Amused in Review

I still managed to do one comic, so at least I'm not falling behind.... Another hand-drawn super-hero one this time. It came out kind of rough, but oh well. I was trying to experiment a little with a different style. It didn't come out either as different or as clean as I wanted, but maybe next time. Next I think I'm going to try Star Trek. I'm of two minds on whether to go really simple, almost iconic, or try for a very realistic likeness. I've been practicing both--but I think I'll probably go with the simple design, since I can only do a good likeness with a photo reference, and that really limits the poses.

An interesting discussion of the "long tail" in sales over the internet (and the surprising ignorance of the meaning of the term among certain tech-heads) over at Language Log:

Language Log: The long tail: in which Gauss is not mocked, but TWiTs (and dictionaries) are

As Amazon and other internet retailers have demonstrated, long-tailed distributions of consumer demand -- in the sense of distributions where a large fraction of the probability mass is in the tail -- are a Good Thing for companies that can cope efficiently with orders for the very large array of books, CDs, movies and so on that are not among the top sellers. That's where Chris Anderson's Wired article "The Long Tail" starts. He claims that a much bigger fraction of the (potential sales) mass than you might think is out in the tails of the distribution of consumer demand, and he turns the phrase "long tail" into a bugle call for the redesign of post-modern life.

I note it here because it has a direct relation to what I was just talking about vis-a-vis webcomics. If you look at demand for comics as being such a curve, with the fat part of the curve being dominated by the big newspaper strips like Garfield or Doonesbury, and the rest of the world of comics trailing off to the right, appealing to smaller and smaller audiences you get the same situation as with books, DVD rentals or music. Without measuring, you don't know the exact size or shape of the tail, but would it surprise anyone to find out that it was "long" in the sense that a large part of the total demand fell in the tail of tinier and tinier niche comics?

Support This Comic

I've submitted WebAmused to the list of comics at OblineComics.net, a webcomic directory service, and they've notified me that they accepted the listing today. If you'd like to support WebAmused, follow the link and add it to your favorites (you may have to create a free account to do so). The chances that it will ever get a high enough popularity score to be displayed in the Popular Comics list are slim and none, but it would still give me a warm glow. You want to give me a warm glow, don't you?

but more than nothing. I was planning on doing several fumetti, but unfortunately I seem to have misplaced my tripod attachment and I wasted a good couple of hours turning the apartment upside-down looking for it. I did manage to find my watch, which had been missing for about a month, where it had fallen down behind my nightstand, but no luck on the attachment. I may have to get a new one, since that's the only way to guarantee that it will turn up.

So I ended up drawing the first one that I had intended to photograph by hand; I think it came out pretty well, maybe even better than it would have as a photograph, but that took all evening. I started in on a second, but I think I'm going to call it a night and finish it tomorrow.

Well, I managed two strips today: a fumetti (I went out at lunch and got a mini-tripod, hoping that'll be enough to cause the missing piece to come out of hiding), and my first Star Trek strip. It's scheduled to go live on December 10th, and I may redraw the final panel before then...I'm not entirely satisfied with the way it came out, but I promised myself I'd not let better become the enemy of good enough when I started this, so I posted it and I'll only rework it if I get well ahead and can do a better job on that single panel. Really it's just a face that maybe needs a redo. Well, and I might fiddle with the background--it looks a little sparse.

Pharyngula::Gimme that old time religion

In Focused Totality: An Open Letter To Larry Young, Mark Fossen writes:

It is my sincere belief that critics matter. I think it now, and I can remember thinking it at 18 when I first read Kott's Shakespeare Our Contemporary. In my theatre days, I greedily devoured book after book of criticism: Brecht, Grotowski, Artaud, Bentley. I think that a good critical essay is art in and of itself - it is simply non-fiction writing, and can rise much higher than the simple level of a consumer review.

My problem is that on a good day, when I'm feeling optimistic, I can barely persuade myself that comics matter. That critics matter is a leap of faith that I can't really take. That's not to say there's no difference between good criticism and bad criticism. Websnark is good, for instance, because it leads me to new comics that I enjoy, and because it sometimes leads me to see something in a comic that I hadn't noticed before. But that the critical enterprise itself matters...nah.

WebAmused :: Comics - Meanwhile, Back in the Dining Hall of Justice

I'm quite proud of the art in this one. Though Hawkgirl's wings could use a bit of work...

The Seraph Inn - Inverloch Webcomic

I've only read the first chapter or so, so I don't know what direction it's going in, but I just can't get over how pretty it is.

Geeks the world over rejoice at the return of Sam & Max... as a web-comic!

I may weep openly

Can I hear a w00t? A-men!

hat tip Comics Worth Reading

"Return of the Mad Bun" by Rachel Hartman

The most beautiful Madbun page yet. See it now, before it vanishes behind the subscription wall!

You can now buy T-shirts of my Christmas comic in a variety of attractive styles thanks to Cafe Press. I make about a dollar per shirt, because I wanted to keep them affordable and it's not like I need the money to pay for the bandwidth.

The black ones are the most expensive, since Cafe Press charges a base fee of about $19 for them, but after looking around a bit, there isn't really a better deal unless I wanted to buy 100 in advance and ship them myself. Also, with the black shirts, the white background of the strip is still present (i.e. the image is in a white box). Personally, I think that looks pretty good, because the original image was never meant to be displayed against a black background, what with the shadows around the text and all. If somebody really, really wants I can re-touch the art in Photoshop to make that background transparent and fix up the text, but I'm not going to bother unless several people bug me about it.

I've got comics uploaded for now through the 31st of December. Lots o' Star Trek coming up. Still trying to come up with a New Year's gag--if I come up with a decent New Year's Eve gag, I'll push back the current non-topical one, otherwise I'll shoot for a New Year's Day comic.