Growing up I was really into reading books. I would read anything and everything I could get my hands on. But since coming to college and becoming a computer science major, I have turned towards web comics for stories. I think it has been mostly becasue it is far easier for me to spend a few minutes every morning checking my RSS feed for new comics than it is to sit down and read a book (It helps that I can understand most of the xkcd jokes now too). Most web comics tell very short, only vaguely related stories (With a few notable exceptions). So I love it when there are recurring characters in comics that are not Typically episodic.

I was reading left-handed toons the other day and came across a collection of all of the comics about a character named John. Every single john comic cracked me up and I always wanted to know what would happen with him next. For my final ds106 I had been thinking about trying to use twitter to tell a story. John’s story is very loosely formed and only briefly touched upon in each comic. So I figured I could and supplement his story with twitter and make it my own. I made some other accounts for other people he encounters in his adventures as well. You can find the strips I’m working off of here.

Follow John: @lefthanded_john

Follow Bill: @ShoutingBilly

Follow Stewart: @StudiousStewart

Follow Sara: @SuspiciousSara

Follow The Beard: @TheFuckingBeard

The hardest part of the whole thing was making all of the different twitter accounts. I only had 3 emails to work with and already had an account to start with, so I had to sign up for a couple of new email accounts in order to make all of the characters I wanted. This took a lot longer than I expected it to. Switching back and forth between all of the characters and trying to give them some sort or back story or personality in just 140 characters was also more difficult than I had anticipated. The author of these comics keeps coming out with new ones as we speak so I’ll try to keep the tweets up to date as much as I can.

If there is anything that I’ve learned from this project, it’s that telling a story is hard. Even when I already had characters and events to work with it was a challenge to tie them all together in a meaningful way. I didn’t want to rehash what was said or done in the comic so most of the tweets I wrote either responded to the events of the last strip or led into the next one. As I look back at all of John’s tweets it does tell a very loose story, but I think it is the combination of his tweets, the other characters’ and the comics that give you an actual story worth reading.

I hope you enjoy both the comics and my twitter additions.