ABOUT & F.A.Q.
IT HURTS!! is a comic about a silly boy riddled with depression and anxiety named Pasqualo and how he finds his first love, a mysterious yet super kind girl named Aurora. Pasqualo also has lots of friends, including his best friend Allison who’s a dirty little munchkin and Tubsy who’s a chilled out big fat dude. Over time, strange and crazy things start happening and before you know it, the whole world changes.
CREDITS:
- Gobolatula – Writing and art. I pick up my wacky wacom and kooky keyboard and give this thing my best shot! Please forgive me!
- Josef Schwem – Official editor. He tells me when my jokes aren’t funny enough and makes me rewrite them. This happens quite often. He also wrote the AWESOME good rap lyrics Pasqualo raps out during the talent show performance.
F.A.Q.
WARNING: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS!
Q. When does the comic update?
A. Now that IT HURTS is in its final arc and the updates are much longer than usual, the comic’s update schedule is a little weird. Basically I put them on the site when they’re done! Follow me on Twitter! I usually tweet updates about the comics’ progress.
Q. Will you tell me what’s going to happen?
A. No. Anything that I consider to be “spoilery” I won’t answer. I’m sorry for being so annoying! If it’s a fun, silly question like “Does Trisssh’s car have a name?” I might answer you in the comments section. Her car’s name is Ssstacy.
Q. What is Pasqualo’s favorite anime?
A. Sailor Moon (the oldschool version). When his mom took off, she left behind a big pile of anime VHS tapes that Pasqualo grew up on.
Q. Is [name of a character that died] coming back to life?
A. In comic 100, lots of characters died. Allison soonafter came back to “life” as a zombie (she was bitten by zombies). I appreciate all the love for all the characters that passed away, but I can’t say as part of my “no-spoiler” policy. I’m sorry. There’s always a chance that I’ll do “flashback” comics that feature characters that used to be alive.
Q. Are guest comics / fan comics part of the main story?
A. No, unless I mark the title with a “[CANON].” When it comes to fan artists drawing It Hurts comics, I don’t like giving many restrictions. Though, I don’t want to post stuff that’s too sexy (nudity, actual sex, etc) or too “blue” for my tastes (actual racism, actual homophobia, etc). But other than that I encourage artists to do what they want and have fun. From time to time, artists come up with their own interpretations of major plot stuff, and I find it fascinating and flattering seeing what other people would do with my story. Just because it isn’t canon doesn’t mean I don’t love and appreciate it 🙂 . The guest comics marked “[CANON]” are ones that were written by myself at the request of the artist.
Q. How much of this series did you / do you have planned?
A. I had the talent show event that happened at comic 100 planned from the very beginning. I also knew Pasqualo was a cyborg and Allison was going to be a zombie. Before I started actually drawing It Hurts, I took a lot of time off comic writing and during that time I daydreamed up the whole situation and bounced all my ideas off my friend / current editor Josef.
As for the events that happen after comic 100, the ideas are constantly changing and it’s very chaotic. I essentially threw out almost all of my post-apocalypse plans and came up with new ones several times already.
I know how IT HURTS ends and that hasn’t changed much, but who knows. I might come up with something better. 🙂
Q. What is the origin story of the name “Gobolatula?”
A. I started going by Gobolatula in 1999. My friend came up with the word “gobolatula” to describe his disgust with an Usher song. I thought it was a really funny made-up word so I immediately made it my AIM screen name and it sort of stuck with me since.
If you have any other questions that you think might be good to add here, please post them in the comments section!
Hey! I noticed your comics are mostly 980px wide, but the site scales them to 978px wide which makes them all blurry on my monitor. It would mean so much to me if you found a way to fix this.
That is strange. I wonder why that’s happening. Is there a way to post a screenshot of that?
I can confirm that the site layout slightly scales the image. I noticed the page DIV has a set size of 980px which would be correct, but nested divs often have some very tiny amount of margin which causes the image to be stretched from its native resolution and blur the text. You can see this for yourself by changing the CSS in ithurts/wp-content/plugins/comic-easel/css/comiceasel.css at this line:
#comic {
text-align: center;
display: table-cell;
vertical-align: top;
width: 100%;
}
to
#comic {
text-align: center;
display: table-cell;
vertical-align: top;
width: 980px;
}
This will force all comic panels to be 980px regardless of the padding or margins on their parent divs and makes the text much more readable. On google chrome you can preview this effect by right clicking on the comic itself and choosing “inspect element” and finding ” and modifying the CSS locally for your browser. Its a pretty big effect, so I recommend either changing that snippet or otherwise modifying comic easel’s settings if there are any that would fix this.
