HutchOwen.com back up!

Hutch Owen.com is back up!

HutchOwen.com still down!

HutchOwen.com should be up any minute or day now.

http://www.tomhart.net is up.
hutchowens.com is up
trunktown.com
storyark.com all up.

new email address is hutchowen at gmail

thanks for your patience.

Website definitely down!

I’ve lost newhatstories.com forever- apparently Network Solutions thinks someone else will pay money for it.

So look for tomhart.net soon, and all this will get sorted out. Thanks for your patience!

Tom

Trashistan Overrun!

This sequence has been brewing in my brain for a while, and will probably represent the longest story I’ve done since Dennis Worner going down to the poor a few years back. But I got a little squeamish early on and interspersed some silly strips along with the Dennis board room scenes.

These first two weeks will bounce back and forth between Dennis and the junkyard. We’ll introduce some new characters and play around with Oswald a little too…

Oh yeah- website is definitely down. Newhatstories.com going into the whirlpool of lost domain names. Look for http://www.tomhart.net soon.

Website down

Sat eve – 7/21/07

Newhatstories.com seems to be down. Thanks for your patience…

The Big Heads

Ok this is serious. This week’s strips mark an overnight change to a big head, 2 1/2 heads tall, cutified, neotenic character designs.

The reasons are three fold:

1- Burned by recent (here and here) nixing of strips by my editors at the paper, I suddenly, from the gut, decided to make the characters more friendly, more “disarming” as my friend Brendan once said.

2- It’s much much faster to draw. It takes half the time, and I’m really pleased with that.

3- They fit in the panels more easily now.

4- I kinda like it. In fact, I really like them, I just want to be careful not to be completely unedgy.

It’s a balancing act, and honestly, I have no idea what side I’m going to fall if I lose my balance here. There’s too much of the pissant in me to not want to keep challenging people’s expectations. This design style is not nearly as ugly as the previous, Mutt and Jeff, Segar-like full figured style; it feels welcoming and there’s a part of me (acknowledgedly influenced by commercial concerns) that likes that.

It’s great if I can subvert it. Sucky if it creates its own gravity and the ideas get sucked into a black hole of cuteness.

What would a Hutch Owen Macy’s Day float look like? It would look like these designs. That scares me.

CENSORED!

Last week’s Money Warrior strips were pulled from the Metro due to them being too close to Jim Cramer, who the Metro publishes. I disagree with their reasoning, and think they’re great strips, so I’m posting them here, along with a few other censored strips.

Check them out!

Money Warrior!

This week’s strips were drawn extremely quickly, in 3 or 4 days, when I realized the current strips I was working on were uninspiring to me. Long, drawn out, slow and crappy.

I’ve had a vague idea about this guy for a while. A bit of a parody of Jim Cramer of Mad Money- but these strips again remind me (since I have to be reminded about my own work) that I don’t really do or like parody. I’d rather invent my own, create something new from a starting point of parody.

I played a formal game here to help generate the strips: I had to move the “TV watching” panel back throughout the series. First it’s in panel 4, then 3, then 2, etc. It helped write a couple I never would have written otherwise…

New Interview posted

NEW INTERVIEW WITH TOM HART AT
http://thedailycrosshatch.com/2007/07/03/interview-tom-hart-pt-1-v-20/#more-556