Tag Archives | (Web)Comics rock

Why Two Comics? A Tale Of Artistic Attachement.

Posted on March 30, 2012 in On Silent Suns, On Traces of Chaos, Thoughts & Musings

Maybe it’s a bit odd to work on starting a second comic when I have problems with keeping the first one going, but well…

Traces of Chaos is my baby.

The thing with us creative types is the second a work becomes your baby, you stop seeing it clearly. If you’re in love with something, you’re going to have a tough time seeing its faults.1 Assessing your own art is hard. Being attached to it makes it even harder. The creative world is littered with examples of works that took a quality nose-dive because the creator lost the ability to check their own work.

But I still adore Silent Suns.

Otherwise I wouldn’t bother writing and drawing it. The story feels solid, the setting entertains me, and it’s a certain kind of pulpy, dark humored science fiction fun you only get once a moon and which I am desperatly missing in the webcomic world. I’m pretty sure that Silent Suns will gain a far bigger following that Traces of Chaos ever will.

For starters, there are no icky furry things in SiS, which, despite being quite well liked in certain depths of the internet, are still putting off the majority of potential readers. Secondly, the female characters in SiS are more… classically attractive than Siendes. As much as I love Siendes2, I am fully aware that my attraction to muscle gals is not as widely shared as I’d love it to be. Thirdly ToC has a much slower narrative rythmn than SiS, which tends to be a deathknell here in the fast paced internet world.

SiS even might be objectivly better than ToC ever will be, simply because I’ll be much more capable of doing quality control on SiS than I am on ToC.

And you know what? I am fine with it.

It’s about pets and racehorses.

I love my cats and I go through a lot of bullshit for them, but that doesn’t change the fact that they have no real productive use.  They haven’t caught or even seen a mouse in their whole life. My cats, they’re for cuddling.

Same with Traces of Chaos. It’s a labour of love and I’m allowed to coddle it. If it takes ages to be completed, well, shit happens. There’s no compromise I am willing to do when it comes to the story and art, and well, I’m fully aware that no, this is not necessary a good thing. ToC’s a hobby.

But Silent Suns is going to be a racehorse. It’ll get everything it needs, too.  Racehorses, service dogs, all working animals need heaps of training and care, too. They’re often more expensive than pets, too, because it’s hard, directed work to allow them perform at their best. But perform they should. Just like Silent Suns should update thrice weekly and eventually pay my bills.

My pet-project spot’s already taken, afterall.

Footnotes:

  1. It’s not even a contradiction to the “my work sucks so much” many creative types suffer from. You can suffer from chronic self-deprecation and still grossly over-estimate the creative value of your pet projects; it just means that you miss what’s really good in your work because you’re blinded by your prejeduces. ↩
  2. And I DO. She and Chalcara are my favourite characters I’ve ever inveted. ↩
Permalink · Comments { 0 }

Lady Sabre & the curious design decision

Posted on July 25, 2011 in Thoughts & Musings

Lady Sabre

Lady Sabre © Nervous Habit, Inc. & Rick Burchett

So…

Lady Sabre & The Pirates of the ineffable Aether.

It’s a sparkling new webcomic. It’s so new, it’s archieves consists of a whopping five pages. The title’s a mouthful (and hard to abbreviate, too), but the pages so far are very promising: Solid visual narrative, real nice lineart and the colouring, while not inspiring, is good enough and better than anything I could produce.

Well, no surprise there: It’s actually made by comic professionals1. As long as those two keep interest, this comic will go places. It’ll easily be able to play with the likes of Girl Genius and similiar adventure stories and I’m glad to have found it this early.

But why in three devil’s names did they decide to put the comic scripts on the webpage itself?!

It’s not even a transcript like in the Schlock Mercenary archives, no, no, no. Transcripts are useful. They allow dialogue search, aid visual impaired readers and allow the comic’s content to be indexed for add bots if you so wish. If you have the time and inclination to handle them2, then by all means go for them; transcripts are grand!

