Welcome to Karmic Debt Comics, all the comics on this site were created by Keith C. Smith. Starting back in the early days of Webcomics (circa 1998) Keith started publishing his comics to the web. They weren’t much to speak of back then, some comics drawn in MS Paint with a mouse, but with the addition of a scanner Keith started scanning his Faneuil Road comic, that he initially had intended to print as a mini comic, but the web beckoned for all those reason’s that Scott McCloud listed in “Reinventing Comics”. In issue # 4 of Faneuil Road Keith toyed with the idea of the Infinite Canvas, was he ahead of his time at that point? Probably not but up till that point he had never seen such a thing done and he was basing the idea more on the idea of a pin up type page then any great idea of what what comics were capable of. Faneuil Road ended with issue seven mostly due to time constraints and the creator had lost interest in drawing characters that at that point he had been drawing for 5 years.

Next came two small single shot comics, the first being Tibetan Wisdom Tales based on a short story in a book by Lama Surya Das. The other was Reflections another of the odd tales that Keith is likely to tell about looking for the answers inside. Both of these are comics that would fall into the spirtual catagory, once again following Scott McCloud with the idea that comics don’t always need guys in tights.

Next Keith came up with the crazy idea of drawing a comic a week for a year. Which turned out to be 52 Weeks, it had it’s ups and downs. But Keith stuck it out and 1 year later he had 52 comics behind him. 52 Weeks did have the dubious distinction of introducing the “Secret Girlfriend” idea, which has certainly come in to play in later series.

Right around this time Keith started the comic of …I wanted to rock! with Brent Collins it was a strange idea that quickly became stranger. Comic creators are an odd bunch given free reign with an idea they will take it places one can not fathom at the start of the process.

During this time he created Faire Adventures based his adventures at the Connecticut Renassaince Faire. This was Keith’s best received comic, it is arguably the comic that brought Keith the fame which he enjoys today. It was so well received the there was even demand for a print version of the comic. He also created a four page comic called Untitled (War) which was another comic with a moral. This one about communication.

After finishing 52 weeks Keith had some time on his hands that was not filled so he created The Webcartoonist to talk about what he thought webcomics could be. He soon discovered that this topic had been covered by others and with much more care and thoughtfulness.

Fortunately right at this time Keith discovered a new comic collective (Transplant Comics) and he had just begun a comic called Diner which began life as a single panel social commentary comic but slowly morphed into a four panel story driven comic. During this change over deadlines were missed, mostly due to preparing Faire Adventures for the printer but also because Keith is a Rennie ( If you know any Rennies you realize that life does revolve around faire ) and the fall is a very busy time for Rennies. Somewhere around January 1st 2006 Keith was informed that Diner no longer had a home on Transplant.

Never one to be kept down Keith created the semi-autobigraphical comic L.O.S.T. which he decided to publish weekly. The comic is semi-autobiographical which means that some of the things in it never happened, others are taken direct from his life while still others are true depending on your point of view. Recently Keith has been experimenting with a new triptych style, which is basically a single panel divided into three panels to create a sense of time passing for the reader that would not necessarily work with a single panel. Plus it looks pretty cool.

So there we have a brief history of the work of Keith C. Smith