To go along with potentially earth-shattering storylines, R Stevens 3, mad genius behind the wacky robot antics at Diesel Sweeties, has decided to give us a gift for his birthday: a new website.
It’s a sketch blog, if one can be said to “sketch” with pixels, as Stevens digs up things that wouldn’t be seen in other venues. Included in the now-launched iheartpixels: paper dolls!
Happy Birthday, Mr Stevens, and thank you.
Item! The Ryan named Estrada reports that he’s teamed up with LiveJournal to produce a comic about semi-beloved LJ mascot Frank. Says Estrada:
Yeah, this is an official LJ comic. It’s being announced in the mid-January LJ newsletter on the 15th, and will be linked to on the front page of Livejournal, right where the picture of Frank is as soon as it launches. I’ve been working closely with the LJ team on this, though they seem content to give me creative control and let me run with it.
And for you beloved readers, Ryan passed along a link to a super-secret preview of the new strip!
Item! Another view on the topic of giving up control of a character, this one from Lore Sjoberg. Okay, it’s mostly to do with his upcoming flash animation project (link not yet live), but it does relate to his existing character (and star of Lore Brand Comics), Lore. Here at Fleen, we like just saying Lore! Lore, Lore, Lore, Lore, Lore, Lore!
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It seems that a number of different websites have recently taken to using new math to figure out something that might seem at first, important – comic strip “ratings”.
No, I guess I don’t mean ratings – I mean “rankings”. That is, some numerical value arrived at through a supposedly secure mechanism, and supposedly calculated properly, that will indicate in some manner the relative quality of a particular webcomic.
Example 1 of this phenomenon is Top WebComics.
The entire purpose of this website is provide rankings. But it seems that they overlooked a small little security flaw in their methodology. And it strikes me as unlikely that SketchBattle is going to be the only one poisoning the pigeons in this park.
Example 2 is Smack Jeeves.
In addition to “proudly” hosting 13,016 comics (as of current count), they provide a number of different views into their ranking system – Top comics of the month, Top Strips of the Week, Top All-Time Strips, and Top All-Time Comics.
The first time I looked at SmackJeeves was about two weeks ago. The Number #1 Comic of All Time was a really really crappy sprite comic that had a total of 4 Ratings. Yep. 4. The comic “artist” had either signed up 4 phony accounts, or gotten his one friend to sign up a couple of phony accounts as well, and given himself the highest ratings he could.
A reasonable method of calculating rankings of comics on a site – based on user feedback – would be to INCLUDE the total number of rankings in your calculation. Otherwise, why bother letting more than one person rate a comic anyway? And then something sensible would occur – a comic that had 300 people decide that it was a good comic would always be rated better than a comic that had 2 people think it was a good comic.
The huge drama factor that is associated with the SmackJeeves ratings system, in their community, is thus at least an order of magnitude (that’s 10 times bigger for the calculationally challenged among you) more humorous given the major flaws in it. Last I looked there were at least four separate threads devoted to “Someone ranked me badly! WAAAAAAAA”.
Math – it’s not just for getting your G.E.D anymore.
A quick follow-up to a previous post.
DrunkDuck is back live again. So pop in to their forum and say “Hi” or “Welcome Back”.
Update: It appears to be back live again, again. Shelley Winters has nothing on these guys.
The very first strip of RSteven‘s Diesel Sweeties introduces us to Maura and Clango, who are clearly madly in love. Maura is a porn star and Clango is a robot. But you knew that, because you’ve been paying at least a little bit of attention to this thing we call webcomics.
One thousand and eighty three strips later, Maura cheats on Clango. And they break up.
But today… Ah! Today, Rich decides to play with us.
Will the greatest lovers in webcomics get back together?
I’m glued to my screen.
No, really.
Where’s that acetone?
Note: Whatever else this series may or may not have accomplished, it certainly got some feedback. Read through the comments for parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. If you haven’t done so previously, check out the work of Lucas TDS, Paul Southworth, Sylvan Migdal, Shaenon Garrity, Jeph Jacques, Christopher Livingston, Sam Logan, and Christopher B. Wright. That’s a lot of webcomics experience talking, and well worth listening to, especially when they agree with me. Okay, onto Part The Last!
Whew! And it all sounded so easy, didn’t it? Some paper, some pencils, a scanner, and a Webcomics Nation account was all that you needed. Hopefully, the past week has given you a few ideas to chew on, and it should be all downhill from here, right?
Right?
