Amused in Review

All shall read it, and despair!

Yep, I've got a webcomic now, currently at SmackJeeves because the original hosting site (DrunkDuck) seems to have vanished. I started doing it Nov 5th, and so far have managed a comic a day. It's a mixture of clipart, photos, hand-drawn, and computer generated, and is a gag-a-day strip. Someday I may do a continuity strip, but I want to be a lot better at drawing, particularly drawing consistently, before I try that.

I've been talking about it a bit on my LiveJournal but I'll probably try to cut back blabbing about it there, and move that more to here. I'm fascinated by the process of producing it, but I doubt my friends who read LJ are nearly as interested.

TalkAboutComics reports that Carla Speed McNeil's awesome Finder comic is going to be published free on the web, and the comic books are going away. She'll continue to put out the TPBs as she accumulates material, but apparently the comics have been a loss leader for the profitable TPBs anyway. This is pretty much the same line of reasoning/business model that Girl Genius went with. I think it's brilliant, and I really hope it works out for Carla, both because she's a wonderful person and because I'd like to see more of it.

I finally saw Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit , and it was spifferiffic. It's hard to say what my favorite part was, though the climactic action sequence was pretty darn neat. Lots of nice little character bits, too. And bunnies. Lots of bunnies. I recall some people being skeptical whether they could really fill out a feature-length movie (though they didn't have any trouble with Chicken Run), but no worries. It entirely made up for my disappointment with The Corpse Bride.

Now I have to decide whether to bother seeing Chicken Little.

The first 27 (out of 65) episodes of Ducktales is now out in a 3 DVD set. Unfortunately, it doesn't contain the pilot, but I'll probably snag it anyway. I remember talking about Ducktales with Don Rosa (probably the most famous $crooge artist after Carl Barks), back on the old Compuserve Comics forum. Basically he admitted that, while they didn't get $crooge at all right according to his lights (the real $crooge McDuck lived in his money-bin and would never waste money on a mansion). the shows were enjoyable in their own right. He liked to think of them as a TV show broadcast in Duckburg, based loosely on $crooge McDuck and completely unauthorized.

What I'm really hoping is that this portends a release of Darkwing Duck on DVD in the near future. I was right when I reasoned that DangerMouse would soon be followed by Count Duckula, so I've got my fingers crossed.

Somehow I lost the latest version of the cartoon that's today's post, so what's displaying now is a somewhat older version than what I intended. To add insult to injury, when I went into Corel Painter IX to try to redo some of the work (in particular a rather nice fern effect in the leaves of the palm that I had spent some time on), I can't find the brush selections that I was using anywhere. I had found, somewhere in the program, a nifty pallette of special-shaped brushes--almost like rubber stamps--in patterns like stars, thin curved lines, etc. Now I've explored every nook and cranny of the menus and toolbars that I can find, and I can't locate them anywhere. I would have thought that the pattern brushes were what I was looking for, but no. Searching the web hasn't helped: every search turns up sites trying to sell the software, not sites discussing how to use it. Corel's own tutorials don't give a hint. So now I've wasted almost two hours, with nothing to show for it. I know that I was able to use these brushes before: you can see them in the image that's on the site (e.g. the sand effect on the island), but right now if I had to do it again I'd be unable to reproduce that effect. Very frustrating. It looks ok, but it looked better before.

In Photoshop Elements...could I have been using that to do touch-up? Conceivable, I suppose. But the interface for picking the brushes doesn't look quite the way I remembered it. Oh, well. At least my palm fronds are looking frondier now.

WebAmused is currently the #1 rated comic at Smack Jeeves . Of course, since this is based on a total of four votes, I doubt it will last, so I intend to enjoy it while I can.

My Intuos 3 pen tablet arrived today, and I had a few minutes at lunch to install and play with it. Sweeeet. Not only is the drawing surface a bit over three times as large, but the action of the pen is smooth as silk; it really feels like drawing, in a way that its little brother, the Graphire 3×5 did not.

I found today's immensely satisfying to work on, though I have no idea whether anyone else in the whole world will even get a ghost of a smile out of it. It actually required research, and a lot of pixel-fiddling in Painter, but the time just flew by.

The buffer that I built up to start with is completely gone, and I'm having to do them day-by-day right now. I'm counting on using the long weekend to build it back up. Just before my vacation I was 5 days ahead, but I only managed to do one during that time, so by the day after I got back I was dry. Ideally I'd like to be working two weeks ahead, so occassional disruptions will be a non-issue.

Websnark.com: However, the entry for the Queen's Theater in Hornchurch, in England? Is perfectly safe! Because, you know, that's notability in action.

