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All responses Most smiled responses
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It's the ice cream of the future.
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The latter. I cannot survive without making comics, my brain will evaporate out of my head, and so I might as well put them online. I have not had the time to make comics with the amount of unrelated work and responsibility I have at the moment.
I apologize for the lack of communication, and am exceedingly grateful for the respectful inquiries I've received. I feel very lucky to have readers who appreciate what I do, and your patience will be rewarded. -
I never was. I've been hit hard with a lot of non-comics related work and am struggling to handle it. My hope was that the time off would let me wrap it up and get ahead on comics, but that didn't happen. You should expect new comics approximately weekly for the time being.
I'm not happy about this, of course. But let's imagine that this will lead to a brighter future full of amazing stuff, okay? Rest assured that the hiatus, followed by this decrease in output, is intended to ensure that Good Comics get made. -
Not remotely at all. Sometimes, rarely, I'll get three good ideas in a row, on a Sunday, and then the week is an easy stroll. I'm not usually happy with writing a week at once, though, as if I need time between ideas to make sure they're different enough.
Which is probably an aspect of creative discipline I need to work on, since having a buffer is essential, and being able to work for long stretches without task switches is also really good. Like, if I can spend a day just pencilling, then that's a really good productive day.
Writing, pencilling, inking, colouring, all in one day, I can only get a comic a day done.
... Did I answer the question? -
Yeah, even if I don't get a table.
You know, last year I made the first minicomic (first, he says, like there are others) in a WEEK before TCAF because I had to have SOMETHING! So I'll probably manage to get another one done much the same way. A lot of excellent people who DID have tables ended up with copies of my mini. LIKE JIM FREAKING WOODRING, DAMN.
As for having a table, I'm apparently on the waiting list and will hear in the next week or so. -
Oh man, yeah. That got way out of hand.
Okay so originally there was going to be a big old Friday comic with all the thesis projects as well as information as to who was actually on the drug. Then I had a whole bunch of work to do, and ran out of time, so I decided to go into more of what happens LATER, which is that Dr Quickly starts secretly medicating the entire populace with all sorts of different things. And it turns out to be the right thing to do! So he's ostensibly doing something profoundly immoral that has vast positive consequences for all of society. A TRICKY SITUATION.
I couldn't end up doing that justice either, and dropped it. It's really hard to do justice to longer-form story ideas when I have so little time. This is partly why the second issue of the minicomic isn't done yet, I see no point in making people PAY for hasty stuff.
Let's hope I can figure it out. -
Yes, absolutely. There's much more to the story, not least because it deals with an absolutely critical point in the timeline of my comics.
It's obviously not coming out every two months, though, eh? Shame on me. -
Right now I have a stack of about 40 "flagged", which means I've taken the time to consider them already. There are another 200 or so that I haven't gone through as carefully yet. Oddly, I'm more likely to draw comics from the "unflagged" stash simply because it's fun to page through the suggestions until something strikes my fancy. Normally I get about 5 or 6 suggestions a week. I try to pick someone who hasn't had a used suggestion for at least a couple months.
At worst, I start about eight different comics with different suggestions before coming up with something I can use. Typically I write comics one at a time (but I'm trying to change that, to build a buffer), so I often end up in serious trouble for Wednesday if I picked a suggestion that has an Obvious Solution! Except... I've never sat for more than about 10 minutes without coming up with something to draw. I like to set a five minute timer and ONLY come up with ideas for five minutes. That's enough to get the juices flowing! More people should try that, I have a suspicion that "creative block" is actually a sort of disguised procrastination (c.f. Temporal Motivational Theory, http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Steel-The-Nature-of-Procrastination.pdf ).
Not to say I'm a master of my time and effort, of course. I have a lot of trouble getting things done! -
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asked by TWoI
Everything. The half closest to me.
I'm not likely to be able to move fast enough ever ever ever to get to the other half of everything ever. So then I'd be ULTRA-EMPEROR of my entire future light cone. -
asked by webbedspace
I think there's a sequence in Gargantua and Pantagruel where Gargantua is trying his vacuum cleaner on various objects to see which one allows him to travel through time the best, so it's kind of a common trope.
