About Bohemian Drive

For publishing purposes, BohemianDrive is an imprint of Adam C. Reed Studios. That’s me, Adam. But this website is a lot older than the imprint, and I don’t call myself Adam when I’m drawing cartoons.

In 2003, my brother Alec and I started a webcomic. As I recall, Alec suggested doing it as a piece for his web-design portfolio. I had an idea left over from a book-making course I had taken in college, so we made Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life. I wrote and illustrated the comic, and Alec created the tools to post it on the web. Back then, online content creators were still mostly hobbyists, and a thoughtfully produced comic stood a good chance of getting noticed. We had some success early on. Soon we were getting enough attention that my rather common given name was causing confusion, so I decided to adopt a pen-name, Kit Roebuck, and I’ve done all my cartooning under that name ever since.

Nine Planets went on, with bursts of episodes appearing at seemingly random intervals, until its ninety-ninth episode released in August 2011. It lasted, by the way, through the reclassification of Pluto as a dwarf-planet in 2006, an event which transformed the title of the series from twee-clever to twee-ignorant overnight. These days, I just refer to it as NPWIL when I can get away with it. You can read all of NPWIL here. And if you want to read it in print, it’s available in a two-volume collection from Amazon here.

A year later in August 2012, Alec and I started a new website and a new comic. This comic, Opplopolis, has a more traditional format, resembling a serialized comic magazine complete with front and back covers for each twenty-four page chapter and a classic four-color-process color scheme. In addition to the free, online version, we distributed high-quality PDFs via Gumroad and Amazon Kindle. After the first 10 chapters we released a partial print collection (which is no longer available.)

Opplopolis never really caught on in the same way NPWIL did, and after a few hiatus I decided to end it after the fifteenth chapter of a planned twenty in 2016. I never let go of it completely, however, and in 2022 circumstances aligned such that I was able to pick it back up again. I managed to complete it over the course of 60 weeks, and after a successful Kickstarter campaign, we were able to release a print edition of the complete comic in 2023. You can purchase the full Opplopolis collection here, or you can read the entire online version of here.

During the big Opplopols hiatus, I decided to focus on oil painting, which I had always been working on in the background anyway, just not as Kit Roebuck. You can see the results of that work in my portfolio here. Now that the Opplopolis book is out, I hope to get back to some painting, but I won’t make the mistake again of abandoning my cartooning. Surely some balance can be struck, right?

—Kit Roebuck