Eric Burns has a nice discussion going on the way that Wikipedia is utterly failing when it comes to webcomics (and probably other things). Basically, the Request For Deletion process is broken, and a bunch of know-nothings are using that to delete pages on various webcomics for "not being noteworthy." He suggests moving on to Comixpedia, which at least has the goal of being an encyclopedic reference on comics so you won't have to continuously justify and rejustify the fact that the article even exists.

I wonder, though, whether there's any point to Wikipedia or Comixpedia anyway. I just created an account on Comixpedia but I don't know if I'll ever use it. Why? Because I'm not at all convinced that these online user-edited encyclopedias do anything that Google doesn't do better.

Think about it: as a user, if you're not particularly concerned with the reliability or completeness of the information, or you think you're in a good position to judge it, then the first few entries that Google returns on any topic will almost certainly be at least as authoritative and useful as the Wikipedia entry. If you are concerned, though, you need a site that actually has editors or an institutional affiliation that you can trust.

On the other hand, as an author of reference material, if you spend effort updating Wikipedia, you not only face editing by people who are likely to know less than you on the subject, but you can lose your work entirely when somebody with a grudge against the topic comes along and sets up a Vote to Delete. You might be able to fend it off, but you'll need constant vigilance to keep fending them off--because they're persistent, and because the process is broken, even if you manage to alert people who actually use your article to come defend it, their votes are likely to be thrown out (as being "self-interested") while the votes of people who have never even read the article or know anything about the subject will likely count (particularly if they've voted to delete a lot of things). On the other hand, if you had spent that effort writing your own web page, or blog entry, on the topic, that's it. Thanks to Google you have every chance that people looking for information on the topic will be able to find your page, you don't have to face hostile edits by the ignorant, and the information is there as long as you want it to be.

So what the hell is the point of Wikipedia again?

I just posted what is easily the most complicated cartoon I've done to date, scheduled to go live December 2nd. This was the first cartoon I scripted, back when I first thought about doing this project, and I've tried it a number of times already over the past six or more months without ever being satisfied with the way it came out. Well, I'm still not sure I'm satisfied, but I finally said good enough and uploaded it. Then I had to retouch and upload again another four or so times, to correct the difference in brightness between my Mac and my Windows machines....I hope it looks ok for other people.

I'm pretty sure I'm not going to use that format again; I like the pictures to come out larger, which means the four-across format looks mighty cramped. I don't know how David Morgan-Mar does it. From now on, I suspect I'll stick mostly to either 4 × 1 or 2 × 2.

I've built up my buffer of finished, posted comics out to December 6th, with at least three comics being hand-drawn. If I can keep up this pace, I should be able to pad the buffer to my goal of two weeks ahead by this weekend. I probably won't be able to do quite that much, because one of those comics was done during an excruciating "Town Hall" conference call and I don't have anything scheduled like that for the rest of the week. And I've managed to extend my buffer of scripts for comics to 102 this morning (I"ve used 32 so far). Of course, not every script is likely to make it into a comic; I've got a whole series of ten or so that build upon that first "Minimalism Sucks" comic that I'll probably not bother with at this point, since it would feel like retrogressing as far as the art goes. Though if I ever have a deadline crunch, who knows?

I continue to be pleased with just how satisfying doing this is. The process of drawing them is fun and energizing. So far I've completely managed to avoid being paralyzed by self-criticism, and finishing one usually makes me want to start another instead of scrap it and redo it until it's perfect.

Nagraj Vs. Shakoora The Magician

Found this link in a discussion thread over on Howling Curmudgeons

Online Comics at OnlineComics.net

I've created an account here, to promote my comic a little, and to see what else is out there. I think this is a pretty exciting time as far as the proliferation of amateur comics goes; I'm not so sure what's going to happen to professional comics--particularly comic books, which seem to be in the process of imploding. Bookstore sales, particularly of manga, have just exploded, but the 32-page staple-bound objects seem to be on the way out--or at least acting as loss-leaders for the collections.

Sure, a lot of amateur comics (and even the semi-pro to pro webcomics) are crap, but like Linus, I'm all about the sincerity. And publication by Image, Marvel or DC, or King Syndicates or UP, doesn't exempt you from Sturgeon's Law. Even if 99% of amateur comics are crap to only 90% of pro comics, the numbers of amateur comics that aren't crap are greater than the numbers of pro comics that aren't crap; it's inevitable, given how many of them there are. OnlineComics.net lists 4,238 comics. SmackJeeves hosts 6,105. Comic Genesis over 6,000. A lot of those are barely comics, but still...

What's more, even the crappiest of those, the ones that even a mother couldn't put on a refrigerator represent genuine public involvement in art. I think folk art is important, and healthy. For a long time it seems to me there's been hardly any mass folk art in America, outside of music and arguably cooking. There's always been some, but this feeling that everybody and their neighbor is producing something that they're proudly displaying to the world via the web (just like blogging is turning everybody and their neighbors into reporters and publishers) is something new and exciting. And I'm proud to be a part of it.