page 41 and 42 of re-drawings of that.
I forgot to change the first frame to explain how the door shut without kumquat being near it like I said I ought to at the previous pertinent posting, and by the time I thought of it I was inclined to leave it as it was and just give an excuse. Consider that the control object has at least three buttons, and two other sections that I have not determined the purpose of. It is possible that a delayed shut was activated with the button pressing I did show on the previous page.
Page 42 is here as well since I did not have occasion to make a separate update for both of these and was interested in trying a slightly different method of rehabilitating the old pages, without switching to another matter before making the next page like I usually do. This way was not an improvement either! And now it has a different visual style than page 41. But page 41 does not look like page 40, which does not look like page 39. Perhaps my signature style is the absence of one.
By this point, the pictures I am redrawing, from 2006 or thereabouts, are scanned at a printable resolution, so I really only need to make them over slightly. When I started redrawing, I looked forward to this point. But now I find the character proportions so unsightly and backgrounds so boxy and empty that I wish I had fully redrawn the thing, so it might have potential to look more interesting. Which is ironic because at the time of the original version, I felt as if I was finally doing things properly for the first time! In fact, I almost like the originals better since they were exactly what I meant them to be at the time. Nonetheless, layout consistency takes precedence, and it is likely that when printed the new versions’ less scratchy outlines and better regulated frame-stuffing will be favorable.
page 9 of part 3 of this
I wish more pages were this simple to arrange. 4 actions, each only needing 3 or 2 spaces.
And here comes a gripe I wrote about the layout that must be irrelevant because I forgot it even mattered until I re-read it just now. But it did matter, so I had better post it so I do not write it again.
The trouble was that I had to reverse the lower frames to make lope right-handed, because kumquat and nemitz are the only left-handed characters. Which is a stupid thing to care about, especially if the beasts aren’t supposed to be human anyway, and have no reason to have the same proportion of right-to-left-handedness as normal people, who often force right-handedness as a standard arbitrarily, if these things even NEED to be “handed” at all. And this is a stupider thing to ruin my composition over. before, the character on the left always talked first and the word spaces made sense, but now they have to be awkward. the other solution would be to switch which hand the creature used in the composition I already had, which would put the hand in front of its head, which would conceal its dumb expressions, which, while dumb, are amusing to me. Either way, the page gets worse due to something nobody would notice. And that I didn’t even notice when I drew it the first time. And I worry about stupid garbage like this instead of real garbage like drawing better or a regular completion schedule. Notice, if you like, that the drawings look looser and scrappier than ones from years ago but that I did not get them done any sooner.
And of course it does not advance the “story” at all. It just replays the “elpse is bothered/worried but forced by nemitz to get over it so that we can continue” process again. Nemitz is a scoundrel.
The next page will almost have some details, and without nemitz’ permission at last.
page 40 of this’s redrawings.
I am disappointed that these are not getting any easier even though the base drawings are less incomprehensible overall. There is less figuring for me to do, but just as much redrawing, alas. And still not NO refiguring, since I seem to have kept up cramming in dialog baubles wherever they would fit, and wherever they would not fit long beyond a reasonable time period. Some people can draw a whole comic book in a day, I can barely draw one old page in a month.
However, I have received the proof prints of the first book, all printed and properly bound together for the first time, and it seems like doing that in greater numbers is a viable operation. All this may amount to something, even if not a whole lot.
Minutae:
Somehow, I only noticed after I had redrawn the thing that I never explained, to myself or anyone else, how kumquat has closed the door in the last frame here. The next page certainly does not explain it; kumquat points at a control unit that was clearly not being touched when the door shut. This note is to remind me to shoe-horn in a clumsy retroactive explanation for that next.
Compared to the old version, I had to change the dialog because it was terribly out of character for elpse to not scream at or attack somebody who admitted to hurting nemitz on purpose.
The lizard’s first appearance is also out of character, but since that takes up two rows, it is hard for me at this point to think of something else that should go there. Since I inserted a page before here where elpse gets angry at someone for hurting nemitz who did not even do so, this page is harder to ignore.
