Grace and Caffeine by Matthew Colclough: the online archive
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Welcome to the Grace and Caffeine archive!
***NEW!*** All your questions answered: The Grace and Caffeine FAQ Page is now online!
I have been producing the comic strip Grace and Caffeine for the weekly bulletin at Yateley Baptist Church, Hants, UK, since mid-December 2006. This site contains the two-and-a-half years' worth of comics - 130 strips - in their original greyscale format, plus coloured versions of some episodes, and a few bits of rough-draft artwork. On the 'The Making Of' page, you can also see time-lapse videos of me drawing Episode 062 and Episode 074.
The strip had no regular title for the first 8 months of its existence, but in September 2007, I gave it the name Grace and Caffeine, which I think reflects well its mixture of spiritual and pragmatic themes. As Christians, we are called to rely primarily on Grace, but as humans, we still resort all too often to more material remedies, e.g. Caffeine, at least for some of our smaller problems. The phrase "grace and caffeine" has appeared in the strip itself only once, in the last panel of Episode 025.
And I would like to sort out, once and for all, the question of whether or not this comic strip is autobiographic. Like much of my other creative output, some parts (such as Episode 009 and Episode 035) are based on my own experience, whereas others (such as Episode 016) obviously aren't. No one character in the comic is particularly based on myself, although all of them probably reflect some facets of my personality. And the comic isn't really set at Yateley Baptist itself, but at a fictional small baptist church which bears a lot of similarity to it. After two years of anonymity, I finally gave the place the name Volesford Free Church in the early-2009 Episode 104.
Anyway... now that I've sorted all that out... I'll let you go and read through the archives. Although I should warn you that some of the file sizes, particularly for a few of the colour versions, aren't exactly dialup-friendly!
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If you'd like to reproduce one or more Grace and Caffeine strips, please email me and say which ones you'd like, and what you want to do with them. Chances are I'll say yes, and I can supply higher-resolution print versions if you wanted to reproduce them on paper.