The Wannabe Pirates!

[Largento]

Hi, everybody!

Along with my old friend Mark McCrary, I do a Monday thru Friday comic called The Wannabe Pirates and a Saturday comic called Greyhawk and the Starbucklers of the Caribbean.

The Wannabe Pirates follows the comic adventures of Captain Errol Flemm and his crew of wannabe pirates as they search for treasure and adventure in the Caribbean. Flemm grew up reading (well, looking at the pictures in) books about pirates and came to the Caribbean with a less-than-accurate view of what pirates really are. This hinders his ability to be recognized by the Parrot Review Board who determines who gets to become a pirate, leaving him forever a wannabe.

The Wannabe Pirates is an all-ages comic and despite my initial belief that I would never do it in CG (because it would be too difficult), is now fully CG (and boy, is it difficult!) :-) We're telling fairly long stories, but doing so in a gag-a-day format. We marked our second anniversary at the beginning of February.

About a year ago, we came up with the idea of doing a crossover story with another group of pirate characters from the same time period that we had self-published a graphic novel about many years ago (in 1997.) Out of this came the idea of running the graphic novel on the website to introduce the characters and then doing new stories as a Saturday comic going forward.

Greyhawk and the Starbucklers of the Caribbean follows a pirate of two worlds. Greyhawk was brought to Earth as an infant and raised by a pirate. At 12, he learned of his extra-terrestrial origins and left Earth, eventually returning to use Earth as his hidden base of operations. Greyhawk pirates both on the sea and in the stars, but acts as a sort of Robin Hood, robbing the evil empires of the galaxy and helping those who need it. Greyhawk is hand-drawn by my pal Mark McCrary.

The current Wannabe Pirates storyline is "The Wannabe Pirates and the Curse of Greyhawk Island" and features Wannabe-Pirate versions of some of the Greyhawk cast.

The current Greyhawk and the Starbucklers of the Caribbean storyline is "Universe on Fire" and is the first new Greyhawk story we've told in 13 years!

[Christo]

I've been a fan of The Wannabe Pirates for sometime now. You can find one of my favorites here.

[Largento]

Thanks, sir!

[Rob]

Great comic made by great guys. If any of you were to see my profile at the Hash forums you would see the words "Be Largento" in my signature.

He da man.  ;)

[Funderbunk]

Very cool! Really shows the potential of 3D Comics. What software do you use for it?

[Rob]

I met Largento for the second time on the Hash Animation:Master forums.

I'm pretty sure he uses Animation: Master as his 3D program.

I can tell you that it's a lot of fun but also a lot of work with a pretty steep learning curve. I mean there are all sorts of assets you can play with and do interesting things with. But when you want to design your own models and rig them so they can move and talk and whatnot... man that's where things get really complicated. There was a time when I had convinced myself that I was going to do with Remedy what Largento has done with Wannabe Pirates and after almost a year of steady daily progress I found myself not even a quarter of the way done.

So I take my hat off to the man. Largento has done some amazing stuff with that program. But then the Hash forum is full of amazing guys doing amazing stuff. Largento's just the only one who used the 3D stuff to make a webcomic (I would have said the only guy with a webcomic but there were a couple guys there who did some webcomic like stuff that didn't involve animation). And the only one I know of who came over here to play too.
;D

[HarringtonAW]

Very good! Well written, and I like the 3D art.

-S