A friend and I started this comic strip about 14 years ago using CorelDraw 4. We produced a few comics, then our enthusiasm waned and nothing much more was done with them.

More recently we decided to resurrect the old comics - and make some new ones - using Inkscape. We're making the SVG files available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike licence.

As an added bonus, each of the comics contains an "Easter Egg" of some sort - usually hiddden away somewhere in the SVG file. More details are available here.

Here are the two comics that are currently on the site (when I preview this post they seem too wide for the forum, so I've made them into clickable links to take you straight to the full-width originals):

The next comic is now available. This one makes use of clones and clip masks in Inkscape in order to produce the top two panels - that way any final tweaks could be done to the last panel, and the others would stay in synch.

There's also some use of filter effects to produce parts of the background scenery.

good humor in that comic strip , keep up the good work.

Thanks for the comments dgimse, glad you're enjoying them.

Time for the next one:

Nice work and drawings. I think there's one problem, the bubbles. You can find good comic fonts from http://blambot.com/ . It would look better with appropriate comic fonts.

Thanks for the comments. I am familiar with blambot's fonts, but we consciously decided not to go for a fake-hand-written comic font for these, as the style of the panels themselves are clearly not supposed to look like hand-drawn images. We quickly ruled out "alien" style writing, or any font that would tie them to a particular TV show - which left us with the obvious choice of a simple sans-serif.

It also means that the SVG file should look pretty close to the original on just about any machine, without the hassle of trying to embed SVG fonts. One of our key points with The Greys is that we want people to download them, translate them, improve or change them, so we want to make that process as easy as possible.

We interrupt the usual fortnightly programming of The Greys to bring you a special anniversary edition:

Longcomic is long...

much win and awsum!!1

As we've now posted a few comics to our website, we'd like to start promoting it a bit more. So this is a gentle reminder that our comics are all Creative Commons licensed (BY-NC-SA) so please feel free to pass them, or our URL (http://www.peppertop.com), on to anyone that you think might like them. Linking to the strips, putting them on your facebook page or adding us to your blogroll are also greatly appreciated. Remember that we make the source files available if you want to examine or modify them - or if you want to go hunting for the Easter Eggs that we hide in our comics.

End of advert

This comic delves into the deeper meaning of self, and the distinction between the inner soul versus the corporeal body. Or, if you prefer, it's got an android and a ray gun - what's not to love?

Really funny

We're going for a bit of shameless self-promotion in an effort to increase visitor numbers a bit, so we've had a few hundred flyers printed. We just need to work out how and where to hand them out for maximum effectiveness now.

Click the image to go to a page with more details, and high-res & SVG versions for download, if you're interested.




Although the flyer was created completely in Inkscape, the PDF export wasn't good enough for our printing company to use directly. In the end we exported a 300dpi PNG file, which the printers then placed into InDesign to produce a PDF for printing.

I admired your motivation, definitely you are having fun by doing all of these. It is really nice to continue producing and motivating ourselves!

One for the Star Trek fans:



On the Inkscape front, this one was a bit of an exploration into patterns. There are obviously three of Inkscape's built-in patterns being used - though two of these render differently when viewed in Opera or Firefox. In fact they render so differently that we ended up replacing one of them for the downloadable SVG file (more details about this on the website - just click on the image above).

Firefox and Opera seem to be in general agreement as to how they should render them, leaving Inkscape as the odd one out. This leads me to wonder how the built-in patterns are actually stored in an Inkscape SVG: Does Inkscape create a pattern definition on the fly and store that in the file? Is this a problem with the browsers, the Inkscape file, or the way in which Inkscape creates/stores patterns? And why don't I get these problems with the wavy line pattern?

I also created a user-defined pattern for one of The Greys, which worked okay, but I think Inkscape's UI for this (or lack of one) leaves a lot to be desired.

Finally the spiral on the left is just an Inkscape spiral with a clip mask, rather than being a pattern.

This is a little number we like to call "Exterminator":

oh i love the greys, my favourite is: yes, of course i think you're prettier than your sister!

...while this is a little number we like to call "It's amazing what a difference a hyphen makes"




Thanks to everyone for the kind comments, they're really appreciated.

As always, please feel free to pass our stuff on to anyone who you think might appreciate it - send them a link, or even the image itself. And if anyone wants to submit or vote for our comics on sites like Digg or Reddit, we do have a widgety thing on each comic page to make it easier for you. A few more Diggs, for example, would do a lot for our visitor numbers (though I'm not sure we want to become too popular there just yet!)

Remember, remember the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and... alien invasion?

The last comic before Christmas, so time to bring out the snowman...