page… I don’t even remember, 49? of that
Don’t stop me if you can see where this is going. It goes there slow enough that your effort would make little difference.
and there also goes the last internet comic with no scenes that take place in a bar. we had a decent length run, I’d say, if I’d held off a bit longer.
There are two things you can expect in a good webcomic: it will become painfully obvious what the artist’s favorite paraphalia is and the main characters will go to a bar within a few pages. Ah I’m kidding, of course. There are no good webcomics.
I thought it might it might be easier and more potentially amusing to base the setting off an actual place I’ve been to, but the one I wanted to use doesn’t have a layout that works with my staging and the one I used instead is rather dull and doesn’t match the locale I’ve established. I think I might have said that last time.
Also, Edward Sorel called. He wants his sketchy, noncommittal ink lines back. And I actually draw with pencil first. By the way why don’t you get a cellular telephone already? I’m tired of taking messages for you.
I think I could handle being a slow inker or a bad inker but being both is becoming harder to accept. Is the huge pint bottle of ink that i bought and have not yet opened reason enough to keep using real pens? If I had a job doing this I would be fired for what this page looked like before I spent a week putting color over and redrawing it with a mouse. Although if I had a job doing this I would have been fired years ago for needing a two weeks of uninterrupted time to finish one page and usually being surrounded by interruptions. I don’t even know what to revise to [further] fix this, much less have the ability. However, this either goes up as it is now or two weeks from now when I can work on it again to make subtle changes that you probably won’t notice.
Oh OH excuse me, am I talking too much for you? Guess what elpse, nobody is intimidated by you! Even with that impressive scar along your midsection. Yes, and I know you also said “oh OH” on the page. I’m very impressed that you almost finished a game of tic tac toe. By the way I’m actually not impressed!
Do you know what I just realized? What? WHO TOLD??!
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I wonder how many times through history we’ve let some Carmen Sandiego-type villain make off with a roman aqueduct or a pyramid just because Interpol tried to go after them without the right warrant.
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I think I would do better on social networking sites if they dropped the social aspect. And the networking, as well. Thus I am here.
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page 48 of this.
I tried using a brush. maybe you can tell. The ink ran out too fast, though. The pen doesn’t hold enough ink and the brush holds even less. Or the same amount but it goes on thicker and thus needs to be redipped sooner. Whenever I DO get faster I decide more things need to have ink on them and so no time is saved.
I was able to reduce the grime by increasing the contrast. I could have done that last time but it removed some of my fainter cross-hatching. This time I realized that faint cross-hatching looks terrible in a digitally colored comic strip so I didn’t do any except when I forgot not to.
In fack this is 48 and a bit of 49 since that last update had a bit of 48 in it. I didn’t do five rows again because I took the art in a direction that doesn’t look good, make sense, or get drawn comfortably, and so I yet ponder the ensuing frames. Whoopth. We won’t be here long. Or they won’t, anyway. It will be four months at the least for us.
It’s just supposed to be a silly diversion before the dorks go where they mean to be going (which is also a silly diversion, since I never wrote an ending), so it shouldn’t take me a week to draw the outside of the building. I thought hey wouldn’t it be funny if I based this on a real place that I went to and just happened to have pictures of? No because nobody who will see this has heard of that place (even I forgot that) and there’s nothing inherently funny about it apart from the name, which I changed, and not even to something that rhymes with the original or that is legible at the size I wrote it. And yet this “page” probably has about the least amount of post-scan line modification I’ve ever had to do, so once I totally lose my ability to reconsider bad decisions, the drawings will be very solid.
Prior to the decision, I couldn’t have spent more than three minutes on this. The ideas are spontaneous but they take so long to draw that I have a lot of time to regret them.
I considered writing “grub hub” on the revised sign, but there is an actual website called that. Here it is being discussed at Chow Hound. I wonder how food dude will weigh in on this.
Oh no, that’s real too! And now that I’ve violated oh so intellectual property of food dude SOPIPA is going to send me to the nibblet gibbet.
page 47 is it now? Of that, I think it was.
I may be getting a little bit better at ink application. Not better enough, and certainly not any FASTER, but perhaps this means that will eventually be feasible.
It finally occurs to me why comic artists use blue pencils; because it’s a different color from the ink and so selective color detection can automatically remove it. I obviously haven’t used one here. It hasn’t been my experience that colored pencils’ marks are terribly compatible with erasers but I never considered testing it by color. Anyway that won’t do a thing about the grain of the paper or the unending hassle that is layer switching plus the increased save period which makes me reluctant to do it as often which is a terrible idea when using outdated image manipulating software.
page 46 of whatever this is.
