Frequently Asked Questions
General
- What the?
- No, really.
- Fine. How did all this start?
- Will you be getting to the point anytime soon?
- Do you have a life?
The house
- Talk about the house. Is it real?
- How big is it?
- How many bricks are in it?
- How do you get access to the insides of it?
- Is each flat assigned to a particular character and painstakingly detailed accordingly?
The comics
- How did you get started writing the comics?
- How do the comics actually get created?
- How come there's not a new comic today?
General
- What the?
- That's not really a question.
- No, really.
- That's even less of a question. Alright, fine, whatever. I suppose you're really wanting something more in the way of an explanation of how this started, etc. yes?
- Fine. How did this all start?
- Good question!
- It all started a few years ago, around about the time when my interest in Lego began to reassert itself. A friend of mine had got me into Star Wars Lego by buying me a set and I'd been collecting others here and there where I'd come across stuff in sales. Consequently, I had a lot of made up Lego sets lying around, and during a bout of boredom one day, I fashioned a crude sofa out of a handful of bricks and positioned a couple of minifigs on it.
- Of course, once you make a sofa for them, they need a TV. And a coffee table. So I made those too (remaking the original sofa so it looked a lot better) and added a pot plant and a little cup. And lo, my first Lego diorama was born.
- Will you be getting to the point anytime soon?
- Alright! So after I'd had the sofa scene set up for a while I had to move it (to dust or something I suppose) and I re-fashioned it afterwards so that it was a Stormtrooper and a Scout trooper carrying the sofa through a crude doorway (Final Duel something-or-other, to be precise).
- And I thought, hey, that looks funny. But you know what would be even better than that? Like, a whole TV show, where these characters were fully CG, and did all sorts of funny things, and were voiced by famous celebrities! But I couldn't afford/be bothered to do that, so I made a comic strip instead.
- Do you have a life?
- Not right now, I'm busy, thanks.
The house
- Talk about the house. Is it real?
- The house is real, yes. And it's mostly complete. After I acquired a load of tan bricks in a sale (I'd never had many before) I realised they were ideal for building a house with, so I set to work. Many years and many Bricklink orders later, it's... er, still in progress. In truth, it's not my best model, and it's not as good as it could be. But it serves well as a 'set' and it's open to improvement. Actually, at this point I'm just rebuilding it, which is why the next section might not still have anything in it yet.
- How big is it?
- It occupies an area of a good few square feet, although that's partly grounds and partly building.
- How many bricks are in it?
- You know, I've no idea. Probably at least a couple of thousand. It tends to vary depending on what modifications I'm currently making to it.
- How do you get access to the insides of it?
- The house was designed and built around the need to access the insides, so each section is built on a different base plate and just slides apart. Some base plates just have external walls on them that fit up against the main structure of the building. Most of the rooms were designed to open onto an open edge of a baseplate. See the house section for some photos.
- Is each flat assigned to a particular character and painstakingly detailed accordingly?
- Er, no. I was originally intending to design each flat around the personality of the character living there (Darth Vader's flat would resemble the inside of a Star Destroyer, for instance) but during building I realised I'd have to make too many decisions that would be difficult to change later, particularly in the light of having envisaged a story early on that involved the Emperor moving flats. Besides, it seems funnier to me that these characters would live in regular homes like you or I, rather than exotically styled palacial penthouses. And yes, it's easier this way.
The comics
- How did you get started writing the comics?
- I came up with the first story long before I started putting brick to brick, as it were. It was inspired by the discovery that Lego made minifig footballs, coupled with the realisation that owning one was ultimately pointless... unless it was incorporated somehow into a website. Ah ha...
- How do the comics actually get created?
- It's a fairly unsophisticated process, really. Once I've positioned and taken the photos, they get loaded into Paint Shop Pro where I've got a layered template image waiting. Then it's a simple matter of resizing, cropping, adjusting and pasting each picture behind a frame, then slapping some speech bubbles over the top of the whole thing and exporting it all as a JPG.
- How come there's not a new comic today?
- The effort required to make each comic is fairly significant. Not only do I have to come up with an idea, write a script and then get all the Lego out, I might have to build new models, tweak existing ones ("The Emperor's new furniture" required an almost total rebuild of the main part of Lego Heights because the previous main staircase was totally unsuitable) and then actually photograph each panel, digitally tweak it, and put the whole thing together into a comic. It's not easy. So if there's not been an update for a while, my apologies, and rest assured that I'm probably doing something about it.