A Sketchy Sort Of Webcomic Updates Irregularly.
MAIN	ARCHIVE	DAVE'S HOMEPAGE	WEBSNARK

ABOUT

The Strip:

    Breakdown Lane is a small community catering to "breakdowns," sketchy sorts who work in the comicbook industry. They're like actors, except they specialize in static poses that artists draw tight (detailed) pencils and inks onto. Not everyone on Breakdown Lane is in the industry, of course. You have has-beens, wanna-bes, and breakdowns who simply work in the service industry supporting all the actors. Normal people who enter Breakdown Lane become breakdowns while there, which is a disturbing enough experience that the community doesn't get many visitors. Don't worry too much about the metaphysics, though, this is (hopefully) a gag strip.

    Why breakdowns? Because my full art takes more time than I'm willing to devote to a webcomic, and frankly isn't THAT great anyway. Also, by avoiding fully rendered art, I feel free to play around with layout, something I'm pretty weak at. So even if the strip is a flop, I at least have an excuse to practice layout stuff.

The Site:

    For now, I'm keeping things brutally simple, as exemplified by my font choice (Courier, in case you actually don't have it installed). Manual updating, hosting on a friend's machine, no ads or fancy graphics. That first bit means that when I'm out of town, I may skip an update or two, but I'll let you know in advance when that happens. I don't plan on setting up a dedicated forum for this strip, but I have a subforum of my own over at the AllSpark, you can go there and register if you want to discuss Breakdown Lane.

    The site updated on a regular Tues/Thurs schedule from June through mid-September 2005. After that, it started to feel more like a job than a hobby, so I switched to an irregular update schedule...in other words, a two year hiatus. It came back at least briefly in 2007, but no promises. No one has offered to date, but if anyone wants to do a guest strip, they're welcome to. :)

The Creator:

    See that link up top to my homepage? Go there. Don't have the time? Okay, extremely short version: Dave Van Domelen was born in Waukesha WI in 1970, did very well in school, got a PhD in Physics (Physics Education specialty) from the Ohio State University, and now works at Kansas State University as the Director of Undergraduate Labs. Hobbies include comics, Transformers (and toys in general), roleplaying games (playing and writing them), writing, drawing, kitbashing, and apparently doing a webcomic. He's been reviewing comics on Usenet since 1992, and Transformers since 1994 (with one of the two oldest Transformers fansites still in existence).

CAST
  John - Square-jawed and crew-cut, John is a fairly successful breakdown. He gets a lot of work as superheroes, under the pencils of A-list artists. A generally good guy, he loves his wife and has a good home at the nicer end of Breakdown Lane. First Appearance: 001

  Marsha - John's wife. They met on a comicbook set, where she was a standard superhero vixen. After they married, she retired, being kind of sick of the exploitation. She's since put on a little weight, which has caused her problems since she decided to try to get back into the industry. First Appearance: 001

  Amanda - Co-worker of John's. Mid-length straight hair, usually in some sort of angular style. It's a running gag that she never actually appears on screen with John or Marsha (and, in fact, almost never appears at all). First Appearance: 013 (mentioned), 022 (seen)

  Danny - A very twitchy and jittery breakdown, who does a lot of "mook" parts. It pays the bills, but getting beaten up (even in freezeframe) for a living is bad for his nerves. He has wild and messy hair. He's also a hypochondriac, which you'd think he was too busy for, given his number of real injuries. First Appearance: 003

  Fred - A robot breakdown. That there is a robot in this strip should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me even a little. And you shouldn't even have to ask if he can transform. Victim of another running gag, you never get to see his face. First Appearance: 009

  Jamie - Like a younger, female version of Little Jim. A thoroughly unpleasant woman in her early 20s who specializes in playing characters down to 10 years old. Unlike Jim, she maintains the cute act all the time...because she realizes how much it bugs people. First Appearance: 035

  Little Jim - 45 years old but still small enough to play child roles. Utterly horrible role model, but fortunately no breakdown is really "famous" outside of the industry. First Appearance: 010

  Louie - A very fat breakdown with a combover. He does manage to get work, but has problems with typecasting. College buddy of John's. First Appearance: 004

GLOSSARY
Some helpful terms and background.

• BG or bg - Abbreviation for "background" normally used when giving detail directions to the inker or letterer.
• Breakdowns - In comics, this is the rough art that lays out where everything is, but has little details. In this webcomic, it also refers to the living pencil sketches who work as "pose dummies" for artists.
• Inking - Part of the traditional division of labor in drawing comics. How much labor is involved depends on how detailed the penciling is. Called "Finishing" if the penciller only supplied breakdowns.
• Lorem Ipsum - Fragment of "dolorem ipsum", after the common use of chunks of Latin orations for paste-up text where the actual content is unimportant, such as stories on a newspaper a character may be holding. Most Lorem Ipsum now is just random characters, but it retains the name from its roots. It's kinda the lettering equivalent of "X" (see below).
• Penciling - The second stage of "standard" comic art, after breakdowns and before inking. It runs the spectrum from loose pencils (barely more detailed than a breakdown) to tight pencils (which can be and often are given directly to the colorist these days, with no inking needed beyond filling in shadows and darkening lines). To a breakdown, the tightness or looseness of pencils translates directly into physical tightness or looseness, and it can be uncomfortable to "wear" excessively tight pencils.
• Stat - Not statistic, short for photostatic copy. Nowadays cut and paste is usually used instead, but I'm sticking with "stat" for that old time feel. Essentially it's a direction to directly copy a previous panel, often used when art is to be repeated more exactly than the artist can do by hand, such as for shots implying that nothing is happening. Or used by lazy artists for "talking head" sequences that won't be resellable anyway.
• X - When a penciler wants to let the inker know to fill an area entirely in black, he usually puts a few X's in that area.

• Byrne, John - A major artist and writer in the 70s and 80s, has become something of a parody of himself in recent years, although a decent guy in person. His women tend to be on the angular side.
• Frenz, Ron - Long time Marvel artist, generally works with a Kirby pastiche to his style.
• Kirby, Jack "the King" - If you don't know who this is, you're probably not going to get many of the jokes in this strip. Not because I invoke him directly a lot, but because it indicates a general lack of comicbook knowledge. :)
• Lee, Pat - The driving force behind the recent revival of Transformers comics, but his company went bankrupt in 2005. Noted for drawing Transformers that look kind of bloated.
• Liefeld, Rob - One of the Image Comics founders, whose art started as passable and then got worse and worse as he got more famous and successful. Noted for bloated idiots with tiny hands and feet.
• Ordway, Jerry - Noted for drawing Superman a lot in the past decade or so. A very tight penciller.