on that page
older version
very older version
what better way to honor the recently ceased publication that was one of my major influences in artwork and comic strips than by removing the most blatant reference to it?
I wanted to renovate the text on a lot of older pages because somebody who doesn’t actually care about the comic that i inexplicably wanted to and thought that I COULD impress with a printed version of it, casually suggested to me replacing the hand-drawn dialog with fonts, not aware that I had taken considerable effort replacing fonts with hand-drawn letters. It prompted me to obsess beyond any past level over the legibility of the text in the second book. And I thought while I was at it I should deal with this old thing.*
I have seen some people (other than that one) in person enjoy this section, after being indifferent to the first few pages, but while it works for pog, overall it is terribly out of character for lope, especially when i introduce the concept that without its hat the pitiful lizard will not take bold action. I had worried about this prior to the first printing in 2015 but eventually decided it did not matter. However the more i saw it the more it mattered to me! At last year’s alternative space weekend art show, I was telling people who laughed at that page that it was out of character! As if I didn’t WANT them to like that page. Soon they will not be able to! Ha HA! That means I win!
And then for christmas last year a different person who I don’t know offered the first criticism of that page, which was enough to finally inspire me to remove it. But looking now I see that he is only criticizing the number of exchanges and not the logic of that sequence of exchanges! The person also called the package “the MacGuffin,” kumquat “the main antagonist,” and pog “his side kick” even though each of those takes longer to type and say in addition to being less specific, and maybe I should not give too much weight to what he says, positive or otherwise. But something good came of it which is what matters [if i am a reasonable person, which i am not]. Also up to that point I always thought of kumquat as the protagonist of that section. Being told the opposite does not mean I have to change anything but it gives me rare insight into how other people might interpret a work that I wrote so long ago that its content has become in part abstract to me. Except on this one one part that I specifically worried about. It works better in an inconsequential pencil drawn comic strip made without a plan, before the lizard was assigned a personality or existence outside of that minor role.
I also ended up having to remove a view of the door that I really like, in the frame where pog says “did you want something?” but obsessive compulsion of course has made this a referendum on the artwork as well as the text so I end up changing a whole bunch of pages, again, I may [mentally un]well end up replacing a blander view of the door on another page with this one.
On a later page pog alludes to one of lope’s comments, saying “didn’t you eat the package?” which i now also had. I like that line; it only works BECAUSE the question and answer part is so inappropriate. Outside of that interlude it makes no sense for lope to claim to have eaten the package, and it is possible to imagine that you only imagined seeing lope say that, or retroactively interpret that as a silly thing that didn’t “really” happen, like when I show inanimate objects talking or transforming between panels, and directly acknowledging that sort of thing is an act that characters apart from pog could not commit without being distracting, and now pog cannot even do it! Tragic!
I have a personal “rule” that no significant part of this comic strip should be dependent on a person’s awareness of other media. On a much later page, elpse mentions “an ethnic sidekick from a lame Indiana Jones ripoff,” in foreground dialog, but no other character acknowledges that elpse said that and it has no bearing on anything else, though I still may drop that line when I get to reworking that section simply on the basis of my personal assessment that the indiana jones series is rife with lameness and unoriginality already and more importantly my not wanting to imply that elpse, it of green and greenish skin, has a perspective on what is and is not ethnic in movies that don’t even exist where it comes from, EVEN THOUGH to ME it is obvious that the INTENT of the line is to have be implicit that the ethnicity of the sidekick is relative to the protagonist, which in the case of Indiana Jones is definitively established, ethnicity and protagonistship both.
Howdy.
