The Halcyon Years – “Sand Dollar Collar” (2002)

There was a subset of The Halcyon Years which tried to blend music and webomics. It was called “The Synesthesia Drive-In” and was a collaboration between myself and close friend Nichlaus Von Hulsebus, who is now the front man for our own Hang Dog Expression.

The first collaboration was “Sleeping Dark Things“. Nich came up with a musical rendition of that comic and we posted it after the fact.

“Sand Dollar Collar” was made with the intent of having an audio component.

 

It wasn’t very easy to blend images and music at the time, so I believe we opted to have the viewer pre-load the mp3 (back in 2002, this was an operation that would have taken some time, depending on people’s internet connection) then play the song and read through the comic simultaneously. Not exactly earth-shattering, but it made for some interesting impressions.

Here’s the original sketch for this comic. The formal goal was to nest the narrative in a metapanel. I think I attempted to put legs at the bottom of the comic, but that didn’t work at all.

 

You can read the comic and listen to the song here.