Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: webcomix
Four hours later . . .
I was doing fine.
Really, I was.
Then Gimp refused to let me add a “rifle layer.” No rifle. So poor Messy seems to be waving his hands, or something. (Compare to first panel below.)
Also, I must say that while I like my starry sky (done manually, mind you — no clever gimmicks there), I’m not at all sure this was worth the extra effort compared to the black and white version. You tell me if you think it’s that much better. If anything, it looks even more amateurish. I’m developing an even healthier respect for comics artists.
D.
Character models
As there are no models on the web for a bird holding a rifle, I looked instead for a person holding a rifle, and found this:
which is cool and all, but does not quite suit my purposes.
New discovery for me: Cortney Tidwell, who is, well . . . just listen.
Great stuff. I got her album “Don’t Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up.” Not a single dog on that album.
D.
First efforts, tough audience
Hours of grinding, and here’s what I have to show:
What I like about it: it does not look completely unprofessional. The composition isn’t terrible.
What I dislike: just about everything else. I don’t feel that I am producing a “convincing” devolved bird (one whose wings have become arms and hands, rather similar to their hands and feet). The proportions are wrong, unnatural. Isen (the bird) is too dark, you can barely see his eyes.
My resident Web Comic expert, Jake, wouldn’t look at my efforts until I had a completed panel. I showed him the source photos and how I had doctored them and put them all together.
“What did you draw?” he said.
“The desk under the book.”
“So you’re making a cut-and-paste web comic.”
“Well –”
“I’d be impressed if you had drawn it.” And that was that.
Next, I’m going to try using this as a faint layer, over which I can sketch a different draft. This will allow me to punch up the detail on Isen and hopefully fix his upper body proportions. I’m hoping that the many-hours-if-not-days-per-panel is a consequence of the learning curve and not intrinsic to the medium.
Meanwhile, I’m having fun learning Gimp.
D.
What’s this then, an actual idea?
I can feel the muse stretching her arms. She might turn over and go back to sleep, but for the moment, for this evening, she’s been a lean brown bear rising from her cave, grunting at snow, wondering if she might pilfer some poor campers’ freeze-dried lasagna. Not sure what the lasagna is in this metaphor. Other people’s ideas, maybe? Yeah. And my own.
Here’s how it came to me. Karen’s been heavy into anime (and to a lesser degree manga) for some time now, and Jake is into his own favorite medium — web comics, and in particular, the web comics over at MS Paint Adventures. He’s been hyping Homestuck to his parents for some time now, and cajoled his mother into reading. And now I’m into it, too.
It took me a while. Homestuck takes a good long while to sink its hooks into the reader — the author has little concept of narrative drive. You have to stick it out until nearly the end of Act One before getting the sense that hey, maybe the author really does have a plan here, maybe this is a story worth spending time with, maybe, in fact, I’m experiencing a medium far different from anything else out there.
Okay, so maybe that last is hyperbolic. Still, Homestuck strikes me as being quite other. It’s a spoof on text adventures, and in its inception it was interactive, inasmuch as some of the content was reader-generated. According to Jake, the author had an idea where he was going, and so he likely accepted reader-generated suggestions that were either consistent with his story arc or at least not damaging to it.
But back to me. Remember my SF trilogy, the one I got blocked on while editing, which is when I started writing that romance — oh, ages ago? It’s always seemed to me that The Brakan Correspondent (or reconceived as the trilogy, Nest, Flight, and Shrike) would work far better as a graphic novel than as a novel. Ideas like that wither fast, though, especially when (A) my artistic talents are limited — not to mention my time, and (B) I could hardly invest that kind of effort into something that would likely face an even steeper climb to publication than a novel.
What about a web comic, though? Updated a little bit every day. With quite a bit less requirement for high quality artwork (with most web comics, it’s the story and not the art work that draws people in).
The art work is still the greatest barrier for me. I’m not talentless, and I suspect I would get better as time goes on, but the whole thing seems daunting. On the minus side, I’d be looking at a Herculean task. On the plus side, I could stretch it out over many months (if not longer) and I could just maybe attract a whole new batch of readers. And really, readers are what it’s all about, since I still think it’s a fine story that deserves more readers.
Yes, it has occurred to me that I could set the novel up as a PDF and give it away for free as an ebook, but I feel it still needs a good edit before reaching even that stage. And it’s editing that blocked me in the first place. If I reinvented the task in this new and different form, a form which apparently pleases the muse since I can feel her inside my head saying yes yes yes, then I could edit on the fly. Who knows, maybe a whole new story would spin out of the work.
I’ll sleep on it. The muse has gotten hot and bothered before, only to return to her cave, so I’m not gonna run out and buy Photoshop (or some other graphic software) any time soon.
Speaking of which — any suggestions on drawing software?
BTW, I finished Kraken tonight. Great book . . . I’ll try to muster up a review sometime soon.
D.