This is a self portrait I drew for the back of the Lemon Inc. book. It’s a lot harder to draw myself than I would have thought it would be. The last time I did a finished self portrait was back in 2008, I think, and I’ve been meaning to do a better one for a while.

I had been mostly focused on the idea of entering the field of graphic novels and because I didn’t think of this as a graphic novel I pushed it to the back burner. Not many graphic novel publishers are particularly interested in comedy though and that is often my genre of choice. I have been aware of webcomics for quite some time though and read several on a daily basis. I was even aware that some people made a living off of their webcomics but I thought that it was a goal that was even more unrealistic than starting a newspaper comic.

About a year ago though I came to the realization that doing a webcomic would be a great way to hone my cartooning skills. Lemon Inc. was the first idea that came to mind. I designed the characters, came up with some storylines, and even designed a website but I never got around to actually getting web hosting or setting up my site until now. This actually turned out to be a blessing because it gave me time to learn about webcomics and prepare myself for my own.

During the past year I have been expanding the number of webcomics that I read and have discovered some truly great comics (although I have yet to read through many of the ones that I have discovered… the ones with big archives) and I have familiarized myself with the world of webcomics. Webcomics seem to have a different atmosphere than newspaper comics or graphic novels. I could create a comic in any genre about anything I wanted and it wouldn’t matter. It feels like I’ve found the venue I’ve been looking for to make comics.

I have realized that it truly is possible to turn this into a career and I hope that I can one day although I’m not focusing on making this into one at the moment. For now I feel that I simply need to make this comic for the joy of doing so. I hope you will enjoy reading Lemon Inc. I am very excited about it and I have some ideas that I feel, if I can pull them off, could be kinda epic.

I plan to update the comic on Tuesdays and update this blog at least once a week. Please feel free to tell me what you think of the comic so far and of the site design too.

Thanks for reading this!

-Tim Lai