What Is Stuffy Stuff?

Stuffy Stuff is a four year long web-comic brain child that started off back in my Cambridge Regional College (CRC) days. It all started back when I was watching more TV and the amount of web-comics I was reading was steadily increasing. Over time I started to notice a trend that was evolving in modern day media revolving around the physically and mentally impaired; that was, even though some stories focused on accepting that they are all just like us, they'd spend most of the story making fun of their disability, so despite their message, we'd spend most of the time making fun of them.

So I started to devise a comic idea which focused more on the disabled as the main cast. My original idea for the comic was to be called "Sadistic Puppetry", which focused on a man suffering from chronic depression and his struggle to simply stay happy in a overly positive world, or one that appeared so to him. While part of me will still always love this idea, I felt it didn't evoke the message I had originally planned to do, so I shelved the idea in the back of my mind, for the next few years.

Skip forward from the end of CRC to the first year of Norwich University Of The Arts (NUCA), I had started to get back into Anime and Manga, as did my sister, but let's keep this on me. Even then I started to get bored with the medium; I felt that every Anime and Manga were starting to blur together, the same over the top drama, senseless death and violence, and overall just becoming very depressing to watch.

That was until I tried an Anime called Lucky Star, of the Slice of Life genre and instantly, I fell in love. Funny characters, real-life situations exaggerated enough to keep the point but remain funny, colourful imagery and just upbeat everything. I then started to try more Slice of Life animes and I just couldn't help myself, I was really enjoying the genre to the point I was even buying the manga copy of it and trying to get my hands on the DVDs.

Some time later, I was working on a different comic that I again felt like shelving for it was too broad to just work with right off the bat. Then suddenly, I read a journal telling people if they wanted to get into web-comics, they just simply needed to "DO IT" and work with it. So after some time, I gave these words some thought and thought back to my "Sadistic Puppetry" as a comic concept I could take and just roll with and then I decided to combine it with my new found love of Slice of life and figured it be the perfect way to tell a story about the life of people who are challenged every day, by NOT focusing on what makes them different and instead make it a part of who they are.

This is when Stuffy Stuff was born, when I finally realised the best way to create something that speaks positively about something. Sometimes it's easier to make something positive rather than something that dwells on the negative.