I am teh spikey, and I am the writer/creator of this here comic.

Im 27 years old and I live in Sydney, Australia, with my partner Dana, and my cat Pixel. Yes, I am a lesbian, and I own a cat. Terribly stereotypical of me, I know, but I don’t care. I loves my kitty.

I’m relatively new to the world of comics. I grew up in Wollongong, NSW, which is a relatively small town with no comics shops. They aren’t as prolific here in Australia, and while I think I would have enjoyed reading print comics, the best I would have been likely to get is the occational Garfield book.

However I’ve been reading webcomics for about as long as I’ve been connected. A friend of mine put me on to Sluggy Freelance (which I no longer read, but I enjoyed at the time) and my list of comics I regularly read has grown and changed over the years. There are some really fantastic comics out there with incredible stories to them, and it doesn’t matter how small a town you live in, or what country, you can still enjoy them just as easily as anyone else. But anyway, you likely know this already…

Orange Hat Girl, and Me…

Orange Hat Girl is a concept thats existed in my mind and as a running joke between my circle of friends for a couple of years now. It all started from this hideous orange terry towelling bucket hat that I’d bought during the Big Day Out (a big music festival that happens every year in the summer) to keep the sun off my face. When I would wear it later, one particular friend of mine (who is, incidently, Nateour Narrator in the comic) would say “ORANGE HAT GIRL!” in this voice rather reminicent of the old Batman TV series.

The idea grew over many weekends of drinks at the huge 10 bedroom house we lived in, a converted ex-rehab centre. Each character that appears in the comic was started from one of my friends gaining their superhero/villain Three Letter Acronym… The youngest in the group got his hands on a rainbow beanie, so Rainbow Beanie Boy was born. A few months later, I won a promotional Jack Daniels trucker hat at the pub we used to haunt, so Orange Hat Girl’s evil twin, Trucker Hat Girl was born. There are many more, that came before and after, but to mention them now would bring spoilers. I’ll save the rest of the details for a Cast Page, which will come soon.

Comic Origins

Converting these ideas and characters into a comic took a while to implement. None of us had any real particular artistic flair (outside of Music anyway) nor was anyone really up to putting the work into it but me. It wasn’t until I started reading Flintlocke — a relatively short lived Gamespy machinimation comic set in World of Warcraft — that I had the idea to use The Sims 2. I made a test comic, which took me about 8 hours for a 2 panel gag, as I had waited for the Sims to get the right expressions in conversation or other means. I decided that it was going to be too much time and effort, and so the comic almost finished before it began.

It was another of my more tech-savvy friends that explained the concept of Machinimation to me. Instead of waiting for the sims to get the right expression, I could command the expression from them when and where I wanted them. To do this, most games require heavy coding and hacking to give you that kind of control, requiring far more knowledge and skill that I could ever hope to have. But after some searching I found all kinds of tools and funky downloadable content specifically designed for machinimating The Sims 2, as the “video capture” function built into the game itself made Machinima videos easier than ever. It’s just now a simple matter of taking a screenshot, instead of a video capture.

After that, as they say, the rest is history. The largest hurdle I have to deal with now is keeping the site up and running, and overcoming my inherant laziness and lack of motivation in order to create new comics. The whole thing has become far more successful that I hoped… I just wanted to entertain my friends by putting all our humorous ideas together into a fun story. That others enjoy it too is more than I ever hoped for.