What is El Kiablo?

El Kiablo is a webcomic that started on July 4th, 2005. It was daily for the first two or three years, its a little less so now. My goal was always to provide the most variety in terms of content that I could, so I’ve done a lot of one-off comics about whatever: religion, advertising mascots, monsters, pop culture… But I’ve also done serial comics, too. Book one (aka the first month) of the serial comic starts here.  Book two of the serial comic starts here.

In 2009, I started making short animations, with help from a few people, mostly Pablo, Renzo and Forney. The First animation is here, and it is - as of the date of this writing - probably the best. You can also see most of the animations on Youtube by clicking here. In the long term, this site is probably going to be more about animation than cartoons, but we’ll see.

Who or what is El Kiablo?

This site’s namesake is the devil’s younger, crappier brother. El Kiablo is depressed a lot because he fails at the things most demons excel at: he can’t torture, lie, or steal competently. The serial comic I did was about El Kiablo and his two fake superhero henchmen Angry Panda and Hungry Ghost, but I stopped doing it because the art requirements of a serial comic are a lot more draining than the art requirements of a one-off cartoon, and less rewarding than animation work.

Mister, you sure got a lotta cartoons. You gonna eat all these cartoons?

I don’t recommend starting from the beginning. The early cartoons look kind of bad because I didn’t know what I was doing, but through constant practice, I’ve been getting better at the art and the pacing. The art, in particular, has improved exponentially.

I’m leaving the early cartoons up for a few reasons. One it’s more honest. Two, I knew when I was doing them that I’d look back at them and think that they were sort of crappy, so I made my peace with looking like an idiot a long time ago. Three, I think it’s interesting to see the evolution. But most importantly, flaws and all, a lot of them have endearing qualities; they may not be all the way there, but they have something nice.

Your cartoons are pretty inexplicable / strange / vulgar / obsessed with monsters.

For the record, I do have strict (but arbitrary) taste filters. I try to only reference things that I expect a large audience would know, and I try to use the further reading link to help explain references that might seem obscure to readers. As far as the strangeness goes, that’s just the type of humor I like: surreal, ridiculous, fantastic. I try to keep the absolutely absurd to a minimum, but if I really like it, I will run it, and then I’ll try to balance it by running another more vanilla cartoon afterwards.

As far as vulgar goes, I have very strong limits of what I’ll draw, and there are limits to what I’ll say. Mostly, the cartoons don’t use foul language (although I have no problem with dropping an f-bomb if I have to), and for the most part, I don’t think they are very offensive. However, I think it helps the site’s variety to run the occasional naughty cartoon, and my definition of vulgar is NOT the average person’s.

Overall, I’d say that while what I do might be strange, it’s more or less par for the internet.

I want to spread the word about El Kiablo. Is that a good idea?

In order to encourage people to spread El Kiablo, I’ll make you a deal: if you plug El Kiablo in your blog and send me a link, or if you email a link to at least five people and cc me, then I’ll draw you into a cartoon. Obviously, you’ll have to send me a picture before I draw the cartoon, unless I already know you, but it’s that simple - pimp my site and let me know about it, and you’ll be punching bears into orbit / stomping on montana / trying to kill your gaurdian angel to steal his molars.

If you want to appear in an animation - well, that’s a little more work. Go to Youtube, grab a video and imbed it in your blog and as a return favor, I’ll try to work your image into an animation. Because animation is more time consuming and has higher requirements, I can’t promise that your video will be done promptly, but I will make a good faith effort to get it done.

I need to get in touch with you. Do you have an email address?

You can email me at kiablokirk@gmail.com.