I used to kill minor characters constantly in my oldest comics, and continued bestowing maladies-apparently-exceeding-injury to sketchbook dwellers, even ones which returned to live again afterward, but at some point I started finding it more depressing than funny. This has not changed.
I tried to keep the ink layer separate from the color layer, because this would allow me to preserve the full alpha qualities of the lines, rather than reducing them to flat black and white. Not only did this not look better, it in fact looks worse, because correcting errors is more of a hassle so I’m less inclined to bother, and what I did do took four times longer than usual, in part due to the various scan blemishes also retaining full fidelity, which I meant I had to constantly be removing them. Ordinarily, all the murky greys turn white and cease to be a factor. But now…
GRIIIIIIIIIME! Hours and hours removing grime! My compulsions are too powerful to allow me to not remove grime. The worse is when it’s on highlights or in the center of the letter O. The shiny part of an object should not have grime on it! Must scrub. This grime I cannot handle.
No! Even this picture of someone scrubbing has grime on it! It’s nothing more than a common griminal! It’s not even a special griminal! It’s the same old grime every time!
I’ve been seeking out grime for so long that now I’m seeing it in places where it does not exist! Single layer, flat-color images that I know factually that I never scanned off of grimy paper through a grimy scanner. My monitor itself is afflicted and now I will always notice it. Or perhaps my own EYES are covered with a wet, slimy substance! ARHHGJKHGJ GET it offffffffffffenbach
Page 45 of this. Scroll down, like always!
Ah ha, two new pages in just under a month! This is the first time that has happened in a while, and probably the last time that will happen in a longer while.
My mother has been telling me for years that I might do well to get involved in theater. However, these characters clearly exhibit that I have no respect for the profession.
This page, like the previous, may also ultimately prove to have no bearing on the future. Whoopth. However, the source image for this page and the previous are increased from the pages before, creating the possibility of a higher quality end product! Can you tell? No, of course not. I made it harder and more hard drive space-wasty for absolutely no reason, and it still looks cramped. Whoopth 2.
page 44 of this, I suppose.
That slide goes into my ball of fame for badly designed metallic objects that I can’t draw consistently next to the lizard’s car and every metallic object I have designed. Jack Kirby I’m not. I think this became clear when I devoted several paragraphs to complaining about characters that prominently display their neon waist triangles at all times. I keep my fame in a ball because I dwell in an apartment and don’t even have a hall, much less a spare one to devote to my personal failings. A ball because mother says I can’t go to the ball, and I don’t want to see this stuff anyway.
And unlike Mr. Kirby, there isn’t going to be forty years of indistinguishable comic artists trying to copy my style. They couldn’t if they wanted to because they’d have to change in every frame.
This is the first, perhaps only page whose ink was placed entirely without disposable pens. It is very dark because I didn’t do it very well. Every time I DIPped the NIB, the mark was very wide at first and then got really narrow. When I wanted a heavy line I felt like I had to use the narrow remnants and when I wanted narrow lines I didn’t want to waste the heavy ink. Even so, I covered a few nearby paper objects with blot marks to rid myself of excess ink and seem to have half-emptied one of my two ink bottles.
The result was still unsightly and I still had to do hours of digital correction, but it’s fun to pretend I’m improving sometimes.
It’s entirely possible that references to future events on this page will amount to nothing because I don’t know what they are yet.
Page 12 (eventually, scroll down I advise) of that.
The imagery is somewhat underdone because my mouse sustained injuries recently and evidently lacks the strength to complete most left button presses. I actually subconsciously started to feel bad for the miserable thing and would highlight commands with the cursor and press Enter instead. I’m assuming nobody cares what the interior of the lizard’s “car” looks like, nor the laws of perspective it violates.
With this the last of the initial drawings from 2001 are covered. I’m not sure if I beat the deadline to hide them all before they were fully ten years old, but fortunately I suspect you don’t care about that, either. So now we are getting into the remakes of the remakes. The new pictures aren’t totally necessary, but they must change slightly to accommodate more competent and less fonty word layouts. Yes and also the fact that the next few pages are mildly illogical in their current forms despite being themselves attempts to amend a not-quite-sensical script. It’s sort of like when you build a new bridge to replace an old one but people still drive on the old one and you can’t just take it down altogether for a decade or so, and build the new one next to the old one, in a less ideal spot, meaning it will never be as good as it could have been. It’s not like that at all in the respect that my old comics get very little traffic. Ha ha, like car traffic on the bridge.
I blame the previous paragraph on my broken mouse also. I have the power. What’s important is that there are no ten year old drawings left. Just seven year old drawings. Don’t tell me I began the task of replacing the ten year old drawings three years ago. I already know that. I just said so.
