page_title: Scary Go Round
section_title: Stylistic changes
hierarchical_section_title: Scary Go Round / Style and influences / Stylistic changes
caption_attribution_description: English: Sample of the comic Scary Go Round downloaded from http://www.scarygoround.com/strips/20060922.png, copyright and attribution: John Allison. This sample shows six coloured rectangular panels drawn in Ligne claire style and with standard speech balloons. Reading left to right and top to bottom, panels one and five show coloured onomatopoeic text without balloons depicting sound effects, while panel four depicts the mentioned object inside a separate jagged balloon.
context_page_description: Scary Go Round was a 2002 webcomic set in the fictional West Yorkshire town of Tackleford, England, and written by John Allison. Scary Go Round was named one of the best webcomics of 2004 by The Webcomics Examiner. The Sunday Times describes it as "postmodern Brit horror" that is "subtle and stylishly drawn, with a bold cartoon edge". The Morning Star has called it "brilliant, bonkers" and "the best British strip that I've yet found". Scary Go Round won the Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards in 2003 for Outstanding Original Digital Art, in 2005 and in 2007 for Outstanding Comic.
  Scary Go Round started on 4 June 2002 as part of Modern Tales, roughly following on from Allison's previous comic, Bobbins. It featured bizarre happenings, a "quirky cast", strange creatures, parallel universes, zombies, time travel, reincarnation, "and random spots of tea". Initially set as the lives of the barmaids Tessa and Rachel, it soon came to focus on another set of characters entirely. Amy Chilton, one of the core characters to succeed Tessa and Rachel, successfully made the transition from the author's 17-year-old scribblings, through the Bobbins era, and into Scary Go Round.
context_section_description: From its inception in 2002 until August 2005, Scary Go Round was drawn in Adobe Illustrator. During that period Allison changed the style at least twice. Some readers were upset when Allison killed off a major character, and he admitted that this was a mistake and that he had since moved towards "ambient excitement" rather than shock. Notable shifts in art style during this period include:
  24 November 2003: Characters' faces are outlined in a slightly darker flesh tone.
  4 January 2004: Characters' heads are disproportionately large for their bodies.
  25 January 2004: After three weeks, the "big heads" era ends.
  11 April 2005: Allison briefly switches to hand-drawn art, before replacing the hand-drawn strips with copies rendered in Illustrator.  Characters are given new, distinctive faces: for example, Shelley's face becomes more square, Ryan develops large round eyes, and The Boy is given a straighter nose.
  On 28 August 2005, Allison switched to hand-drawn art.  This period lasted until the return of Illustrator on 17 November 2005.  The characters' Illustrator-drawn faces were quite different from the August versions, having become harder-edged and less attractive due a professed lack of time.
  Hand-drawn art returned permanently on 17 April 2006. Notable shifts in art style during the contemporary hand-drawn period include:
  5 November 2007: Allison switches to a larger page size, making the inks much thinner in the final scans.  Female characters are given lips.
  3 December 2007: After four weeks, the "lips" era ends.
  1 January 2008: Allison begins drawing the strip using art software Manga Studio.
caption: A page of September 2006.
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