Welp, to begin with, I'm very green at this whole comicking thing… cut me some slack, okay? This is very much a learning experience, which was the reason I started it in the first place. If the art looks a little wonky or the pacing is off then you'll have to forgive me. I'm still trying to find my comicking legs.

The roots of ORAR lie in summer 2003. I was having a rotten summer and I was stuck inside the house for my entire summer vacation. To keep my sanity, I found all kinds of new hobbies. I spent a lot of time reading, drawing, and perusing webcomics online. I used to read comics all the time as a kid but it wasn't until I discovered this whole comicking world online that I started getting back into them. At this time, I had just decided to go into Illustration but after years of slacking off artistically I found that my skills weren't as advanced as I'd hoped. Long story short, I put two and two together and said, hey, why don't I write my own comic? I didn't plan on putting it online at first… the main idea was to entertain myself and improve my drawing skills simultaneously. I didn't start drawing the actual comic, however, until May 2004. All that time before was spent on preparation.

The first crude plot I came up with involved a gal named Jacqueline and she was loosely based on a character from a story I started writing in 2001 and couldn't finish. The first comic idea sucked serious ass. I came to my senses and decided to take the plot in a different direction. But I liked the main character so I kept her. I wrote down a list of subjects that interest me, a list of plot elements/themes I love, and character traits I wanted to include. Pickpockets have always fascinated me so I went with that. I kept coming up with all these story ideas all summer, autumn, and winter and in January 2004, I sat down and hammered out a detailed outline of the plot so I could work out all the kinks. After all, I didn't finish that aforementioned story because I ran into irreparable plot problems that I couldn’t remedy because I hadn't planned ahead. If I was going to do this comic thing, I was going to do it right, dammit, and I was going to finish it too.

While I let the plot stew in my head for months, I worked really hard on character design. My area of expertise, art-wise, has always been rendering images realistically… not stylistically. And I never drew people before this point either. The whole cartooning thing was entirely new to me. I had something really specific in mind for Jack… but it was more a case of "I'll know it when I see it". After a month of failed designs I finally hit upon a design I liked. Then I started chipping away at all the other characters. I took a look at that list of character traits and I divvied them up between the characters appropriately. Once I had my characters in mind it made it easier for me to flesh out the plot since I wanted it to be character driven.

I tried my best to beef up my art skills until I decided in May 2004 that I was far enough along to actually start the comic. ORAR debuted on DeviantArt on May 26, 2004.