Page 43 of this. It still has no name.
This is one of those pages where I’ll have to come back and edit stuff later. Don’t look at the orange picture right here until after you looked at the link. Unless you don’t care about the comic, but if that was the case I don’t imagine you’d care about its construction phase, either. Not in a sincere fashion that it would be worth my trouble to accommodate, certainly.
I added the letters this time with a dippin’ ink pen. I’m sure this is reflected in the improved legibility of the text. The pen ran out of ink really fast. I didn’t try to render the creatures with it. I may need to switch paper types again. Not right away, though; I want to savor my last remaining excuses for unsatisfactory quality.
Intially the creature was held like this and so the alarmed expression made more sense. however, then the way it hit the wall didn’t. The way it looked smiling with its body upright but its head pointed downwards was so deliciously stupid that everything else had to change to match it.
Also, I just realized that my most animated and dynamique character is a chair with arms. And I still don’t know what “dynamic” means. However, the “still” suggests that I did not in fact just realize the latter fact that but have been aware for an extended period gosh I can’t believe I always struggle to fit words into panels.
I didn’t forget about this! I just also didn’t do anything about it.
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Important notice! Way back in December I mentioned the foodoid product combos and placed a link to a video sequence on another site. I entered the link improperly. Nobody cared, including myself, so I didn’t notice my error until today.
The link is this.
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page 11 of that. I tried a different thing this time. I probably won’t try that again for a while!
Also I think a serious redesign of the lizard’s transport machine may be in order because it continually confuses me and it’s going to be used more later. In the preview I made evidently in June of last year, the driver is pulling down a handle to shut the door from the inside and I can’t remember what I was thinking. I also don’t remember the car having “doors.”
Also observe how much less fancy this looks if I erase this part of the green circle. The extra boundary conveys no information yet it makes me look edgy to have an oddly shaped, tiny, useless frame. It also makes me look edgy to have a useless frame with no edges. Circles are not practical for filling a rectangle-shaped space! Wastefulness is artistic.
Eh so with the next installment the last of the redraws of nine year-old pages will be completed! Ideally it will not be a ten year old page by then. And thus will commence the redrawing of five year old pages. Later I will have to redraw this when I realize it is an incredibly awkward flashback and that would make more sense to be shown first and then not be flashed-back to.
page 42 (scroll down!) of this. It isn’t making any more sense or coming out any faster, but by Gumby it is getting weirder looking. I think my brain is melting. In another year or so the comic will probably resemble a kindergarten finger-painting. This is called artistic maturity. Did you know Pablope Picasso actually made stuff that looked like stuff before he got famous? Yes yes, I am now putting all hope of success on my becoming harder to understand.
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Tuesday, january 4: here I go, and by krimpet I mean it this time. I should have updated the thing before I left but it wouldn’t have been very good and I reckon you’ll not see even this for a while after it goes here!
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With a new year come new absences of content.
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page forty…one? of this. Hey, remember this? Neither do I. I also don’t expect my rate of completion will improve much as long as I’m putting 45 stupid little characters on each page and insisting on coloring them like they matter.
Annnd… well that’s over then. I’ll see you in April!
Tuesduh, Augurst 24: I
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Is that a hastily assembled content divider or is there a ghost writing this website now?
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
page 40 of this. could it be? More space trouble? (yes) This has been up for a few days but I kept forgetting to say so. And eventually I stopped doing that.
Show me a comic that changes styles more often… well often’s not the proper word since I don’t update often, but show me a comic that changes styles more times within a short span of strips and I probably won’t look at it because I’m too jealous and egotistical to read anyone else’s comics unless I think they like mine first. Why did I even bring this up?
I brightened the character colors and restrained myself from overshading with the pen, but this still didn’t get done very fast. Also, I never liked the way the last page looked until I saw it above this one. However, hey nobody fell down on this page. No “people,” anyhow, assuming these degenerates count as that, which I actually don’t.
everything I want to talk about today insists on transitioning into another topic which I do NOT want to talk about, and yet I hate to waste a decent transition.
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Generally, i am not scared of BEARS.
That’s generally, and not for my life.