*And also replace every instance of “keilphix” with “kielphix” since the second way implies a more accurate, kielbasa-like pronunciation even though i no longer like that name at all and have shown kumquat being annoyed by it on newer pages, which of course means it cannot be changed! Even though only a few pages earlier lope announces that it changed its name from scragthrax so it seems like I am being redundant by having two characters that dislike their given names. However, lope, who is a little bit like me, definitively changed its name, whereas kumquat, which is much more like me, would not commit to doing so, and I likewise have not! ALTHOUGH kumquat lives outside of the law of any remotely functional society and really could call itself whatever it wants, but I only need to think further than hypothetical people who might criticize the comic strip, not ahead of myself thinking ahead of myself. But I will anyway so in four years I will probably change every pertinent page again to have an entirely different name than kielphix and also have kumquat not be annoyed by it.**
**Howdest.
this is the dominant project of the moment. Trying to make awkward comic strip pages from ten years ago look slightly less awkward by surgically extracting as much of the rigidity, bad mouse-done “ink”work and bad anatomy out of them as is feasible by some arbitrary point that is likely still too late to get new books printed by when I want to have them. My anatomical rendering skill and general awareness are still terrible but I am considerably less likely now to commit to a weird guess. This example shows some unusually bad dialog flow, which is why I chose it, even though it is not one of the problems I cited. This is also a problem! There is no sense in mentioning it twice!
Ostensibly it should not be that hard but there are a few hundred drawings in here, if i estimate 13 panels per page and 30 pages it comes to 390 which is likely a bit low. Also I “have” to separate the panel boundaries and word baubles –in the event it isn’t necessary to rewrite the text entirely, which is frequently the case with elpse, or redraw the bauble shape, which I do for pog and nemitz since I decided that less serious characters have less serious bauble shapes after this point– to maximize my ability to correct awkwardness on them, which is also a bigger job than it would be to a reasonable person. In 2009 I obsessive compulsively used hard black for all outlines and more shading than was called for, so getting the components separated is tedious but necessary for reasons too tedious for me to explain. what it amounts to is that I have a heirarchy of sicknesses and in order to live with the chief sickness I must endure some less prodigious sicknesses that both necessitate that I do strange needless work and that I do the work very strangely, to a needless degree. A long time ago I was proud of the fact that I could arrange and complete these things all on one digital layer. Also of using pure black for all outlines and text. Now I definitely wish I had not been so insistent on those things!
Why did i think it was a good idea to use solid line shading on skin? I imagined it would blend into a smooth grey but in the end it looks like a bunch of scratches. It looks good on wood. I felt so empowered to be using real ink from real pens at that I thought it could solve all of my problems! It looks better than my bad mouse pretend ink but then I kept adding more and more of it so it was still a mess. page 20 has some particularly bad examples but I have not gotten to altering that one yet! But I “need” to make a website update today so this is that.
comic page 3-41
all other pages are of course there.
i am not at all satisfied with the backgrounds; they are incomplete and have hardly any silliness lately, but i must keep going. I am likely quite past the point where I can have a third comic printed in time for the one art event that I attend in early november but it still would be prudent to resume the task of furthering my progress on that.
in MY mind this page makes sense, but based on one person’s comments, seeming to consider kumquat to be at risk of what elpse experienced on the previous page even though kumquat has already brought that on deliberately and then blatantly explains that elpse will have a different reaction to the formula since I correctly assumed just showing it would be inadequate. Absolute clarity has always been a problem with this comic strip, since I do not like to overstate things, since that dilutes their effectiveness, and even when I do overstate things it still is not clear enough! (in another example I added the word “flavor” to the end of the mouse-over text on the above image so it was more obvious I was referring to the nerds candy and not just social nerds of unusual colors) This specific matter is not of great importance, however, I primarily want to tie up loose ends from the first two sections that I wrote before I had even the meager “plan” that I do now. This page, to me, finally resolves one such end, the extremely brief appearance of kaklabesk in part 1-2 that is seemingly never followed up on. I must have thought I would do something more meaningful with it but the time in which to do so has elapsed so the longer I wait to explain it the worse it is. Of course 60+ pages on likely nobody even remembers that kaklabesk ever appearred, but I do, and so I must tend to it. There is yet another unsorted issue that the blue loser lizard will have to handle, which it is not yet aware of, and which will be slightly more important than this one.
I would refer to the creature as a “loserd” or “lozerd” but the pronunciation is not intuitive and with “loozard” or “luzard” the meaning is not intuitive. Yet one more way the creature is a loser, there is not even a convenient way to refer to it!
7-1-2019 nobody actually cares how regularly I update this, right? I am at Eng Land right now and following people around constantly and have no energy to do much more than issue a warning that
violet (the one on the right) is a human nemitz and should be avoided at all costs.
