Hi, I am Boone, the author of Tyler Tales. I am a fifteen-year-old Texan with big ideas. I was never really exposed to comic strips until I was 14, about a year and a half ago. Once I began reading them, I could not stop. I fell in love with the very versatile medium of the comic strip and its unification of words and drawings. When I first read comic strips I really enjoyed them and started writing my own, mainly because of my love of drawing. There is rarely a sheet of my paper at school without a small drawing or a doodle on it. Drawing during class has gotten me in some trouble over the years but it is really something that I just do naturally. Tyler Tales was not the first time I had drawn cartoon characters. I drew Snoopy, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck all the time, as well as other nameless goofy-looking characters of my own. I have always loved art and drawing, so it really wasn’t that hard for me to draw cartoon characters from the beginning. I have a great sense of humor – I often make myself laugh during school because of some joke that I cracked that no one else laughed at. All these things set me up to enjoy telling a story or a joke through the unique comic strip. I love writing and drawing this strip and I hope you love reading about the adventures of Tyler.
Origins: As I said before I never really read comic strips until fairly recently. Sure I had read a few strips of the Peanuts, here and there, but the comic strip did not catch my attention until I read Calvin and Hobbes. I read Calvin and Hobbes for the first time shortly after my grandfather passed away. I was looking through his bookshelf and I ran across Its a Magical World: a Calvin and Hobbes Collection. I sat there and read it cover to cover, I couldn’t put it down. I brought it home and read it several times in the next week and immediately became an avid fan. I related strongly with Calvin, his imagination distracting him from school, all his crazy, philosophical ideas, and his whole personality. I read a few of the other collection books and knew I needed a strip of my own. Originally, Tyler Tales went into Tyler’s imagination, similar to Calvin. Early on, Tyler was an extremely flat character, only there to give a one-liner or just to be a door into his world. “Bull’s Eye Pete” was the name Tyler gave to himself in his imaginary western adventures. It occurred to me that I needed some originality, so I added another character, Charlie, and the strip came alive in my mind.
This is an early Tyler Tales strip, from my sketchbook, that travels into Tyler’s imagination. (I obviously had no idea about correct formatting at this point.)
Influences: There are a couple of different influences for Tyler Tales, the biggest being Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. The other influences include: Peanuts by Charles Schulz, the old TV show, Leave it to Beaver, and the children’s book, the Brave Cowboy by Joan Anglund. I have grown to love the Peanuts as my family and I watch the holiday specials every year. I love the unique style of humor it has and I try to work some of that into Tyler Tales. I’ve grown up watching a lot of older, black and white TV shows, including: The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dike Show, and Leave it to Beaver. I really like all the crazy things Beaver and his friends do and say. Beaver and his brother using words like “hunk”, “stuff”, and”junk” with regularity, sounds funny to me, and I find myself using those words – as well as Tyler and Charlie. The Brave Cowboy is a short children’s book my Mom read to me when I was young. It is about a little boy and his imagination, using everyday things to play cowboys. That also played into the original idea of going into Tyler’s imagination, and especially his alter ego “Bull’s Eye Pete”.
Characters:
Tyler- Tyler is in a way a self portrait, in appearance and ideas. Many of the outrageous things that Tyler says are exaggerations of thoughts I have had at some point in my life but never had the guts to say out loud. His name comes from nowhere in particular, it just starts with the same letter as Tales.
Charlie- When Charlie was just a formless idea, I saw a picture of John Denver, and instantly I knew Charlie needed to look like him, with the glasses and the blonde, bowl haircut, it was perfect. Charlie’s character is a mix of Hobbes and Linus, and is the loyal friend of Tyler. If Tyler and Charlie were one person, Charlie would be the conscience, so to speak. As you may have guessed, Charlie is named after “Good Ol’ Charlie Brown”, as an ode to the Peanuts.
I hope you like reading Tyler Tales as much as I like writing it. Thank You.
– Boone
Contact at: tylertalescomics@gmail.com
Tyler Tales 