Although maybe I would have made more success if I didn’t try to justify everything and just wrote an anarchy story. Nobody ever said to me: I like this comic strip but sometimes the characters have inconsistent personalities. But generally if people don’t like something they just keep quiet so I have to anticipate what they are having a problem with.
One good thing to come of the print attempt that I can apply immediately, is that it forced me to figure out exactly how much space I “have.” A long time ago I measured a comic book that I had and based my space usage on that, not considering that the book I measured might have had a reason for not printing to the page edges. And as I changed the paper I drew on, and its orientation several times, my proportions got further warped. Now I match them to a template provided by Ka-Blam, the print company, which I presume is consistent, at least, with what other north american printers are using.
The version I had here for years is either too narrow when scaled to the height of the template, leaving “live” space on the sides, or too tall when scaled to its width, entering the forbidden margin zone. Narrow is actually fine, since extra live space will be filled in exactly the same as the margin space. What is wrong with drawing in the margins? They MIGHT be cut off, due to natural shifting while printing or cutting across many documents. And the bleed WILL be cut off in any event. So why can’t the computer just choose to NOT print into the bleed since it knows exactly where that is? Don’t bother to ask anybody that question, since they will pretend you are asking something else and treat you like you are rubbing a doughnut on your face. They guard this sacred knowledge like it’s the Davinci Code. You just have to live with it, or you die for it.
So I can leave the page narrow. Except I drew way too big originally, and had to cram in the dialog awkwardly around the drawings that I could not comfortably reduce. Therefore, I ought to widen the page, and claim the live space that is rightfully mine to try and declutter the wordage, right? But I had already been widening the redrawn pages based on my latest guess at correct page proportions prior to using the template, which actually ends up being too wide or too short for proper printing!!! I went too far!
Scandal! Look at all that free live space! I long to see it captured and slaughtered. Having it be marginalized is inadequate punishment.
But too short, like too narrow, can go unnoticed. Since I arranged the words reasonably this time, nothing more needs to be done. In the printed book, therefore, most pages are too short. For once I left things alone! I only talled up a few toward the end of the process, and superficially altered a few others immediately prior to printing by increasing the size of the gaps between frames.
One of the taller pages with enhanced gaps beside one of the shortest, that you may already be acquainted with. The disparity is already not great, and since they do not actually appear together,
and a real book doesn’t lie flat, the issue is almost invisible.
Does that all make sense? It shouldn’t! Printing technology is still stuck in the 1940s. We can electronically send a sandwich into space but we can’t know exactly how a computer image is going to show up on paper right in front of us, and the machine responsible may break in one of many ways trying to do it. It took me so many years and so much rage to figure all this out and get used to it, I have no CHOICE but to keep printing books. For once I know everything that can go wrong and have prepared for them all. The books came out perfectly and I succeeded. I can not be held up further!
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGHHHHFFFFFH I’VE BEEN BORDER-LINED
Part 3, page 08 of the questionable comic strip.
I was worried that I had lost touch with the comic through all the delays and my lack of a clear path to a conclusion, but I like this page more than many that came before it.
Unfortunately, you can tell nemitz is a scoundrel because nemitz ALWAYS thinks it is funny when elpse gets hurt.
What a ridiculous scenario. The lizard and elpse are fighting over NEMITZ. Nobody should want nemitz, much less two people trying to prove who wants nemitz more! Thankfully these are dumb imps and not people. Still, it makes me mad. The lizard thinks it is being polite by refusing the drink! It thinks it is TOO polite to drink that, even though it is causing a major problem, and it keeps saying lope. It literally does not know how to stop saying its name. After I work so hard to not say its name, it is quite rude to sabotage my work.
