I: Metamorpho-psych
Flint is having a little fun fantasizing about suffering a fate similar to the main character of Franz Kafka’s short story “Metamorphosis.”
The first line that Flint speaks is a reference to the first line in Unfamiliar Reflection, UTC’s spiritual predecessor.
(The main character in that series was also unwittingly transformed.)
Technical Archive Detail – Post Date
The date shown in this archive reflects the first date the strip/page was posted online; either at the original ComicGenesis site or here at its new home, Catomix.com. (A few strips were previewed on my deviantArt page earlier in 2007, but I don’t consider those the official debut dates.) There are some exceptions, which will be noted in the commentary for those pages. WordPress orders the comic posts by date, so to make sure you can read the series and its supplementary material in the intended order, I had to add a few false dates.
Technical Archive Detail – Chronological Numbers vs. Production Codes
UTC’s strips/pages have a dual numbering system because of my organizational habits. There are many different computer files that make up each strip/page of UTC, and they all need to be numbered identically for easy identification. (This strip alone has a JPG file of the scanned lineart, 6 Photoshop files ((one for each panel)), an Illustrator file with them all put together with the word balloons, and of course the finished image file that you see above.)
During the comic’s first year, I produced the strips out of continuity order, and I didn’t know at first exactly where each strip would fall in the story. I had to number the comics somehow, so I assigned each one a “production code” in the order in which I made them. (ex: This strip’s code is “UTC002,” meaning it’s the second strip that was created.)
To prevent myself from getting the production code mixed up with the actual order the pages were meant to be read in, I decided to use Roman numerals for the chronological order. (As the comic progressed, the production and chronological numbers started to sync up most of the time, but there were still occasions where I skipped ahead to draw future pages for one reason or another.)
The reason the comics were made out of order in the first place was because I wanted to work out how certain scenes would go. I was also concerned about the very first dozen strips being of poorer quality than strips I would make once I got used to drawing the characters. I thought that a “staggered” approach would hide the quality differences. In hindsight, this was self-defeating, because I eventually changed the format of the comic from a block of six panels to a full page with varying panel sizes. This is why the strips/pages for Chapters 1 and 2 vary in size seemingly at random: the first 20 I drew in strip format. I changed to page format starting with UTC021, or “page XIV” in chronological order.