//////////////////////////////
page 3-40 of that old thing. inexplicably squirb is one of the hardest yet characters to draw. and despite making its design deliberately stupid i don’t want to leave that creature behind once i finally get done with all these parking lot scenes. and the blue moron who yells out the window also amuses me more than the other creatures at points. But I am not going to turn this into a pathetic mitz-com that never goes anywhere. It might not go FAR but this will continue to go.
the pink-mustached gnome i apparently gave a full beard to in its first two panels but changed it to this in the third frame even though that was on the same page and same row even as the first two. This will probably not be important in the future or the past or the present.
Do not worry about when fruznit sleeps or has its own life, either. I considered placing another creature there but i like the idea that fruznit HAS no life, and just sits behind a desk reading awful magazines and not providing service all day. or maybe lope come in before at the start of the creature’s shift and it will be leaving shortly afterward. perhaps the shifts are irregular and not the same every day. perhaps i worry too much about things that do not matter! But I am not going to change it either so i certainly could be worrying more than this.
BUT with a front desk attendant who [is supposed to] keeps keys, does this mean lope’s apartment is actually a hotel room? I don’t know. somebody should have asked me that years ago, and so far still nobody has!
page 3-39, of the questionable comic strip. One of those pages whose construction caused me to question if I really have any business making comics, but it is almost all related to drawing the environments. At least there are more interesting colors on this page. Looking back, I generally can’t tell which older pages also made me feel that way, but comparing the dates between them is often alarming. The first time I drew the gnomes was seven years ago on a page which was only about half a day ago, “story”wise!
I must have made hundreds of character “designs” over the years, and many of them have appeared in pointless illustrations. so why is it that whenever i introduce a new character in the comic strip i end up having to figure out how it looks on that very page?
When trying to figure out what squirb looked like, my goal was to draw something that would make sense for elpse to want to beat it up. Hopefully I will think of a properly stupid thing to have hanging from its neck rather than a green gold medal, but for the moment it seems of minimal importance! The creature itself is yellow, and indeed most of my secondary characters end up being yellow, presumably since none of the primary ones are, but I do not always plan in advance for them to be.
comic page 3-38 of that is here. As usual I expect to clean it more later.
This is the fastest I have gotten a new one out in quite some time, but of course hardly anything happens here! And worse, there may seem to be a bit of a time anomaly since nemitz seems to be very nearby on the previous page, yet is unseen by elpse on this one, but I did not explicitly indicate how far away nemitz had gone. But this will always be confusing, i fear, but I have been majorly confused by less excusable things than this in Tintin and even Garfield comics and people who hate those comics don’t over this.
amitz this page i realized that the building i have been drawing behind the fence has a largely different design (although still a bland rectangle) when i have drawn it visible from the “street.” as that design appears in the first printed book i wonder if i will make myself change the views of it here in section 3, prospective book 5 (or 6?) or just the one view of it in section 1 and hope that nobody who got one of the first printed books cares that much. hm i suppose i will go with whatever takes more work and provides less benefit.
the same section 1 view and also a section 3 view based on it show that building as being much too far from the fence for elpse’s second-biggest fan (after the dope) to have such a good view of the proceedings. unless it is actually a very large creature roughly twice the size of elpse. but i like the idea of it being meeply. also i implied it was afraid of having nemitz thrown at it ON THE VERY SAME PAGE. which means AT LEAST the blame for screwing this up is on the me from a few years ago who drew the buildings far apart AND then indicated they were actually pretty near each other. Although the blame for shifting the creature’s window considerably further from the back of the parking lot goes to the more recent me. But a meep like that may be friends with and have access to the apartments of other meeps. That blue character is very important because apart from its remarks i have thoroughly run out of background “gags” for this scenery.
Another matter: if I were a more vulgar person I could show lope “disposing” of the toilet paper note after eating all the muffins in the first section. But I do not like to think of anybody using toilet paper in that “world,” especially “clean” characters like lope. I think toilet paper (and toilets) are funny in appearance and name but not in their function. There is stuff wrong with me!
page 3-37 of the comic strip, one more where the layout changed way too many times to be time-efficient, and the backgrounds are increasingly turning into mush, even apart from the roads. But I have sorted through my mess of a script document where there was a considerable pileup of overlapping and redundant dialog setups so it should at least be relatively smooth going forward until the next disaster zone.
page 34 of part 3 of that dumb old comic strip.