A possible back cover for the hopefully imminently imminent self-published first volume of the bimshwellian comicoid. In fact, the exact same volume that was hopefully imminent a year ago. That plan got shoved behind other things, which then got shoved behind other things. After 11 months of such shoving, the management got confused and accidentally shoved the first shoved item in front of something else, and my intention is to act on it before ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGHGHF I’VE BEEN SHOVED
On this occasion, I wanted to give potential viewers a sense of the content without needing them to have any existing idea of the characters, and without having to read much. And also none of the actual pages work on their own anyway whatever your casual tolerance to mass wordage is.
Next comes an alternate version, that while personally amusing to me, distracts from the one joke, that I need to get out without dwelling on, because it is not very special and has almost certainly been done in some form previously.
Also, Yibrik may ultimately be too strange to appear within my best-attempt-at-normal-person bait. Further, within what is to be the book, yib only does appear in one frame, unacknowledged, and speaks in one other frame, unseen, so nobody would have any reason to attempt to figure out what its problem is.
However, I may use some variation on this version for the interior pages of the third/sixth chapter (keeping in mind that book part-1 will only be half of internet part-1), by which point yibrik’s strangeness will be more welcome, and the spectacle of kumquat going shopping at a conventional supermarket, with pog and yibrik, will be more apparent as strange, and likewise welcome in its strangeness. I meant it here to be strange, but now realize it is likely to be taken in the Pixar mundane-conditioning sense of strange, where we see monsters going to a normal-looking school or deformed insects driving in normal looking streets and aren’t even supposed to think there is anything silly about that, which will work in my favor because as I said I need to get normal people to look at what I made, because weird people usually do not have as much money, except when they want me to draw something else.
Of course usually only weirdos read comic books, but you know what I am committed to this and need to do it just to stop fixating on it, so I desire that you stop second-guessing me!
page 39 redrawn from the first part of that
This one has been too-long coming. I drew it differently than the other pages I have been redrawing, where I vectorized and upscaled the line-art. This one had no lineart to vectorize, rather some scribbly experimental technique that while not totally hideous, it was partially so, especially since I changed how I did it halfway down the page, and I dropped it immediately, but never bothered to bring it in line with the pages around it, so I had to redraw it fresh, so it STILL looks out of place, just not as jarringly. There are a few more pages coming where I tried to use pencil lines but I at least used solid colors and less heaps of limbs and so interpreting them should not take nearly as long.
You are no longer a misguided self-insertion so that doesn’t help!
page 38, another one of these. The next page is the one that really needs help, but then I still need to re-do 18 more after that. It seems inefficient and futile, but so is eating chocolate cookies. That is just how my life is going.
Concerning content, there is no way krumquat could say all that and shut the door before all before elpse had time to be startled and toss nemitz. The magic of comic strips!
page 7 of part 3 of this questionable comicoid.
I like that the lizard’s nose is a different shape in every frame. At this point the comic primarily exists for me to laugh at that creature.
The last frame probably has too many actions for one frame but i think the order is apparent eventually.
I decided somebody should actually hold the shopping bag by its handles once before it passes from relevance, to justify drawing them all this time. I would like you to think I deliberately avoided using them as some subtle commentary on how dumb these imps are but I do not think that far ahead.
Inconsistencies between here and the last time I showed this apartment are merely my own lack of effort and not deliberate evidence of in-story subterfuge.
page 37 of redraw comic pages, because I am determined to give illogical external guilt priority over all things, but there should be a new non-old page before [specific period of time].
I was dwelling on what to replace the zelda screenshots with, because I did not for the time being have the patience to construct a series of fake nes screenshots that look like a real ones when reduced for a gag that almost nobody would notice, but since these were just mouse-drawn impressions to begin with, and have now been vectorized and re-rasterized, it would be impossible to prove that any intellectual property is being violated here; only imitated. The full-on one on the previous page was legitimate so I replaced it with a scene from a super mario world rom-hack I was involved with which, as per my usual contract, was never finished, though the level I contributed graphics to was.
