It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time! 

The comic strip

On the origins of the IPMDT comic strip:

“I don’t remember how I heard about Inktober, but in 2015, I decided I’d take a crack at it as I wanted to improve my inking skills. I have always wanted to create comics and tell stories, which in my mind required being able to render things in ink really well. I had thumbnailed and written a comic many years earlier that featured myself as the protagonist, and I had even drawn the first dozen or so pages. I was relying heavily on photo references to draw myself, which was time consuming, and I really felt like I ought to be able to do without them.

Thus, I decided to inject my own theme into my first Inktober in 2015 and focus on ink self-portraits, trying to kill two birds with one stone. I managed to get 31 illustrations done in 31 days, and my skills definitely improved. However, I still didn’t feel like I had mastered drawing my face, so my first Inktober rolled into an ink self-portrait project. My goal was to “cartoonify” myself for the comic adventures I had planned. I would take reference pictures from different angles, making different expressions, and then do two illustrations: one while looking at the reference, and one without.

Eventually, I started running out of faces I could make, but I needed to keep practicing. I needed to find a way to make things interesting and stay motivated. That’s when I began introducing Plunger Monkey into the mix, which evolved into a stream of consciousness comic (I didn’t plan anything out in advance) that I called ‘It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time!’ I’ve been working on it ever since, though I tend to take very long breaks from it to focus on other projects.”

-Toby Gray, from the Introduction to Inklings

2023