Title: Kerry and the Shadow Puppets.
Medium: Dessicated pop culture on rye.
Author: David Thomsen.

Kerry and the Shadow Puppets is an internodus comicus from the early 21st Century. It updates once every two to fourteen days, depending on how much free time I have, how well I'm feeling and whether or not I've recently bought a really cool Lego set. I try to aim for one a week unless I have extra free time or extra bonus distractions. The code of this website is the first to be transmitted entirely in semaphore from the top of a reverse parachute windmill.

KATSP is not fixed, and I may go back and 'improve' things at any time if I think of something for a character to say that I think is more clever (or coherent) than what they're already saying. This will never affect the continuity in any way. I have been known to spend an entire week on a single panel trying to get the dialogue just right, or the shape of a fallen tree.

Contrary to popular custom, this page isn't formatted as an FAQ. Partly because there have been no AQs yet, and partly because I want to prevent that sort of thing before it happens. I also refuse to write this page in Third Person. This isn't the 'about the author' page of a self-published thriller.

I'm not entirely sure who the target audience is supposed to be for this webcomic. Basically I just write whatever I think would amuse me if I were reading it.

The two Ted Staunton fonts used in this comic are Sparrow and Roanoke, supplied by the P22 Type Foundry. I bought them both because I can't stand Comic Sans and wanted to use something both historic and professional, and all the free fonts I could find were pants. The size of the dialogue is a compromise between being too small to be legible, and a reasonable size where I can never quite fit in what I intend to say. Hence, slightly too small to be legible. I apologise if this gives you a headache. I know that these two fonts do not have 'italic' or 'bold' modes, but I like to think that not using italics or bolds gives the comic a nice deadpan feeling.

In addition to the font being too small to read, the page is too wide to fit on old monitors. This is another demonstration of my lack of common sense.

All the panels are made 125% wider than they need to be and then squished by 80% to get the final size. This is a 'stylistic' thing, where 'stylistic' means 'based on an ineffable whim'. By 'ineffable' I mean 'I don't know'.

While other webcomics have clever devices that automatically generate new pages as cartoons are added, I'm content to wade through all that by hand, like the pioneers of old. I find that whenever I utilise a tool that's designed to make my life easier, my life just gets that much more complicated.

Comments, for example, are another thing that make life complicated, which is why this site will never have them. I will possibly add comments when everyone in the world learns to write what they actually mean, so that they no longer write 'this comic is a bottomless pit of suck' when what they actually mean is 'this comic does not match my taste'.

The design of the website is, and always will be, a work in progress.

KATSP is made in New Zealand, although I wouldn't call it a 'product' of New Zealand. Nothing is officially made in New Zealand unless it exclusively handles issues of New Zealand culture, identity or history. If you write a universal love story and it only incidentally happens to feature a tuatara, you're not a real kiwi. However, if you write a story about a tuatara, and it happens to be bland enough that no one will possibly take offence at it... then you might just have a career.

One of the agencies responsible for this is called 'Creative New Zealand'. That's obviously about as much of an oxymoron as 'American Intelligence', 'British Civil Service' and 'Australian Rules Football'.

My ultimate goal is to be cool enough to be accepted by a place like tapatoco.com. And then maybe my life will have meaning.

I haven't quite got my katspuppets.com email working properly yet, but it isn't a very high priority. Every now and then I fiddle with it and then give up. In the meantime I can be contacted on my Yahoo! address.