By the wuh: there is somebody else who hassles me for still playing the game Doom and designing little add-ons for my personal amusement instead of starting a new game in a free 3d development system like Unity for big buck$ because Doom is an outmoded “hipster luddite” gaming engine that is deliberately hard to work with. But compared to Super Mario World, Doom editing is like eating an ice cream sandwich, and mario is one of the easier ones. I find the frightful hellish experience of 21 years ago rather relaxing at this point, and I use it as relief for other annoying obligations rather than to make it an obligation in itself. I do it while listening to classical music. In fact I do not often like classical music in other contexts. Also, the person I did the mario thing with is one of my more trusted acquaintances so this should not be taken as hostility about that either. But rom-hacking is miserable work that gives very little to show for your effort.
And for those following the brief sniplets of my personal non-internet soap stopera, the performance I believed I would be doing the next day last time did not occur because the show ran long due to “technical difficulties.” I cannot now commit to doing it at the next show because I may be kidnapped by skeletons next week.
Anyway, what is important is that asking me to do anything means it will never get done to anyone’s satisfaction and everyone will be very angry afterward.
page 36 of the old part 1 of that? Yes.
Even when I reused the old drawing this took a week. It looks as if every one of these pages will need to be significantly overhauled before I may rest. I will be remaking broken trash until I die. Just like Lunar Silver Star Story, a 1997 Playstation remake of a 1992 Sega CD game, that has since been repolished and repackaged as a new game two or more times, (like what Capcom did with Street Fighter 2 stretched across two decades instead of two years), except without anime to distract people from the lack of improvements over plainly dated content. And also I do it alone for free, at nobody’s insistence but my own. But I think this is superior to before.
that makes me feel better!
page 35 of the old part 1 of that
Hopefully this is the last page that needs new drawings, but I have said that before! And extensive panel re-arrangement will still be needed in the ybrik section, where I knew even at the time I drew it that I would have to come back and split it into more pages later. I sure know how to plan ahead.
The cartoon which pog watches on this one I had not thought the slightest bit about in apparently nearly ten years, going by the October 2005 date on the .fla-fla flash file “thingswithproblems.fla”. This would be a great opportunity to put something clever or legitimately satirical there, but I could not think of anything I could put here that would work that I was also comfortable having in my “serious” comic strip. Initially, ten years ago (and it appears as if I only got around to changing it LAST year), I had the right one handing over a vibrator, or the only thing I could turn up in an image search for the word that was not specifically sculpted to resemble a phallus, and it bothered me. It bothered me that I would not put a “real” one there, but if I had that would have bothered me even more! Now see here, I cannot make a sex joke because I have never done any sex deeds and I have no idea how many normal people actually know what a vibrator looks like, and if they would be able to pick one out that was atypical of the pictures I could find of them. Literally my only sight of one prior to then had been a Mad-TV sketch called Sex Toy Story that aired in 1997 or thereabouts, (the period when I thought I was pretty bad for daring to say “go the hell”) in which “Buzz Lighttouch” had a fairly generic rod-shape, so I assumed I could get away with one, but ultimately I had adequate doubt to remove it. My compromise replacement, an electric hair-cutting machine, is still unpleasant to use on one’s teeth, but no longer gross (even assuming the thing is cleaned once in a while), and thus not in line with the sort of gross cartoon I probably thought I was making fun of ten years ago.
Consider that tomorrow/today is April foist, April’s Fool Day, a 47 hour period known for its varied pranks, which run the range all the way from annoying to obnoxious. However, in order for a prank to be effective, there must be a shared level of understanding between the prank-applier and the prank-receiver. When I am kidding, people think I am serious, and when I am serious nobody knows what I am talking about, and just nod and say “yeahhhhh” because I am perceived as too unstable to be told the truth about how foolish I appear (and as such not worth looking for merit in the words of should I not actually be foolish on that occasion). My conception of what is strange about something is often not what somebody else would find strange, and if it relates to something that a normal person does, I probably do not understand how it works to begin with. I don’t even understand how pepper works. Little black dots that you put on your food that make it taste exactly the same, glorious. Therefore pranks, satire and I generally do not get along. I can invent a surrogate object, idea, behavior or structure that has no relation to a real thing, but satire requires reality.