Smokey’s not like the cartoon all stars or the ninja turduckens or Kirk Cameron*, who will plead with you to not use drugs and tell you about some fictitious abusers who had hard times. Smokey will point right at YOU and tell YOU to cut it out, lest he maim you with mining equipment. Smokey is scary and he knows it. HE’S not going to prevent forest fires, but he’s going to make you wish you had. Smokey doesn’t beat around the bush; he beats you into the ground for lighting up near a bush. Or maybe he’ll just eat you and use the shovel to dig a ceremonial grave for any bones he doesn’t fancy swallowing. There was an ad recently in which some dirtbag is smoking a cigarette and someone else TRANSFORMS INTO SMOKEY and starts leering at the smoker. Sure, this is because of the FIRE risk of DISCARDING a cigarette carelessly, but it would not be a hard transition to make for Smokey to just hate smokers in general. They’re getting a little too close to his name. Only YOU can prevent Smokey’s lunch.
I have to get a painting painted and framed by Friday. How did that have time to happen?
this wrathful oaf by the time I was paying attention. Forty years of people continuing to start fires anyway will do that to you.
To be fair, however, the same group was using Krauts and Japs to scare childrens around the same time and probably figured bringing in an angry forest beast might be excessive. Or worse, encourage kids to start more fires to burn the brutes alive. Kids these days lack the initiative to start a fire out of spite for a cartoon bear, much less go to a forest for any reason. They’ll drive to your house and murder you for talking trash about them specifically on facebook, but bears are safe.
I stole these off of the slow loading Smokey the Bear website, and I give it credit for not pretending they didn’t stereotype America’s enemies back when that was kewl. However, I’m still not linking directly to it because apparently Smokey is copyrighted and the only thing worse than setting his home on fire is cutting him off from his royalties. It’s been over fifty years by now and Smokey still hasn’t made enough money to retire.
*Kirk Cameron once starred in a drug awareness video which featured Kirk showing kids in a class room other videos of other kids turning into cartoon characters when threatened by drugs in some sort of parody or SLAM to the other drug videos but it didn’t really work because the “real” examples were considerably less entertaining and not a whole lot more plausible; those kids just said “no way man, you jerks aren’t COOL.” and that was the end of their troubles. True enough; nobody’s going to chase you down and MAKE you eat drugs for biting your thumb at them; that stuff’s expensive. They’ll probably just murder you and call it even. Additionally, In order to gain access to the kids he imposes his videos upon, Kirk outwits and outmaneuvers a bumbling hall monitor who for reasons that aren’t stated but I can fully understand does not want Kirk Cameron in that classroom. That doesn’t put us in the right frame of mind to compare fiction to fictitious reality. You might as well have brought Moraff in there.
Also, based on the online appearance of and reactions to the “nobody turns down drugs” scene from the video within the video, nobody also turns down realizing or caring that this part is supposed to be ridiculous. This clip, incidootily, was blatantly ripped out of another youtube video featuring brief strange clips from uncited sources, in which context it could be argued, due to its presence not being announced (6 minutes, 13 seconds in), this weirdness is far more effective (apart from the annoying “static” transitions, but that’s irrelevant because the person who reripped out the drug clip didn’t bother to omit the annoying fake 1970s static).
I’d like to tell you what the film is called but I forgot approximately the moment I learned it back in 1995 (and I had to watch it twice!), and Mr. Cameron may have since lobbied to have it removed from his filmo graphy. He’d much rather be known for classics like Firepoof, featuring a wicked computer screen that creates pornography to tear a marriage apart so that nothing less than Chick Fila product placement can heal the wounds.
I assume this is some gimmick to get people to click on a video which does not actually depict a suicide occurring. It potentially even scolds people for daring to look at it. However, the idea that the promise of video of suicide, real or not, gets one million people to watch it does not give me comfort. Even if some outrage group linked to it with “this is disgusting and should be banned but watch it anyway” that wouldn’t likely account for more than a few thousand additional views. Somebody influential has FEATURED this.
Whatever’s in the video, the real tragedy is that anybody takes this guy’s recommendation for anything.
Aye yi.
I have one of many headaches. I am going to sleep.
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page 9 (scroll down!) of that. I’m always looking for a way to speed things up. I’m always failing, to, too. It won’t be necessary to remind me never to try this way again because I’ll remember.
No, actually, I just remembered that I’ll forget. I should have reminded you to remind me sooner.
Also, I realized I ought to have made a better/any plan for this whole “remake” business and rearranged events so that no memory scenes were necessary, because they’re awkward and unprofessional. However, I do not believe that I did. That is to say, you can be sure that when I make them they will be awkward and unprofessional. I like to think this way is less jarring than the old way, but I also like to think I’m less likely to get hearteriosclerosis because I eat boring and chewy Kashi cerealdirt instead of corn flakes like I used to even though I still eat just as many hot clogs. As for lope(the lizard)’s ridiculous automobile, it’s in just one frame here so there’s still time to not get around to redesigning it into a more visually appealing and practical-looking thing whose drawing process is in any way logical.