HISTORY:

Artist and author Kevin Tracy began using MSPaint in 1991 when he was a mere 7 years old. Over the next years, his artistic skills would develop into an incredible talent that has left many speechless. By 2001, he was creating animated sequences using MSPaint drawings and a variety of animation programs. In 2002, determined to fight in the Global War on Terrorism, Tracy enlisted in the US Air Force as an intelligence analyst, where he served the majority of his enlistment at Beale AFB, CA.

At Beale AFB, his fellow airmen were equally impressed by Tracy’s artistic talents. While he was creating complex 3D art using programs like 3D Studio, it was his art work while passing time in the office and before missions that garnered the most attention. In the hours of waiting, Tracy often created single frame comics in MSPaint of the misadventures of the U-2 and GLOBAL HAWK spy planes, personifying the aircraft and excessively exaggerating their capabilities and faults. By 2004, Tracy’s comics had become a staple of his unit’s culture and characters were being added, including Mission Operations Commanders (MOC), pilots, and imagery analysts determined to stop at nothing to not have to work. Late that year, a Major suggested creating a comic for the public.

For a while, Tracy experimented with a plot concerning two incompetent reserve police officers in a small town’s police force, but the first comics were not well received by Tracy’s friends in the law enforcement community. Tracy was also unhappy with the final visual product of these hand drawn comics.

Next, he explored the idea of a Dick Tracy parody featuring a brilliant but caffeine-addicted female detective in the 1930s surrounded by a wide variety of strange and unusual characters in a universe created by some friends from high school years earlier. Although he wrote a tremendous amount of material for this comic, including four story arcs, he ultimately decided against pursuing this, as well. However, the idea does remain on the backburner and may be revisited several years from now.

Looking through the work he did for his political parody website, KTracy.com, Tracy realized he had a lot of fun telling stories of his encounters with California progressives and, on the first Monday of 2005, Kevin published an experimental comic made in MSPaint featuring himself and members of his staff. It would be the first MSPaint Comic. And almost every week from then until mid-2007, a new MSPaint Comic appeared.

In 2007, however, now out of the Air Force, Tracy’s political activities began to take an increasing amount of his time. After getting hosed by event organizers at a Wizard World Convention and dealing with the death of his grandfather, Tracy decided to stop publishing weekly comics. He kept thinking about them, though. In particular, Tracy began to consider ways to make the his comic a more cohesive story and what things he wished he could have written into the story when he was still in the Air Force and not allowed to include that information in the comic. Over the next three years, Kevin began to piece together that more cohesive story until it was a refined work of literature, shrouded in abstract, hidden meaning and using every literary tool known to him.

In 2010, work on The MSPaint Comic started in Tracy’s spare time.

ABOUT THE COMIC:

The MSPaint Comic is the abstract autobiography of author and artist Kevin Tracy from 2004 until 2008. While there is a very entertaining story at the surface of this enormous work, there is a tremendous amount of hidden meaning in the pages. The MSPaint Comic deals with matters of politics, war, pop-culture, the evils of drug addiction, modern Christianity, and much more. Every time you read these works, you are likely to uncover some new, strategically placed gem.

The decision to use the title “The MSPaint Comic” is a tribute to the Iceberg Theory or Theory of Omission attributed to the writing style of Ernest Hemingway, who very often understated what was being presented. The term Iceberg Theory refers to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the mass of an iceberg is unseen below the sea. Similarly, The MSPaint Comic is more than just a collection of some carelessly thrown together pixels. Furthermore, the vast majority of the significance of the MSPaint Comic’s story cannot be seen on the surface. It implores you to look below the surface to find the hidden meanings.