Also I only just realized what day it was.
“Thankfully” actual tv cartoons have not gotten any less cheaply produced in a decade, so that part still goes. I think we can safely agree that pog is watching a terribly-written, awkwardly-paced program regardless of its degree of similarity to one that exists. Unless you think I am kidding.
page 34 of part 1 of that.
Can you believe it, I made the world’s slowest paced comic strip even slower. I like to imagine it will speed up once I have thoroughly established what “normal” is, 130 pages in, but I also like to imagine that eating an 18 inch diameter bacon-topped pizza once a week is not going to have lasting negative consequences. Show me another comic strip where it takes five years of real time for one fictional day to pass and I will ask you why you bothered, given my record of intense jealousy/hostility when shown anything.
Yes here it is, another page inserted among the redraws that it has nothing stylistically in common with. My current “plan” is to split “part 1” into two sub parts for my test printing, which necessitates a clean break right about this point, and this will begin part 2 of part 1, because 33 pages cost less to print than 65.
I suppose this could be “cleaner,” and I deliberately disregarded a note I wrote to myself, “start zoomed out,” because I forgot the reason I wrote it. The first scene of a story or in a new location should start zoomed out, or zoomed in, by my reckoning. This is zoomed in, but not taking up enough space that it works. But in the “full” book it will follow directly from an out-zoomed look at the same thing. Of course I then will not need the clean break I set up these two pages to create, but apart from that it explains, or is the closest I have come to explaining where elpse and nemitz are going, and I do not want it to seem like I just made it up “now” when elpse tells the lizard what they are doing in the nextish “new” pages I am drawing, even if I did make it up just now, because when I first drew them I was not even considering them far enough ahead that I considered they were going anywhere.
There is the cost, and also I am at this point terribly impatient with the process and myself, and not interested in spending another year redrawing pages before I finally take the chance and realize “oops” it does not work after eh. It certainly does not work on tapastic, the comic strip community website, where the image size is capped at 940 pixels wide, yet narrower than I already show things, so if anything it will be HARDER to read, and requiring another full set of jpgs at the different size! Oh is my work never done? Moments after my registering, a variety of automated messages posing as human acknowledgment reminded me that people only read comics on mobile devices these days and that I had better plan my project to have big text and vertically scrolling frames. If you have already been drawing a comic for years and haven’t either had a quantifiable success or given up you are a statistical anomaly and not worth considering.
Technology is REGRESSING and proud of itself for doing so. Tapastic is at least immensely superior to tumblr in its display capabilities and organization; it actually HAS some.
By the wuh that is tap-astic, not taptastic, which I was certain it was for several days. I assumed it was some play on “fantastic” that I was not grasping, and perhaps should be glad that it is not a traceable play on anything because I am an ancient out of touch bog monster that barely comprehends what the other bog monsters are doing.
In fact the person who initially had an issue with the red and green imps not being explained also believes that print, the realm of media, is a person who is dead, and so if I trust his opinion at all, only my own latter purpose is served. He also hates old people. Unfortunately old people (that is, anyone older than me, which really is not THAT old) are the ones who buy my pictures at at local art exhibitions! No no no, I cannot connect with younger folk. They have too many rules. They want comic strips featuring minimally defined smiling lumps that always explain what they are doing, except when they are referencing tv shows or movies, references the grasping of which the entire project rests on, which will not be explained, and somehow despite such conditions for readership do quite well for themselves. If I have any shot at selling this comic to anybody it will be the surviving 40-year olds who still buy comic books but are not opposed to the idea of going outside the major established brands, plus anyone I personally coerce who knows they can see it on the internet for free. There are younger comic book buyers, but they already got word that I broke the rules. They know that I have never donated money to incentivize the playing of a video game by a party other than myself or publicly upheld the honor of my “childhood.” Also the comic is kind of boring.