Damn dude thanks! I’ll have to remind myself to fix this when I get home from work
No problem amigo. I enjoy your comic, so its my pleasure to help make it look its best on our screens.
Dude holy crap. Yeah, everything looks a lot more crisp. I probably didn’t notice the blurriness due to my shitty eyesight. Thanks again and please let me know if it looks better to you.
That is substantially better. Anyone who doesn’t see the updated CSS needs to force a no-cache reload (ctrl+f5 in most browsers) or just clear their browser cache and cookies and let the site reload.
Unfortunately, when wordpress updates that plugin its probably going to overwrite the custom CSS you just added with the default so keep that in mind in the future.
your a cool dude
keep on trucking
best wishes from something awful
Gracias señor. I love me some goons.
Hey there guy, I used to read Erik the Juiceman all the time back in the PS2/Newgrounds days. Just a day or two ago I said to myself, “I wonder if that notebook paper dude is still making comics? A lot of those were pretty funny.” I googled ETJ and found It Hurts, and I read it all over the course of an evening. I really have to congratulate you on this series, it’s a very fun read and the dialogue is always great. The later parts of the story give me a Shonen Jump vibe, only with more hilarious asshattery and general dicking around.
Dude thanks a lot and thanks for looking me up. I really appreciate your kind words! 🙂
great comic. it really reminds me of how i interact with my best buds but really more how i interacted with them when we were 16, also i have no idea what the fuck you are doing. keep it up
Hey Gob how about you add WHEN THE COMIC UPDATES. Might be helpful to new readers.
Ah yes! Thank you.
Maybe you could spoiler the spoilery questions so people can read the FAQ without fear of spoilers.
I gotta figure out how to do that, yeah.
Why is the comic called “IT HURTS!!”? What’s the origin story of the name Gobolatula? What exactly IS a Juiceman, and how did Erik come to that position?
I answered the “Gobolatula” question! The other 2 I’ll answer later. 🙂
Kickass. That was a much easier mystery to solve than National Treasure.
Yo Gob, it may be of interest to you that your Randumb button is broken!
It gives you a random comic ONCE, then keeps giving you that same comic.
Good luck with that.
I think I might just end up removing it. I’m honestly not sure why it isn’t working… :/
Spoke to my computing teacher, and he said that the problem may be that you’re using an IF statement instead of a WHILE statement.
Problem with this is that it’d check whether you want a random comic once, but only once.
He didn’t get a chance to look at the code, and I only really know python, so this is really just speculation.
He said you’d want to use a while statement, then set the value of buttonpress to false. (Assuming clicking it makes it true)
So the pseudocode would look like this:
while ButtonPress==True:
Give Random Comic
ButtonPress=False
Hope this helps!
Whoa thank you sir! I’ll look into it. I’m not even sure what the code looks like tbh; I just use whatever came with WordPress.
Do you draw the art for your panels on paper, scan them in and then go over them in flash, or do you start each drawing directly in Flash?
I draw them directly in Flash. 🙂
Dude, I just want to say that you’ve touched me in places(ha, that’s what she said) that only the combined forces of J. Michael Straczynski and Esad Ribic(they did silver surfer requiem, it made me cry a lot. more than I’d like to admit). Anyways I fuckin love you, have a good life.
I love you too <3
Where did the initial inspiration for It Hurts!! come from? What made you want to start doing comics in the first place?
I first came up with the story of IT HURTS through its prototype “GOD DAMMIT.” God Dammit was the story of a boy named Pasqualo who set out on a quest to kill God because his pet goldfish died. I wasn’t really satisfied with God Dammit so I scrapped it and decided to give the story another go, since I liked the characters so much. I also retooled the whole story with the help of my buddy Josef.
The original “God Dammit” idea was just something I came up with that was an expression of my frustration, really. I just wanted to make something weird and stupid. 🙂
What about what got you doing comics in the first place? Btw /co/ is full of plebs. While Trisssh is great, Aurora is clearly best girl.
When I was about 9 years old (back in 1992-3ish), I was crazy about X-Men and Spiderman. Me and my silly friends all drew our own terrible comics. I drew comics on and off for years but then I really REALLY started getting back into it around 2001 when I started drawing Erik the Juiceman. It was a way to escape what I felt was a dull everyday life. I got to make a world full of craziness and weirdness. I think that’s what excites me most: making weird, crazy, and cute shit.
Thank you for the answers. Keep up the good work.
Are you going to make any new comics after It Hurts is over? Like I really don’t want that feeling of your favorite TV show ending and you’ve got nothing else to watch.
Yes! My plan is to make more comics as well as other neat stuff.
Awesome!!
I love you