that's what I do. It evolves quickly too, so drawings I do now won't look much like drawings I did when I started these comics. Compare page 1 and page 167 of "The 10 Doctors" or page 3 and page 940 of YAFGC. It could almost be different people entirely.
I feel that my greatest influences were Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny cartoons (esp.the Coyote), Archie comics (that's where I learned how to draw the female body!) and all the shows I've worked on over the years. When you spend three months forced to draw in a particular style, you wind up keeping what you liked and dumping the rest. Arthur, Mona the Vampire, Animal Crackers, Caillou (though I think I kept none of that), Da Jammies, Lunar Jim, Bo on the Go, Animal Mechanicals... I've never been able to emulate the Manga style, I tried a few times and just never was comfortable with it.
You'll find as you go that you'll adopt what you like and you'll evolve. Your evolution will happen faster the more often you draw. So for me, a guy who spends the working day (9-5 generally) drawing constantly, my stuff evolves rather rapidly.
So my advise is: DRAW DRAW DRAW. Bring a pencil to restaurants and doodle jokes on napkins and placemats. Always bring a sketchbook with you and doodle people on the bus or cartoon situations that happen to you throughout the day. The more you do the better you'll get and you'll always always always evolve.

Okay - Now that Jack's been killed, there's something I've been wondering about that you may not be ready to answer, Rich.

The Doctor could tell that Jack was a fixed point in time, so that just looking at him was wrong. He's also mentioned Timelords can tell fixed points in time because that's how they see everything - so all the Timelords in the story, all the Doctors, Romana, Rani, Master (if alive) and any others they come across should all be able to tell what Jack is by just looking at him- and they all should be very bothered by it.

9 dumped Jack, on a satillite full of bodies over a half dead Earth in the wrong century, as soon as it happened. Before he knew he was going to start regenerating. All of the Timelords should have a terrible urge to leave him behind rather than look at him -Jack doesnt even know exactly what's wrong with him and has been chasing the Doctor to find out (which, since he understands the problems of talking with the Doctor before it happened, I can see continuity issues avoided merely by keeping 10 away from Jack...and 9 as well, tho I'm guessing Jack has figured out they havent met by now.)

So - are you playing it that with so many people crowded together, the Doctor (and Romana and Rani and Drax) are just sheilding themselves by keeping lots of people between them in Jack, or did you have another solution in mind? Or ... something else at work?

If it messes up the story to tell me, I'm fine, but I thought maybe with so many characters in the room, and so many reunions and character moments, you might not want to take the time to spell out in the comic how the Timelords dealt with someone they were avoiding, so I'd ask off the comment pages.

I did think about that when I started incorporating Jack into the storyline. Yes, the Time Lords should be bothered by Jack but not understand why. What's more important is that the Doctor was very subtle about it at first, just avoiding him. Well, he can't really avoid him in this situation. And, truth be told, they've only just got together when the TARDIS full of companions picked up the 1st Doctor (and got rescued in turn by the 9th). But like a lot of things, there've been reunions and reactions "off screen" because I don't have space to deal with it all. Let us assume that the Doctors (and Romana, who is, after all, extemely time sensative according to "City of Death", and possibly the telepathic Susan) have exchanged looks and are kind of avoiding him. Jack, in his turn, is also trying to be subtle and careful about how he interacts in this anomaly. He understands a lot of what's going on around him)

Okay - I kind of wondered about that, because since this is before he met Martha&Doc, he would have no idea what happened to him and spent 100yrs on Earth trying to find a Doctor from a post-Parting of Ways experience, just to get the Doctor to explain it to him and cure him/kill him.

I knew you had to avoid that - but wasnt sure if the plan was going to be revealed. I figured Jack's protocol knowledge from his Time Agent days would help - but was getting pretty curious about close he'd cut it, or if there'd be some background bit with him trying to get a pretty Timelady to give some guesses to him - I keep picturing that if they end up on Gallifrey, he'd be the one not allowed out of the Tardis, and not left alone with Rani, whose scientific curiousity and urges to experiment might outweigh any other reaction.

I have to ask, Rich:

Page 181. What did 9 mean by 300 years? Was he talking about 1's time before regeneration? I'm confoosed!

Actually that was a calculation error on my part. I meant to have him say 600 years to reflect the fact that the 1st Doctor is about 350 and he claims to be 900+. Still, this is how the more interesting aspects of fan projections occur!

Oh - you mean he's keeping up the lie because Rose is right there?

I hadn't thought of that, and didnt think it was an age thing because Sylvester stated he was 954 or so in Rani (that one I trust because it was his chance to dig at the Rani's age being the same his own, like I trust Romana to have told the truth about his age when she met him, morethan I ever take the Doctors word on it) and early on the 9th Doctor was caught out in the lie by 7 talking about his midlife crisis when he was really 900<g> to 6's disgruntlement.

I thought it was reference to how long 8 fought in the TimeWar - it must have gone on a long time before the Doctor would have accepted the genocide of how own people as the only way to end it. Ah well.

Hi Rich - not sure if you've answered this before, but how did you come to love Doctor Who? What got you hooked?

Oh man, yeah, I've answered this one a few times and if I could remember where it is I'd cut n' paste the answer.... but what the hell, here we go:

When I was about 7 I was in England visiting relatives, staying at my grandmothers' house. We caught episode 1 of "Masque of Mandragora" which gave me nightmares for ....well, months, I think. The imagery stuck with me and when we were back again in 1980 I sought the show out. I saw episode 1 of "Warrior's Gate" (still one of my favorites). It was something I associated with my happy childhood and my beloved English relatives (as well as some quality time I spent with my big sister). When I discovered it was on in Canada, I just ate it up and absorbed it all. That's pretty much the short version.

Hi Rich!

I was wondering if you had any figures for 'unique' visits to your comic pages (average viewing figures for want of a term, or 'hits' I believe), not including repeat views.

Just wondering how popular you are.

Thanks for your time!

Our stat counter puts our YAFGC hits at between 8700 - 9300 unique ips per day (depending on the day - Mondays always have a couple of thousand more hits than weekends), and the Ten Doctors tends to get between 5500 - 5800 per new page. Some of that is people hotlinking our banners and pages in forum sigs, and things like that, so I'd say the real number of unique readers for each page is probably closer to the lower end of each range. Still, that gives us about 13000 reading eyeballs a day between the two strips (not accounting for whatever portion are crossover readers who read both). That's not too shabby!