The GibThom Story
GibThom: The ‘Pointy Ear’ Character
“GibThom”, or “Gibson Thomas”, is a character made by the cartoonist, “Samuel Mancer” and has been around the internet since early 2016.
GibThom was originlaly a webcomic on Tumblr.com, but overtime, the project leaned into animated form.
With the recent addition of Bip in the story (late 2021), popularity of the series has grown tremendously, gaining a million youtube subscribers in July of 2024.
Early Gib Designs
In the early Gibson drawings, his ears would have a cut near the base of each ear, this is because it was thought that Gib didnt have enough features to “stand out” as a unique character, but that detail eventually faded from the design.
It was also very prominant that Gibson used to be of very short stature, having legs much shorter than the length of his ears. Its clear today that this change was due to the way his cartoonist portrayed himself through this character, and Sam is very tall in person.
Another small design change was in his teeth. Gibson used to have a space in the top row of his upper left teeth. This was another feature carried from Gib’s cartoonist, as Sam had a decent amount of gaps in his teeth, all of which he still has as of the time this is being writtn. He should go see a dentist sometime…
Jadie
Before Bip, there was Jadie
This little rabbit had everything to do with the beginning of the GibThom character style, even though it soon became unrecognizable to the evolved Facen creatures.
Jadie was a spiritual predicessor to Bip, having an appearance in the GibThom graphic novels. His design was inspired by Nidoran from Pokemon Go.
In 2016, Sam was payed by his older brother, Elden, to go around and catch pokemon on his iPad. As he caught a Nidoran, something about the shape of the rabbit’s eyes really inspired Sam. Soon after, he made this little rabbit character and called him “Jadie”.
The first Drawings of Gibthom
This draft of a comic was the first place where Gibson (such a character with the cut in his pointed ears) was ever drawn.
At the time, it was just an interesting design choice, sam was only drawing on the back of a ‘chess game scoring sheet’ and he thought little of it.
It was a few days after making this drawing that Sam created his original Tumblr page, which was the start of the “GibThom Webcomic” although the series never had any success on its own.
Sam’s Tumblr was what inspired him to make his first graphic novel, “GibThom and The Maur” which heavily shaped the GibThom story, and Sam a great deal of practice in his drawing and storytelling craft.
The episode “A Prank Call” was the second episode of The GibThom Webcomic, and the first 6 panel comic in the series. While the first episode was 4 panels, is still lost media.
Although its plot is hard to follow and its design is primitive, this episode marked the launch of the rest of the GibThom series. As the first episode was nothing more than a one off, and was lost soon after its creation.
This burst of little guys on purple paper was one of the first drawings to include the name “Gibson Thomas” and portrays the early design of Sam’s character style.
The purple paper was from sleve of his high school class binder, having the name of the school, “Vanguard Academy” on its other side.
It was common for students to draw on this purple page in their binders, and Sam was no exception.