I probably wrote more text about this page than any other and feel like showing less of it than ever!
this script is so old, elpse initially said “get up, ramus.” Ramus is a character from the video game Lunar Silver Star Story Complete Absolute Total, who is unprepared for the life of a video game hero and gets knocked down a lot. lope was also initially quoting ramus’s “blarrrrgh.” I played Lunar Silver Star, in 2006, and last mentioned it, specifically with regard to Ramus, in 2007. I don’t remember if I wrote this part of the script then but I was certainly un-old enough to think I could put an obscure exchange like that in here and have anyone know what it meant, even though I didn’t actually post a screenshot of Ramus saying “blarg” anywhere because I didn’t think it was an interesting-enough line for that, so it most certainly was not interesting enough to allude to out of context nearly 12 years after the game was already a 7 year old remake of a game from 1992 which wasn’t even particularly innovative THEN. Also the one time a voice actor says his name it is pronounced “ray-mis” and I always say “ram-us.” I made myself obsessed with Lunar because I knew, at that time, other people who had been obsessed with it when they were children and I thought they would link to my website if I liked the same stuff they did. If they read my comic strips in 2006 they certainly don’t now! Probably.
Oddly enough one of them specifically denigrated the game Breath of Fire in favor of Lunar and I said nothing in its defense even though I legitimately liked Breath of Fire and still like it better and I don’t know that I have mentioned it even one time in the half-my-life of having this website. I don’t even have any screenshots from it since I last played it before I made this website or meticulously documented everything I did.
Literally the last time I played it, my computer had an MS-DOS based infrastructure. Three to four times as much time has passed since I last played it than had passed between the last time I played it on real hardware and the first time I played it in an emulator, which I thought at the time was a long time!
I may even have stolen pog’s name from it! Although I only remember being surprised to see the name in the game years after stealing it if I stole it, not actually doing so. All this is not to say I resent Lunar –I was able to make a forced infatuation be sincere back in 2006– or that Breath of Fire isn’t made of problems that only a childhoodded fixation can disregard (and I may resent BOF instead for making me steal POG from it), but of all the things I make, the bimshwellian comicoid least of all I ordinarily wonder who I am trying to please with it and why, but today I did!
Also lope being felled occurred, initially, during the altercation with the robots, but when I got to that point I decided the robots should just get beaten up without doing anything. Inexplicably I liked the dialog enough that i contrived a way for lope to fall down in the same spot at a later point, and now that is a permanent part of the “story.” i only removed the ramus line literally on february 22 2019. Or rather made a copy of the dialog bauble and moved it to another layer and turned it unvisible in case I wanted to bring it back (and look, I just did). I had drawn it in knowing it didn’t belong there but not feeling like dealing with it. Thankfully I still think it is funny that lope is pitiful and a substitute line easily suggested itself, so this is only a major problem with regard to me knowing i cannot be trusted and that i will probably be 60 years old before i get through the entire script as it is now.
Of course, as I indicated, much of what goes on is NOT in the script. i get to a point and i change it, sometimes significantly; initially nemitz was intended to capture pog out of view, but when i got to this point I thought it would be funny if elpse’s goop fell on nemitz, so then elpse had to run off and capture pog itself, and that gave me an opportunity to acknowledge the dope still exists and also exhibit pog’s unusual attitude toward captivity.
