For starters, it'll be easier to make sets. Were I to do it with 3D rendering, I'd undoubtedly get bogged down with my tendency to hyperdetail every model. I'd spend so much time building the models — beveling the edges so they don't have the knife-sharp look of bad 3D, painting realistic textures, revising endlessly so they looked "perfect" — and lighting the sets (itself an exacting art) that I'd never get it off the ground. And every shot would need a background.

But with toon rendering, the textures can be simple, the edges can be hard (in fact, it's better if they are, so the toon renderer will draw lines), and if I just need a throwaway scene, I could just draw it in The GIMP or Flash and drop it in behind the models.

In addition, I can take shortcuts on the characters. A toon face doesn't need to have all the secondary motion that a more realistic face has, and the emotions can be exaggerated without looking wrong. If the splines aren't perfectly even, it's much less obvious in toon renderin. And again, the textures can be simpler. One of Karen's objections to the 3D version of one of my models is that her hair looks like plastic. In toon rendering, it looks fine.

There's also the question of touching up. If there's a problem — an slbow blows through a sleeve, for example — it's a lot easier to fix it in The GIMP if everything's got solid colors, than if I have to (in essence) alter a photograph.

Finally, there's the issue of storage space; a toon can often be compressed smaller than a realistically-rendered picture. And I plan on storing each comic in a pretty large size, so that (thanks to the magic of JavaScript and PHP) it can be resampled on the fly to fit the viewer's screen, so people running at high resolutions don't have to squint, and people running at lower resolutions don't have to scroll left and right to read the whole thing.

Now, the next dilemma: typical three- or four-panel strips with a gag at the end of each one, or a more comic-book-shaped "page" each day which advances the story but doesn't necessarily have a punchline? The former would be less work, but I'm not certain enough of my writing skills to think I could pull off the regular gags while still keeping a narrative flow. The latter would allow for more artistic expression and variety, and relieve the pressure of having to be consistently funny, but it would take more time to plan and execute each page.

On the one hand, I wish I could just draw it, because it would take much less preparation (in the form of building and rigging characters, props and sets). On the other hand, my drawing skills suck, and doing it in 3D will take care of the coloring as well.

But I am going to do this thing. I've wanted to for years, and I'm not about to let it be just another project I had high hopes for but never even started. I've got too many of those projects haunting me.