What with Clickwheel blurring the lines and all, you could argue that Homestar Runner is or is not deserving of mention here. But one thing is certain: Strong Bad is himself a comics creator, and you see his comics on the web, so….

Anyway, after a month of no updates, H*R has an update. Thrill as the aforementioned Mr Bad skewers every terrible Hanna-Barbera “Hey, chums, let’s go solve a wacky mystery!” cartoon of my youth. You know that somewhere, Frank Welker is laughing at this, too.

Also after a month or so, Kestrel and her crew are continuing their commented countdown towards … um … something that starts with a “k” sound. Queen of Wands reruns with DVD commentary track, for your enjoyment.

Lastly, we commented earlier on Owen Dunne’s computer loss and revival. Not only is You Damn Kid back, but he’s launched a new strip called My New Mommy (check out the intro here), and revived the hiatused Norman P. Function and the deliciously deranged Nippleshine Manor. That’s four separate strips, for which Dunne has set himself an ambitious update schedule of eleven strips per week (including color Sunday YDK). Here’s hoping that life doesn’t conspire against him, because his work’s always entertaining.

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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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?

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.

One of the more interesting critiques of the new version of The Producers is that it’s shot like it’s on a proscenium stage. The camera is way back, we see the full-height figures, and the actors are projecting to reach the audience in the cheap seats at the back of the balcony. Frame your comic panel like a play, you’ll end up with little bitty characters that you can’t identify unless you make the panels huge. Leaving the Infinite Canvas argument for another day, try this: don’t stage a static play in every panel.

When you bring the camera in closer, all of a sudden you achieve two things: recognition of the characters (which opens up other options; come back tomorrow for more along those lines), and a sense of immediacy. Your readers aren’t looking at an action happening WAY OVER THERE; they’re in the room with the characters. They’re participants.
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If you noticed Jeff Rowland’s initial announcements at Overcompensating regarding changes in how you get your crack Wigu, you saw that there was a super-official announcement forthcoming.

Here it is. Short attention span version:

Jeffrey Rowland, the most talented, handsomest, and strongest member of the Dumbrella alliance has recently announced that his formerly daily comic strip “Wigu” will be updating soon in a monthly format. This American Manga is planned to be released in paper format on a monthly basis, with the online version released a few weeks after the paper version is firmly planted in the hands of its insatiable readers…. Rowland has yet to decide on a printer for this independently published work of mind-boggling genius, but insists that it will be released by February 1 even if he has to hand-print each copy with his own wretched blood on shreds of stolen toilet paper.

In support of Mr Rowland, Fleen will be accepting donations of both blood and toilet paper. Contact us for details on where to send both.

This was important enough not to bury as an edit to the original posting.

According to Gabe in today’s Penny Arcade (scroll down to the second item), this year’s Child’s Play raised $590,000 in cash and toys for childrens hospitals around the world.

Damn, it feels good to type those words.

Ryuko Midori of The Green Avenger has added a new dimension to webcomics criticism: sexiness!

Most surprising bit: Ghastly keeps the tie and pipe even when doing a Chippendales routine. Somewhere, J.R. “Bob” Dobbs is slackishly weeping in envy.

Scariest bit: “A rugged, blurry man, Mr. Rosenberg has hair that models would kill for, and a beard that has killed many a man with jealousy. His gaze seems to say, “I know why you stare, and it is because I am so very handsome.” Why has this man not been contracted to model for the covers of romance novels yet? Harlequin must be KICKING themselves.”

I smell a new signature quote. Bravo, Ms Midori, bravo!