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Three Panel Soul is a webcomic made by Ian McConville and Matt Boyd, the creators of the now concluded Mac Hall. It is a comic about events in the creators' lives and in the news, with some gaming references thrown in. This makes it thematically very similar to Mac Hall, albeit with more of a mature focus.
Style In keeping with its namesake, each comic is set in a three panel format. Artistically, most of the strips are very different from Mac Hall. The predominant style is heavily stylized realistic drawings in black and white. However, a few strips have a visual style that is almost identical to Mac Hall, those to date both being set within MMORPGs (City of Villains and World of Warcraft, respectively). It is notable that at the time of this writing, there are few comics, so the style is hardly set. Commentary by Ian McConville implied that the old artistic style of Mac Hall required much time to implement, which is responsible for his adoption of the new style.
Three Panel Soul features far more artistic experimentation than Mac Hall, with styles changing radically from week to week. McConville has mentioned that he made a resolution upon starting Three Panel Soul that he would continue trying new things.
Origin A series of "secret" comic strips were created by Ian and Matt, the first of which was hidden behind a link in one of Matt's news posts on Mac Hall. All three secret comic were then organized into what appeared to be a site template (originally Three Panel Soul only had the three strips and text saying 'html by timmy age 3'). While the site still holds place-markers for things like the logo, icons, footer, and the title "Two isn't enough, four is one more than necessary", there is now a navigation system for the strips and the address bar bears the familiar Cthulhu icon present on Mac Hall. The new site also employs btphp, a content management system for web comics.
On January 28th, 2007 both Ian and Matt updated the Three Panel Soul main page with slightly more substantial rants than the previous test posts. Both posts ruminate over the definition of what the soul is, with Ian making observations of religion and philosophy, and Matt referencing forerunners of soul music.
Finally, on February fifth, 2007, Matt posted a welcome message to readers that had stumbled across the site before its "official" announcement: Welcome, all... ...who have stumbled across this site, one way or the other. It isn't quite "public" yet, and won't be until we have some comics in the archive we really like. Don't worry about showing to others if you feel like it, though. Soonest possible date for new comics is Monday, Feb. 12. I guess we also need some real icons.
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