Using one of your suggestions is, frankly, overdue. Thanks for adding the quote to TV Tropes! (shut up, I don't get a lot of referrals) -
Probably not. For one thing, Noël isn't a supernatural being. For another, there's been no sign of him anywhere else in the comic. Does that mean Noël is using "brother" in a different sense? No... it just means the scene worked better with a hint of familial discord. Plus it reinforces the image of Noël as traditionally-evil to have her employing a sibling in her sweatshop. This isn't, however, one of the non-canon comics (the U.U.S. makes a couple other appearances, sort of). I just fudged with the facts for... some reason.
It's like with Li'l Beefy, who I thought was a completely one-off incidental character I had made up for a punchline, but then it turned out he shows up in vast swaths of the continuity in ways I had never noticed before.
Yes, the metered-acquisition marketplace system is canon, for quite a long time. The premise is that based on your social contribution you get a certain number of tokens to spend on any material good. Toothbrush: one token. House: one token. Light bulb: one token. Once you reach the age of majority, you get your one-a-week allowance regardless of contribution.
I am keeping track, but it's not like I have a spreadsheet or anything. One of the features of the continuity is that it takes place over a vast time and space in, oddly enough, a single city. I hope I can eventually explain that enough (probably in the minicomics which I'm still working on!) to satisfy. Another feature is that a lot of the time I feel like this stuff is being channelled through me and I just go where it takes me... and it always works out in the end. -
Yes. Also she's pink instead of red, which is ridiculous.
The original character design for Rabish -- a character invented by a fellow who at the time was the Little Kid Across The Street, and is now a University Graduate according to facebook -- had her with a ponytail, but I thought it would be too hard to have that visible from enough angles to tell the monsters apart, so I changed it to a bow.
But yes, a thousand times yes, it's a little bit cliché. I also wish I had designed characters with hands (difficult to convey gestures with mitten-paws) and eyes (difficult to convey expressions with slits).
But that was almost twenty years ago...
So really all I can do at this point is Move On, somehow, at some point. Maybe learn to draw people.
(Incidentally: http://nameremoved.com/comics/465/ ) -
Good eye! They're a thick-skinned bubble that comes up through the lake of blood past the mountain range ( http://nameremoved.com/comics/369/ ). They eventually burst in the upper atmosphere. The lake is actually full of a thick soup of phytoplankton. Some sort of terraforming scheme.
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Slim to high! It's not likely that I'll focus on other denizens of Desperonto, the City Everywhere, simply because I'm most familiar with the central few -- and, confidentially, have made agreements with them to highlight their actions in particular. Li'l Beefy was a surprise, especially since he turned out to be around in such a vast swath of the continuity. There is of course the constant spray of incidental monsters, square- and round-head, slit- and hole-eyed, yellow, green, orange, and blue. They all have lives of their own, often just as perplexing and convoluted and interesting as the nigh-immortal vastly-replicated universal citizens of the main story.
Nevertheless, I am learning how to draw people (properly) and will probably introduce a batch of humans as characters in a separate (or distantly related) continuity at some point. -
By taking a cellular sample, reverting it to stem state, splitting it a bunch of times, and running the resulting cells through early-development hormone gradients. This creates a nice mass of frogspawn.
There may be other ways to clone Space Frogs, like grafting, or photocopying. It depends on what a Space Frog really is, which answer varies depending on which phase of the continuity is relevant. -
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ha ha whoops!
that would be because I coloured it in GREAT HASTE. The two mitten-paw colours you see there were randomly assigned by the bpelt multifill plugin. -
Photoshop.
A bit of background: I draw it all by hand, using either crowquill or sable brush. Lettering and rules are technical pens (currently Copic refillables). Pencils are a few different Col-Erase colours, depending on what part I'm working on. I like green for rules, blue for text, and red for art.
I erase pencils, scan (in two pieces) at 600dpi, giving a final, stitched together image of about 5200px square. I scale it up to 1200dpi, adjust levels and do a threshold (at around 180), then scale back down to 600 using "nearest neighbour". Then I clean up specks, overlaps, bad rules, typos... Monday's comic had "sheperd" instead of "shepherd", so I copied the "h" from "Rabish".
I duplicate the ink layer, set the top one to multiply, and select the lower layer and use the awesome BPELT plugins to flat the colours: http://www.bpelt.com/psplugins/flatting.html I often forget to close gaps in my linework before doing that. WHAT A PAIN.