But I do not want to drop anything I think of for any reason and so try to think of in-character ways for them to behave illogically to accommodate script pieces that are no longer relevant. In this case, lope thinking that the goop-covered nemitz is a ghost (and at the same time avoid saying “I’m soooo dead”). From a long term stand point, do I really believe that lope really believes that ghosts are real or that itself was well and truly dead? I did not think about it that deeply. But I knew “wow I am sooooo dead” is obviously not how lope talks by the time I got here, even when I still thought elpse might call lope “ramus.” I wrote that so long ago I did not have a solid grasp of how lope talked or just how foolish it was and in what ways. But NOW I wonder: does lope live in constant fear of death and undead spirits? What occurred to make it be preoccupied with that? I know, or think I know, that nobody is going to DIE in this comic strip, and have worried about my ability to introduce matters of consequence as a result, but I did not want to face the issue on the big punchable nose either, since it is too permanent an occurrence to add on a whim unless you are making something stupid like Dilbert that isn’t supposed to be consistent or not contradict itself. A hypothetical future version of me with a clearer mind may think a character death is necessary or even devise an alternative that is not strictly “death” as it applies to real people but without relying on conventional cartoon judeo-christian afterlife tropes that have no business applying to dumb old lope who I won’t even let have a christmas tree, or even some of the other innumerable copout ways American comic books have, often on whims, undone once-significant or equally whimly deaths. And that version of me would then also have to determine if there are supernatural forces which have interest in or authority over death and life. The present me is not qualified and so should avoid topics which lead to that one!
additionally lope’s new comment about ghosts agitates pog, who now has no reason to be this bored by the dialog. Fortunately pog has a looser concept of reality than lope so I do not need to wonder about why it is afraid of ghosts.
Pog’s boredom complaint came about because consistently in this section of the comic strip i have worried that i had more dialog than interesting visuals could be made to accompany. But again and again, and indeed again, had to strain to cram in all the visuals i came up with. However, now a script revision that I added due to the boringness of the script was made irrelevant by a future revision. That is so convoluted, crowded and broken I am surprised now that I didn’t keep it in!
Beyond all that, this page is one that is very hard to get working without layout swapping or dialog bauble stem crossing because there are so many characters stuffed into it. Ordinarily you can switch around where characters are to facilitate better dialog flow by zooming in, zooming out, or going to the next page, but I don’t like doing those things! i had in fact gone to a bit of trouble to switch the layout already; initially the viewpoint matched the previous pages, with the dialog positioned to suit that, and then I realized that would mean drawing the back of this parking lot 12 more times and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to draw this side either but it at least is plainly a different page.
I should just put the word “trivia” at the top of a page every time I am conflicted about the overall relevance of its contents.
page 33 of part 3 of this. One good thing does happen, but not much el[p]se. It took me less than two weeks to make, though, which is good, I hope, and not just reflective of my shoddy work on the backgrounds and the already mentioned not much occurring. The only thing in my favor is that I can hold a thought for twenty years. I think usually web comic people hit their peak within two years and finish everything they ever planned on doing within ten. I don’t have to/can’t beat anybody, but eventually they will all retire or move to endeavors that I am not also trying to do, unless battling for the last piece of breathable air becomes a common activity in the near future.
You may need to click at that twice for it to be remotely legible. i will need to make a separate section on the regular comic sub-website for these because increasingly they are not able to be read when reduced to a degree that fits here! And there are things wrong with this to needlessly point out apart from that.
I thought I could save time but not obsessing over the visuals, since this is stupid anyway, but it still ended up taking days, even unfussed. Or actually it took a year since it is based on opposing, non-acknowledging trash-content site posts which I saw last year, in search of what I cannot remember. People can find ways to be authoritative, elitist and condemnatory about any topic. Really the first box without the “argue” statement would have sufficed.
The second (and first also) “issue” of my comic books can now be ordered from http://www.indyplanet.us/bimshwel
It features 36 needlessly dense pages, artwork superior to my photography, considerably more legible lettering than the first book and NO DOPES ((actually there is one dope on the inside back cover, don’t tell anyone).
The linked page has them for 8 dollars, which may feel a tad excessive for a comic book but most comic books there have less content per page and eight fewer of them. More panels stuffed into the the same space is not necessarily “better” but I think it suits what I am doing better than the other way would have! Or at least it had better since I sure am not going to change it after all that. And then it would end up being a 48 page book and even more expensive!
Of course it can still be browsed for free up to and beyond that point also on the internet, but people on the internet are peculiar sometimes so I offer both options to them.
ALSO: if you dwell outside the federated republic of United Statia and want this for some reason but think the international shipping cost is exorbitant (I sure do), please contact me directly at [email protected] and I can send one to you through rinkety dinkity postal mail, although I could not guess when it would get to you! This is a fairly stupid time of year to try and mail things.
