Intro
Mood:  lyrical
Now Playing: the sound of silence
Topic: Intro

The strange practice of rewriting, or rather relettering, comics has many names. Remixing, photochopping, strip slaying, you name it. For some reason lost in obscurity (and a recent server crash it shows no sign of recovering from) the people at The Nice (well, the Freefall fans anyway) call(ed) it filking. The best explanation (in fact the only one) that's been offered is that remixing a comic is like writing a filksong to an old tune.

I have actually been filking for ages long before I knew what it was called or that others were doing it.  Many comics met a cruel fate in my hands before I went digital. So when I discovered what the Nice gang were up to, I took to it like a duck to orange sauce.

In the beginning I was just filking normally along with the rest of them, but one day I noticed one of the other forums had a thread called Caption this or something. Turned out Tiffany Ross, another Nice artist, was having a little filking contest with one of her strips. The thread and the other entries have been lost to the inevitable, but my entry survived.

  

A funny thing about this was that I didn't know the characters at the time, so I avoided the most obvious jokes. But a bit more relevant was that Tiff had numbered the panels of the original strip. I removed the numbers from my version and made a comment to the effect that it could be fun to filk a strip manga style, right to left.

About a year later the idea resurfaced. I felt tired of plain old filking and figured I was ready for a bigger challenge. How about filking Freefall in chronological order? And to make it even harder, do each strip backwards? That night I flipped the first three strips and started playing with them. The next morning I presented the result in a new thread.

 

The klif was born.