Rabid and the rest of the characters are all coloured out of the default Photoshop palette. That was a decision made years ago to keep me from getting into trouble if my computer crashed. Backgrounds and props are usually coloured by choosing a few complementary Pantone swatches and working in shades off those. The secret, of course, is that I'm actually fairly colourblind, so I rely on a numeric understanding of colour most of the time. I do all the colouring in one panel, then move on to the next. Using shades of pantone colours started around June last year, with Space Frog, Rapper. I think it works nicely.
Shading is done using a trick I learned from Evan Dahm ( http://www.rice-boy.com/ ), where you make a multiply layer at around 50% and draw a (usually) saturated shade colour into it. When I met him at TCAF I thanked him directly for explaining that technique. Shading is done after colouring is finished. Rim light makes things look good (like in Super Mario Galaxy! ha ha)
Most of the steps like scaling and flatting and making shade layers is automated via Actions, which saves a lot of time. I keep Actions set to button mode so I can toggle my shade layer between Multiply and Normal (so I can eyedropper different shade colours accurately).
The most recent comic (Everybody's Pie (for a while)) has another thing going on -- in the fourth and fifth panels, there's a layer of ugly orange set to Hard Light around 50% for the sodium lamp glare. There's also a darker blue overlay in the inverse area of the orange. I wonder if there's a way to have a mask apply to two layers at once, but inverted on one...
So once that's done, and note that there are NO blended colours -- the ink layer is monochrome, and there is no antialiasing in the colour or shade layer, I reduce it to 550px wide using "bilinear scaling". This is really important, because the other scaling methods introduce artifacting on sharp colour transitions (you can see it in some older comics, where there are single pixels of bright red in shaded areas of Rabid's body up against the ink line).
Sometimes I need to colour ink -- make a speech bubble red or something. When that happens, the easiest thing to do is delete all the white out of that layer, set it back to Normal blending, and lock the transparency.
I always use the pencil tool, and make sure eraser and lasso are set to NOT anti-alias.
Interestingly, the scale and threshold trick works really nicely to clean up shaded pencil art, as long as you scan it at a high enough resolution to begin with.
blah blah blah honk honk honk -
With love and the finest ingredients.
Osso Bucco Pie: cook a hearty stew of shins (pre-browned in a pan) and vegetables, render it down to a thick sauce. Let it cool to room temperature. Make a crust and top, pour the stew in, poke a steam vent. Bake until the crust is set and the filling is hot. You may want to brush egg on the crust for shine. Not sure if you'd want to mix in a gremolata before baking, but it might be really good.
Lentil Dal Shepherd's Pie: Make a strong and spicy sambaar (I recommend the lentil + radish sauce on p137 of Julie Sahni's "Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking"). For the crust, make an Aloo Bharta that isn't at all spicy, but put the juice of a lime in it. Bake it like a regular shepherd's pie. The sour, starchy crust should be a relief from the spice of the sambaar. This is vegan.
Deep Dish Pesto Pizza Pie: Pretty straightforward! Use a big chicago-style pan. I recommend the stuffed construction instead of pure deep-dish. For fillings, use pesto sauce, pecorino romano and mozzarella, mushrooms, whole basil leaves, diced cremini mushrooms, and whatever else you might want. Spicy olives would probably be good. Shredded sopressata? On the top, more pesto and broad thin sheets of parmesan.
Cherry Coffee Chiffon Pie: Use the darkest, sourest, cherries you can find. Boil them into a thick slurry as with any chiffon pie (you can use thickeners other than gelatin if you want, fine by me! some people use marshmallow!!). Add 4 to 8 shots of ristretto espresso. Pour into a blind baked graham cracker crust, and chill. You will PROBABLY need to punch the sweetness up, because of the coffee. Dark maple syrup might be just the thing.
Dark Chocolate and Spicy Pecan Brittle Pie: Spicy pecans are glazed with egg white and cinnamon, paprika, brown sugar, then roasted. Experiment with spice blends, there's a lot of room for experimentation and it's pretty much always delicious. Cook a sugar syrup to hard crack, and as you pour it to set, also pour in some melted dark chocolate (unsweetened, preferably). Mix it as much as you can, then let it set. Then, crush it into little tiny bits. Make a bowl of sweetened whipped cream, stir in most of the shards, and pour into a dessert crust like the chiffon pie. Sprinkle the remaining on top. Cool to set. Good with fruit.
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nick wolfe’s Bio
here i am!!
