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About U-Boy!

U-Boy! was created in my second year of university.  It was done literally because after looking at the campus newspaper's comics and I decided could do a better comic.  This isn't to say that I have some massive ego, but rather that the comics were of less than stellar quality.  After going through a few ideas, I decided to do one about a guy named Usher, going to university and meeting a bunch of unusual characters.  I did it for about five years in the Manitoban, the campus newspaper of the University of Manitoba.  Through it, I got my share of cheers and jeers, from both readers and myself, but it was always fun.

I decided to stop doing the comic after five years and graduate the characters.  There were a few reasons behind this.  One was that I felt the university setting was exhausted.  Also, the comic was running in the Manitoban after five years, and I felt it was time to move on and let other people's work get printed.  It helped that near the end of the run that the Manitoban started getting some new and very talented cartoonists.

After the comic ended I always thought about returning to the characters.  I kind of missed them, and I would think of ideas for comics now and then.   Once again, several ideas were considered until I decided that Usher, the lead character, would go off to an office job in another city, away from his friends and surrounded by another group of unusual characters.

For those of you wondering, the fate of Usher's friends will be revealed.  Here's a hint: none of them are dead.

About the RSS feed

If you're not familiar with RSS, then I'm going to turn it over to Heather Green from Businessweek, who wrote an excellent explanation of RSS.  She exaplins:

If you're a news junkie, an online auction lover, or someone who wants to know when the latest songs, DVDs, and books are released, here's a technology that's perfect for you. Called Really Simple Syndication (RSS), it lets you pull together a list of Web sites you want to follow. So instead of surfing through The New York Times site for news, going to eBay (EBAY ) to track a particular auction, or checking with Apple's (AAPL ) iTunes to see when a new recording is available, you can get access to all the information through one Web page or download to your computer. The information you get, called a feed, comes to you through a piece of software called a newsreader."

So now you can use many different newsreaders out there, some of them you have to download and install on your computer like RSSReader or even an email program like Mozilla Thunderbird.  A slightly easier solution would be one of the many online newsreaders such as Google Reader, My Yahoo, Bloglines and many others.  I've provided add buttons to each of the most popular online newsreaders so that you can add the feed for the comic with one click.