About...Bastich

The "Creator"	About Bastich... (...More than you could possibly want to know...)	The Unholy "Creation"

About the Artist...

Joshua Adam Hart is a 6'8" tall self-professed "King Of All Nerds." He is currently a grad student at California State University, Chico,i pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science through the College of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology. He once worked for the University at the ECT helpdesk, explaining to users that nobody could do anything about the computer systems being down, thus saving the tech staff tremendous amounts of time, which they could spend being unable to do anything about all kinds of additional problems. It was in the Helpdesk office, under extreme conditions of boredom that The Bastich was born.

Josh has since escaped the Helpdesk (well, it sort of escaped him, really) andhas since been working from his bedroom as an intern for Hewlett Packard,making that heinous 350-mile telecommute from Chico to Palo Alto five days aweek.

For more info on the artist, check out his actual homepage.

About the Characters...

The Bastich was orignally intended to be a highly stylized self-portrait, but he quickly gained a look and personality of his own, developing a devilishly barbed hairstyle, and about three dozen nerdly obsessions the artist never even knew existed. The name, of course, was lifted gratuitously from DC's Lobo comic books, though the term has been known to pop up in other places as well, such as in the film Johnny Dangerously.

Joined by a score of supporting characters, including the almost-sane Faith and the BeYoNd-WiReD Hacker-Lad, Bastich makes his way through the dunes and trenches of Nerd Hell. This is not merely a comic strip. It is a documentary of our troubled geek youth.

For a while, Bastich went off on a Summer Internship to work for "Mothership Incorporated" along with two of his friends, "Mtn. Dewd" and "Bapper." MD&B eventually graduated to their own comic strip, which is written by their real-life counterparts and drawn by Joshua Hart. These strips have been integrated with the main Bastich archive.

The humor of the strip ranges through all of the artist's interests, including computer programming, Star Trek, comic books, cheesy television, and the inevitability of Hostile Alien Invasion. Ahh, it is the stuff of which laughter itself is made.

For more dirt on the Bastich Characters, check out the character bios. Or, better still, read the entire strip archive to see them all in action!

The Orion...

In addition to these web pages, The Bastich also once appeared in CSU Chico's campus newspaper, The Orion every Wednesday (At least, during the Spring and Fall Semesters). Most of the strips on this site were concurrently published in the Orion, but quite a few "bonus" strips exist as well. It is left as a reader exercise to determine which of these catagories each strip falls into.

The Process...
For those of the curious variety, here are the tools used in creating this fine work of art:

Bastich Labs

Hardware

200MHz Pentium with 48MB RAM and 2GB HD
Microtek ScanMaker E6
Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 500C

Software

Corel Draw! 8
Adobe Photoshop 4.0
VIM 4.6

ArtWare

Pentel "Quicker Clicker" Mechanical Pencil & 0.5mm H or Non-Photo Blue Lead
Staedtler "Pigment Liner" Felt Pens (01, 03, 05 and 07)
Pentel Fine Point Correction Pen (White-out on a stick!)
Oh... and whatever paper happens to come out of my printer!

In a nutshell, each Bastich strip starts out as a layout in Corel Draw! (an excellent vector-based drawing program from Corel Corporation), which contains the panel arrangement and most of the dialogue leading up to the "punch-line." The layout is then printed using my DeskJet, and the art is drawn over it using old-fashioned techniques. Usually, I sketch the strip in with a mechanicial pencil and finish it off with felt pens. Sometimes I use non-photo blue "lead" and then go over it with normal lead. After the strip is done, I scan it back in and touch it up in Photoshop, making various editorial changes as I go along and trying to keep the final product relatively small in file size. Finally, the strip is uploaded to my campus account and chmod'd for all to see...
That, basically, is the process!

Bastich Labs
Hardware	200MHz Pentium with 48MB RAM and 2GB HD Microtek ScanMaker E6 Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 500C
Software	Corel Draw! 8 Adobe Photoshop 4.0 VIM 4.6
ArtWare	Pentel "Quicker Clicker" Mechanical Pencil & 0.5mm H or Non-Photo Blue Lead Staedtler "Pigment Liner" Felt Pens (01, 03, 05 and 07) Pentel Fine Point Correction Pen (White-out on a stick!) Oh... and whatever paper happens to come out of my printer!

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About Bastich...