However, I would have gotten this out of my way much sooner if I could! “Currently, it’s taking *at least* 4-6 weeks from when a book ships to when it goes live” eventually struck me as meaning: “NOTHING will happen BEFORE 4 weeks and afterward it could be any length of time. weeks months years.” the “-6” is misleading. it has no meaning.
I only found out the book was finally available during a cursory check on it before I wrote a second annoyed request for information; the robot never contacted me!
Gimme a break, robot. That “i was driving to the bathroom when you called” story isn’t going to cut it this time. What kind of idiot would make a robot that even needs to do that? This smiling moron should be able to interface directly with the robot car instead of needing to operate external controls!
Another more worrisome matter: It has been brought to my attention that after months of obsessively relettering the internal text, I left out the M in “bimshwellian” on the FRONT COVER of the newish comic book! Order now before I fix that, and be the owner of a rare collectors’ item. Apart from the huge pile of them I ordered for my own purposes months ago and the fact that I might not get around to changing it at all.
page 3-32 of the the questionable comic strip
did you notice at one point that the lighting flips all the way around? i started drawing it correctly, then thought it was wrong and flipped it around. But once I thought “this lighting looks really nice” i knew that meant i had screwed up. And so for once decided to leave it that way, because you probably DIDN’T notice the lighting flipped around. and if you did, you can potentially imagine that elpse just ran around the block, even though the front of the apartment building is still visible. I only recognize it as the front because I hate drawing it so much and always need to use a reference from its regrettable non-designed initial appearance. Lighting can change but ugly architecture cannot.
page 31 of part 3 of the comic strip.
I planned this with a blow gun without really thinking about it. When I came back to it two weeks ago that seemed bland. I couldn’t think of anything to change it to except a sling shot, but then remembered i already used a slingshot on a page that i suppose realistically was not all that long ago. I also considered but did not draw a tiny bow-and-arrow but justified reverting to the blow gun on the grounds that kumquat looks funny opening its mouth like that. But then I had to tilt its angle more toward the viewer to seem less like it was deliberately aiming away from elpse, and consequently made it look less funny!
I also had to mirror the layouts over flow of information concerns and hopefully this will not screw up the page after this which I already laid out with the expectation that kumquat was attacking from the right instead of left!
If anyone is still out there after that last thing I put up, which I stand behind, 93%, here is page 30 of part 3 of the comic strip.
My only consolation: finding out that I’m my one true obligation.
Who needs a dream? Who needs ambition? Who’d be the fool in my position? Not very many, the way things are going, there’ll soon be one less. No one in your life is with you constantly. No one is completely on your side. And though I moved my world to be with them, still the gap between us was too wide. And I won’t miss them, they made it perfectly clear: I was a fool and probably queer. Not a help, you’ll admit, to agreement between us. I’ve taken mitz for seven years and I won’t take it anymore. Each day got through means one or two less mistakes remain to be made.
Let man’s petty fandoms tear themselves apart. It brings me no joy adding to their satisfaction. Bit by bit the pieces fit the bimshwellian machine advances, not one move that won’t improve our nation’s chances. This is the one situation I wanted most to avoid. What on earth am I doing, I could be better employed! I don’t care if you’re a champion, no one messes with me. I am ruthless in upholding what I know is right, black or white, as you’ll see. I’m on the case, can’t be fooled. Any objection is overruled. One night in bimshwel and the tough guys tumble. If you don’t like it then it’s up to you. You’ve a better reason to be anti-nem than me. How can you let mediocrity win? Who do these foreign chappies think they are? I can’t believe that they don’t see my game; I’m like that tennis player — what’s his name? Maybe it’s a bit confusing, for a game, but rubik’s cubes were much the same. And the appeal, partner, of this deal, partner, Is we both stand to win; We’ll bring back the golden era.
No no, you’re reacting exactly the way that they waaaaant! And ehhhhvery poison word shows that you never understood. You take care you don’t let their shenanigans blind you. It’s all very well to say “you fool!” It’s now or never. I could be choosing no choices whatsoever. Sad to see the ancient and distinguished game that used to be very like another when your head’s down over your pieces, brother.