Well, sure. Once you figure out where to place word balloons and decide on hand-lettering or a typeface. Oh, and how you’re going to place panels. Plus, characters and story, they have to be interesting. There’s a zillion other things to figure out as you go along, including the part where you decide when to break every single one of these rules o’ readability to fit the story that you’re trying to tell.
And most of all, you have to practice. Let’s revisit the master again, shall we?
… my first instructor at Chouinard Art Institute … greeted his students with the following grim edict: “All of you here have one hundred thousand bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone.” This was not a discouraging statement to me, because I was already well into my third hundred thousand.
— Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck
Almost no matter what you do, you’re going to look back on early efforts and see stuff you would do differently. And with any luck, one hundred thousand drawings later you’ll find that you’re doing things are much, much better. You start drawing, and we’ll start reading. Deal?
Apparently, T Campbell read the previous Fleen article and realized that his competitors were a step ahead of him again.
So he re-launched Clickwheel.
Now I’m going to have to try this out for myself and see how bad it is to watch cartoons or read comics on my iPod.
Once I get my less-than-a-month-old iPod working again. Hooray for AppleCare!
If you’re still with us, today is the long post; maybe you should get a refreshing beverage before you start reading.
It’s time to see if it’s easy to tell characters apart. Fortunately, this is probably where you’ll have the most leeway in a comic; your readers have had a lifetime of training that tells them down in their guts that “comics = a certain degree of looseness in anatomical representation”. Not that you should abandon anatomy entirely, mind (drag out Chuck Amuck again and flip to How to Make a Tennis Shoe for a Percheron), but within certain broad limits, you can exaggerate characters visually in whatever way you need or want to.
Even in a more realistic strip, there’s room for variation of height, build, hair, and suchlike. If you really want to see how different “real” people can look, check out Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise. Yes, it’s a print comic, but go buy a copy of issue #78 anyway. Check out the variety of character designs he uses, especially the effectiveness of switching between illustrative and cartoony styles on pages 15 – 1 7. You can do that! That’s the really cool part: you don’t get to design just one look for your characters … you get to design a bunch. In addition to making things more or less cartoony, play around with posture, clothing, POV, and especially posing.
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It seems that Andy Bell is quite the bastard. Quick version of his perfidy:
Cyberspace was rocked today with the news that wretched man-child and Dumbrella associate Andrew Bell was seen extinguishing a cigarette on the arm of a five-year-old boy…. The boy, possibly a deaf-mute, apparently seemed unable or unwilling to communicate in any way…. “It doesn’t surprise me in the least,” admitted Dumbrella co-founder R Stevens. “You’ve seen the guy’s art, right?”
For shame, Mr Bell, for shame. Fleen urges all right-thinking folk to visit Mr Bell’s website and buy a shirt so that the man can afford the therapy he so desperately needs.
Bobby Shaftoe knows a thing or two about infrastructure. In Neal‘s little book, he reminisces about various types of saws that he had worked with, and describes in detail a lumber mill’s bandsaw. The main difference between all of the saws that he worked with was the infrastructure that they came with. A hand saw had only as much power as the person using it. A power saw could cut more things and cut faster – but a hand held power saw could only cut some things and on larger or tougher materials it would slow down or heat up or jam. But the lumber mill saw would cut anything and it would never ever slow down or jam or get noticably hotter – because of the supporting infrastructure.
Some webcomics out there really need a lot of infrastructure. With tens of thousands of visitors out there, they need redundant systems with a very high speed connection and lots and lots of bandwidth capacity from their host. They need backup systems and might even need disaster recovery scenarios. Unique page-views directly ties into profitablility. And you simply can’t sustain large viewership without deriving revenue from them.
Most webcomics don’t need that (yet). But there is a bare minimum of infrastructure you need if you want to keep any visitors that you get from whatever forms of shameless self-promotion you do (and shameless self-promotion is about the only way to be heard above the crowd. There are thousands of webcomics being produced currently.)
The following items are absolutely required if you want to have regular readers:
It’s a short list. Don’t publish without it.
The following items are very very helpful.
Note the first place that “blog” shows up. And note what it’s used for – reader comments and feedback.
LiveJournal is not the place to publish your comic if you expect anyone to take you seriously. Neither is MySpace or any other “social networking” or “personal journaling” tool.
There are lots of websites out there that are happy to provide you with the basics of webcomic infrastructure. Some of them will even do it for free. If your comic is good enough or you are persuasive or persistant enough, you can join a collective and make use of their infrastructure. Or you can start your own collective and use your combined might to browbeat a geek into building some infrastructure for you.
If you've got webcomics-related news, insight, rumors, gossip, or shameless press releases, let us know.
