A Few Words of Introduction 

The Crown Prince is an ongoing comic strip which chronicles the adventures and misadventures, the trials and tribulations, and the sleepless nights and stressful days of new parents.  In this case, the parents just happen to be royalty!  With the strip’s meticulous research, it makes perfect reading for anyone who has wondered how child-rearing actually happened in the Middle Ages.  As an added wrinkle, events in the comic move forward in time: watch the Crown Prince grow over time rather than remaining a perpetual infant, toddler or child.  Just because the children will grow, however, you should not expect the adult characters to change in any way whatsoever, except perhaps their clothing and even then in very rare circumstances. 

How the strip came to be

Way back in that crazy decade known as the 1990s, I wrote, drew and “published” twenty-seven issues of a mini-comic entitled Bubonix.  Between 1998 and 2005, these comics sat on my shelf, collecting dust.  In early 2005, Jim, a friend of mine from hockey, told me he had just heard that I used to draw comics and could he see some of them?  I said sure and offered to loan him some.  He replied: “What?  They’re not online?”

I had no idea what Jim was talking about: “Online comics”??.  I rushed home and began investigating this weird, wacky world of webcomics.  Even though I had been completely into drawing comics ten years earlier, I had no idea that online comics had come so far.  I learned that it was now perfectly feasible to reproduce comics online and there were actually people out there who were looking for comics to read online.  How could this be?  And then I remembered: most people have the internet at work now, whereas they didn’t ten years earlier.  With grim determination, I began scanning each and every one of the 500-plus pages of my Bubonix mini-comix in order to post them online.

At just about the same time, my wife and I had a baby.  I don’t need to tell you that our lives were forever changed with our son’s arrival.  Suddenly, days full of diapers, naps, laundry and assorted new activities began to reduce the amount of sleep we were getting.  And we all know that when we are sleep-deprived, everything becomes funny.  All the elements in our lives as new parents became fodder for jokes.  It was only a matter of time before this new source of comedic inspiration merged with my newfound knowledge of online comics.  Over the course of a few months, I toyed around with a number of baby-related jokes but had no real framework for them.  One day, I drew a quick caricature of myself and added a crown.  It was so simple!  I had found my premise.

Birth of. . .a Website?

Over the course of 2005, Jim was extremely helpful in setting up a website and getting started in the world of webcomics.  On September 1, 2005, the Bubonic Press website was launched, featuring the entire Bubonix mini-comix archive.  As well, the site boasted a new weekly comic strip: The Crown Prince.  Since that time, a new strip has miraculously appeared every Monday.

The website was redesigned and relaunched in January 2008, making use of the WordPress/ComicPress tools to allow new features such as an archive, blogging, search functions, RSS, etc.

J.G. Brin