That seems like a bitter plea for encouragement, but the existence of this post should be taken as evidence that against all reason I have not given up. I over-analyze my situation and discuss the negative aspects. But I have been poking at the work almost as long as the audience I am missing has lived; I do not know how to give up! I do not remember what I did before it! Apart from being annoyed at myself for not having started yet, and really want to stop going to school, and I did both those things. That is good!
page 6 of this
My fake inking is getting better. My speed is not. And still nothing exciting is happening. But I think as long as I can laugh at the comic it has a reason to exist. It is unfortunate that today’s issue is so serious! For example, That lizard thinks people are impressed by it! it thinks it can tell people what to do! Know this: whatever it demands, I refuse!
And nemitz thinks it can tell elpse what to do! Why are the most punchable characters the most proud and bossy? I am tired of nemitz acting humble, such as standing calmly with its mitts clasped behind its back. Nemitz invented hubris!
The only good thing i can say about the lizard is that it usually fixates on elpse and ignores nemitz. If only we all had such power!
On some hypothetical day when I am famous somebody will analyze all the comic’s dialog and try to figure out why nemitz is saying “eestgranby” here. There is a town in connecticut called East Granby. I have never been there, but I have seen it on maps and heard it mentioned on news reports. I just think it is a stupid-sounding name for a town and nemitz looked like it was saying something stupid here. i scripted it to say “offenbach” but of course nemitz never reads the script. And usually it attempts to disguise real-ish words or names if it is saying one, but here it just changed one letter. I am getting tired of nemitz’s laziness. Note that I differentiate between tired and lazy. Nemitz COULD do better, mit merely chooses not to.
Page 5 of part 3 of this.
This sometimes seems like a series of related vaudeville routines more than a story. This was initially a more antagonistic exchange, and although elpse’s recusement on the previous page was meant to show that elpse anticipates one just like those the antagonistic exchanges it had earler, I decided I did not want to be as repetitious as I had already hinted I was about to be. I may have written that out BEFORE I drew elpse’s first argument, in 2008ish, and I may have subconsciously plundered those remarks for other arguments. I remember scribbling it in a notebook my FIRST time in college. I did not know what lope had done at the hospital but I knew getting back into its apartment would be troublesome. Anyway this way is less “funny” but considerably more lopey, which I think is funny, but some people mistake it for sincerity, and pity the creature, and that may have gotten me some print sales at my previous art exhibitions, so perhaps this way is best.
The backgrounds are getting vaguer. I think I can solve my problem with losing patience with my base sketch before it is done and my boring environments at the same time. Going abstract will be easier and will make the settings seem less mundane, I hope. I AM alarmed, however, by how much this lobby inadvertently reminds me of a sega master system game.
To put that comment in perspective, I like them so little that I never use the emulator and thus do not even remember how to get it to start the real game for me to take a screenshot from it, and had to take one of the demo, indicated by the score of 0. In actuality I have several more points than that.
I will have an update on Sunday or my name is not Dwobo Stupwutch. And my name is not Dwobo Stupwutch, but if I fail to display an update that will still be the case.
================================
Page 4 of part 3 of thistle. I keep telling myself when I get a break I will sort out the automated comic system I spent days installing months ago, but I used the break making this new page instead.
The last few times the production got stretched across a lengthy period and I developed a hoard of stupid notes about it that I had to figure out for the website posting. If I did that this time I cannot find any, lucky for you! However, as before, I am concerned about the frequency with which the lizard has been appearing without a mouth lately. I intended to show a picture of it without a mouth here and then looked closer and realized it had a mouth in every pertinent frame, and contradicting me is even worse! I had to waste another minute erasing its mouth in the picture I just showed. Typical pitiful lizard move. Additionally:
I will normally not stick up for dumb imps, but how DARE nemitz talk to elpse that way? How can it live with mitself? Notice how its ears went up just for that remark, like it is prouder of itself than usual. nemitz how would you feel if i said to you “scrobbly doodly nemitz?” Why don’t you think about that awhile. If you have a reason why you don’t I have a reason why I don’t want to hear it!
I wish we could all agree to stop acknowledging nemitz, and just pretend it was not there. Perhaps with time it will choose to not be!