Soup - The Comic Strip is a comic about Erlak, the god of soup on a fantasy world.

I first started this comic way back in August 2000, but unfortunately I didn't keep it up for long; I had trouble making time for the comic and it fell victim to increasingly long hiatuses before finally stopping updates altogether. I always intended to come back to it someday, though, and that day has finally come. It's possible I would have just abandoned it for good, were it not for the fact that I had already planned much of the story. I know how the strip is going to end—though I don't know exactly when it's going to end—and I know the ultimate fates of the main characters. And I figured if I had this story worked out, well, I ought to go ahead and get around to telling it.

For the most part, I'm not changing the old strips, as tempting as it is to redraw some of the ugly art; I'm uploading them just as they were, with one significant exception—the lettering. I created my own fonts for the strip (why? I don't know), but my original fonts were far too thin, badly kerned, and hard to read. I've since updated the fonts; they're still far from perfect, and I may continue to tweak them a bit as I go, but I think they're a lot more legible than they originally were. (There are a few strips where I did make minor alterations or additions besides the fonts, but I'll explain those in the commentary below the applicable strips.) Anyway, the art in the early strips is pretty rough, but I think it does get better as it goes; my art has improved over time—although not as much as I wish it had, or as it would have if I'd spent more time drawing. The old strips will run out next June, but by then I plan to have drawn enough new strips to keep up a decent backlog, and I'll keep going with new strips from there.

When I first started Soup, I hewed close to the format of newspaper comics: small, black-and-white daily strips, and larger color strips on Sunday. There was no good reason for this, except that I guess that's the comic format I was used to—I certainly had no illusions that Soup would ever appear in the newspapers, nor any intention of trying to get it there, but I guess thanks to newspaper comics that's what I thought of as a comic strip. (I wasn't entirely alone in this; some of the first webcomics I read also followed the newspaper comic format.) Were I starting a new webcomic today, I almost certainly wouldn't use this newspaper comic format, but I guess since I've started Soup in that format I'll go ahead and stick to it, even if nowadays for webcomics the newspaper comic format is a bit archaic.

Anyway, I do have plans for this comic, and this time I do intend to keep it up to the end. I hope it brings some enjoyment to someone.

Oh, by the way, if you want to see more of my work, you can go to my website, alunclewe.com, although that page is very bare-bones and out of date at the moment and needs a lot of work. I'm also @alunclewe on both Tumblr and Instagram. You can contact me at аlunсlewe@gmаіl.com. (You'll have to type the email address in, not just copy and paste it, because the email address given here uses some lookalike characters to prevent it being scraped by spammers.)