Johnny Saturn is in a new stage of life.  We never stopped producing episodes, but we did change how and where and when they are distributed.  Originally, we ran the strip with a full page once a week.  It began on Graphic Smash, moved to Komikwerks, then back to Graphic Smash, and then to Comic Genesis and Drunk Duck as well.  For a while, that scattershot approach worked well, and we built a readership of several thousand per day, and our combined numbers looked quite good.  (I do not know what the hits versus unique visitors was, because none of these systems reported that data.  Nowadays I know better.)

After reading “How to Make Webcomics” by the Half-Pixel cartoonists, I decided on a different approach for Johnny Saturn.  I would gather all our content onto one site, along with a store and daily blogs, and we would then proceed to build a single audience and more clearly focus all our energies on one site.  We still run Johnny Saturn on Graphic Smash, but we run the strips a day later there, one Tuesday and Thursday, not Monday and Wednesday.

These days, I divide each page of Johnny Saturn into halves, running the first part of the page on Monday, and second part on Wednesday.  My original thinking here was that offering less content more often was better than running more content less often, and to a degree I believe this is true.  In reality, however, it worked out differently, and it came to mean more content more often.  Each web episode needed to include some entertainment value and had to somehow advance the plot, so it resulted in more panels and more text per page.  It’s more work for me and Benita, my co-writer, but ultimately worth it, I believe.

Johnny Saturn always has been and underdog.  In a webcomic world that favors gag-a-day strips, and often caters to college students and young professionals, Johnny Saturn has defiantly featured superheroes, middle-aged or elderly characters, and close looks at villains and deeply troubled heroes.  There hasn’t been any nudity, and we haven’t sexualized or characters or sensationalized gay characters.  Drug addiction?  Clinical depression?  Grief?  Suicide? We’ve dealt with all of them, but in a straight forward manner, but we’ve left the melodrama at the door. 

Nowadays, there is a political theme underlying the strip.  The beauty of comics is that we are able to tackle the key issues of today in an allegorical fashion, personifying political forces in fictional garb.  The Oppression Wave?  The Star Cabal?  You can read these as pure entertainment, or you can go deeper.  Either way, I invite you to keep reading Johnny Saturn.

In America, we are surrounded by superheroes.  They inhabit our movies, television shows, advertisements, and they have also crept into sports, music, and pretty much any corner of pop culture you can imagine.  Is Save-A-Bunch Man going to save you money at the thrift mart?  His cape, tights, and big smile say “yes.”  Wrestling, a strange mix of sport and theater, long ago succumbed to superhero imagery, but now many major sports figures in other sports have also taken on superhero nicknames, complete with tattoos and jerseys.  This is just a continuation of the old practice of naming children after saints, a bid for the blessings and protection of the holy intermediary.

The origin of the superhero genre has been much discussed.  It has been described as adolescent power fantasies and a modern mythology.  Both are true, I suppose.  I favor the mythology theory, because I believe superheroes are largely allegorical in nature.

By allegorical, I mean that character’s nature is evident in their physical appearance.  Comics are a graphic form, as much as they are literary, so why not?  That unique blend of pictures and words makes it a perfect medium for allegorical characters.

It would be easy to explain all this in terms of traditional superheroes, from the Messianic, Zeus-like Superman, to the Hades-like Batman, the Loki-like John Constantine.  It’s a fun exercise in correspondences and archetypes, really.  It’s no different in the Johnny Saturn setting, where characters wear their strengths and flaws as graphic elements and they descent from mythological archetypes.

One unfortunate meme that got attached to the superhero archetype is that of muscularity.  This is nothing new, of course: All the Greek gods had bodies like, well, Greek gods!  Hercules was huge and strong, as were many other mythological heroes and gods.  Physical supremacy was included in the superhero myth from the beginning, but by the 1980’s and 1990’s the rise in the popularity of weight-lifting and body-building had transformed most superheroes into bloated grotesques.  Even Spider-Man was looking hugely beefy in the 90’s.  Overdeveloped physiques had become associated with superheroes, and live-action actors who played these parts had to wear ridiculous and insulting rubber muscle suits.  Luckily, in comics themselves, hyper-muscularity began to give way to well-developed musculature as the 90’s ended.  Some characters now look simply fit and trim, which is also a vast improvement.