Web comic passes test

Andrew Power is drawing in a number of visitors to his web comic. (Photo by Jonathan Charlton)

Most high school aptitude tests give you the same boring results – librarian, lawyer, nurse. What if your test told you that you should be a superhero?

Aptitude Test is a four-year-old web comic penned by Andrew Power. The 23-year-old Halifax resident, originally from Corner Brook, N.L., started it as a project when he was studying animation at the Nova Scotia Community College in Truro.

The comic has changed in those four years. He started writing in supporting characters in the fourth issue, and since then, he says his technique has improved.

“I was looking back at some of my earliest stuff a few weeks ago, and it’s kind of hard to look at now.”

Power tries to publish one page a week – that means each page has to tell its own story while still adding to a larger arc.

It was originally only going to last three issues, but halfway through, Power realized he wanted to keep going. Now, the comic gets about 500 unique visits every day.

He’s not sure why it has become so popular, but he notes that its subject matter is different from most of what’s on the Internet.

“Seventy-five per cent of web comics are just about video games, so if you’re not doing that you’re already fairly unique …. I just try and do the comic I’d want to read and hopefully there’s other people out there who also want to. And it seems like they have.”

Reader response on the website has been positive. People seem to be drawn mostly to the artistic style, though a few are also impressed by the comic’s cultural references.

“I get a chuckle out of the incidental conversations that happen on the sidelines,” writes Gavin, “Julie’s Lost theory, for example, cracked me up. Also, referencing Chrono Trigger to talk about confidence issues is pretty hardcore. Geek fan-service can be pretty lame if done improperly, but I think you pull it off quite well,” writes Gavin.

Cal Johnston, owner of comic book store Strange Adventures, thinks Aptitude Test’s success – or the success of any webcomic – is due to a simple formula.

“If you’re putting something out every week that just isn’t funny, no one’s going to read it. If you put out something that’s really funny, but you don’t put it out very often, you’re not going to have good readership because, you know, people just don’t know when to come back and look for it….You need some talent, and you need some work ethic.”

Power credits the existence of Halifax’s comic book scene largely to Strange Adventures, saying the comics store helps foster both creators and fans. The store sells Aptitude Test: Cheat Sheet, an introduction to the story and characters. He says Aptitude Test is “ just sort of happy to be in there.”

Power started drawing at six, copying Sonic the Hedgehog comic books – he says comic book fans have a favourite they keep coming back to, and that’s his.

“I read that pretty much all through my childhood, around high school I started getting into comic books a little more seriously.”

Then, when he started reading video game magazines, he drew the Nintendo and Capcom art he saw.

“I didn’t even know it was from Japan, it wasn’t even relevant to me but that’s just a lot of the stuff I started drawing. Eventually my niche style evolved into that.”

Some of his other favourites include recent Spiderman issues and Runaways, but at the moment he’s enjoying The Incredible Hercules.

“It’s possibly the goofiest superhero book in existence … as opposed to a lot of superhero stuff nowadays which is a little darker and more serious. It’s nice to have a couple of those books that don’t mind being completely off the wall.”

Last month, Power started trying to turn his hobby into a profession, applying for freelance work. As for Aptitude Test, he plans to keep writing more issues. He’s even looking at writing spinoffs from the main story.

“Aptitude’s always going to be the sort of thing that’s always there in the background for me no matter what else I’m doing, because I think it’s just such a pure distillation of the kind of stuff I always want to do,” he says.

“I don’t see any reason for myself to stop doing it at any point.”