Come With Me, Back to Happy Valley!

A couple years ago, 2008 to be exact (the year 2008, not 2008 years ago, I really don’t want to talk about that time… it still hurts.), I set about on a quest. But before we get there, I guess I should recap it all from the beginning, if’n I’m’a gonna.

In April 2006 I needed a creative outlet. I had wanted to do a 24 Hour Comics Day, but those officially took place in October. Not one to be dictated to by ancient chrono regulators, I decided I would do myself an unofficial mid-year 24 Hour. The result was Happy Valley #1, the horrible mis-adventures of Lloyd the Bear, the unhappiest anthropomorphic bear in the land of Happy Valley, where all the happy things lived. In 2008 Happy Valley #1 made its world debut at Wonder Con, selling literally DOZENS of copies!

In subsequent 24 Hour Comics Days I made issues #2-5 (which I still plan on re-drawing and publishing). Over those stories Happy Valley became less a world where all the happy things lived and more a place where things horrible and wrong seemed to happen every day.

Which more or less brings us back to 2008. In 2008 I decided to give myself a challenge. For the next year my challenge was to write and draw a one page comic every day for the entire year, posting them to my ComicSpace page every day. Many times that led me to staying up to the wee hours of the night/morning to get the task done, but I stuck with it and I made it through, all 366 pages worth (2008 was naturally, a leap year, giving me just that much more work to do.)

I was quite proud of the work I’d done and hoped to some day clean all these pages up and make a book out of it. Unfortunately, not too long after that, ComicSpace went through a big change and I seemingly lost all of my posted pages. Also in that time, the laptop that I’d scanned all of those pages into had died and now all I had was the hard copy originals. I simply didn’t have the will to scan and repost all of those again so that was pretty much that.

Until this morning.

I got a seemingly random, unsolicited e-mail which accidentally informed me that all of my Happy Valley pages did in fact still exist on the internet wwws. So I set out to put my Happy house back in order and spent the entire day re-assembling things in as presentable a package as possible to share with all of your fresh new eyeballs. I think there’s a lot of good stuff there and while some days were more torturous than others, I enjoyed doing it and am proud to have done it.

So check out Happy Valley, take it in in small bite sized morsels, or gorge yourself with 366 pages of goodly goodness. How ever you choose to take it, I hope you enjoy, I’m glad to see it back.

Come, visit Happy Valley, there’s plenty to see, and none of it can be unseen.

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