But Lady Sabre shows the solid, straight, this-is-what-the-artist-draws-from comic script (excluding all the late stage design decisions mind you) in a prominent place right under the comic. The placement is important: It’s one thing to show the script in the forum for the curious onlookers, or a bit hidden so that it’s clearly marked as extra, an addition to the comic. But it isn’t and that’s a problem. Right now it’s not even marked as a script. I mistook it for author commentary at first.

You can argue if the script should be there or not, but that’s a a matter of personal taste3. But eitherway, right now it’s displayed too promimently. It takes more visiual estate than the comic itself! In any given layout, people tend to associate size and prominence with importance and so on page 3 the author had to explain that the comic’s continuity takes precendence over what’s standing in the script – something that could’ve prevented easily by a different webdesign decision, like marking the script clearly as extra or hiding it behing a popout menu.

But the current situation is kinda like a stage magician showing how it’s tricks are done in the show; or an epic movie interrupting it’s scenes in order to show how the sets are built. Like fantastic novel being interspersed with its first draft so that the reader can compare.

Lady Sabre

art characters © Nervous Habit, Inc. & Rick Burchett


Now the comic has too much going for it that my gripe with the direct script will slow it down noticeably. And now that they started showing the scripts, there would be an outrage if they suddenly were to vanish.

But in the end, this design decision does take a bit magic out of the comic itself. Instead of standing on its own, it’s leaning on the transcript.

So Annoying. Because otherwise both the webpage and the comic are great.

…

That reminds me, I need to fix trarr.net‘s index page…

Footnotes:

  1. Which, frankly, makes the fully dressed heroine a bit surprising, but I am not gonna gripe about THAT. I’m way to busy squealing in joy. Fully dressed heroine! EEEEEEEEE! ↩
  2. I don’t. Even outsourced transcripts have to be supervised. ↩
  3. I’m in the “no” camp. I do not even allow comments, so that there’s no distraction from the story. The creators of Lady Sabre clearly do not share my oppinion there. ↩
Permalink · Comments { 2 }

Caries inducing cute :)

Posted on July 11, 2011 in Thoughts & Musings

My Milk Toof

Sometimes things fill a hole in your life you didn’t know you had.  MY MILK TOOF is one of those things.

 

Not a webcomic in the general sense, but still close enough. Some of the posts tell cute little stories with nothing but fotos and some short captions. Fear the power of a properly set up image!

Permalink · Comments { 8 }

…

Posted on July 2, 2011 in Thoughts & Musings

I freely admit, this strip made me cry.

My own granddad is suffering from Alzheimers, and well it hits double home. So, yeah, ouch.

 

It’s kinda interesting how the acidic and mean cast from Something Positive manages to hit the sniffle button five times as many as any other webcomic, book (or hell, anything!) I read. I mean, this storyline started with Fred (the redhead’s Christian-to-the-core adoptive father) finding his daughter’s girlfriend’s drug stash and subsequently criticizing his daughter’s care of her sextoy – and him creating a display mounting of them in the living room.

It’s all been the sarcastic, schadenfreude laughs that made Something Positive so great, and then, boom. Cryfest. And it’s not the first time that happened.

 

Well played, Randy Millholland. Well played.

Permalink · Comments { 0 }

Art in comics

Posted on April 19, 2011 in Thoughts & Musings

So, it’s kinda clear that you don’t have art for art’s sake in a comic. Everything must’ve a purpose. What was less obvious to me is that you can’t have art for the story’s sake, either.

Art IS the story.

And such follows:

  1. Dialogue becomes part of the art.
    How it looks is as important as what it says. Speechbubbles and the text itself are important design elements. Ideally design enhances the written word and vice versa.
  2. In a comic the art is both, the medium and the message.
    If the reader notices the perfectly executed lightning or the horrible anatomy before the plight of my characters, it’s a story telling failure.
    Overworking is just as bad as being too rough. Both pulls the reader out of the story and breaks the spell that is the narration.
  3. If the art is the story, then the style sets the mood.
    A rough shadowrun-style cyberpunk story needs a different style than a childrens bedtime fairy tale.

So what does that mean for Traces of Chaos?

I’m not sure yet. But I’m going to find out – and I’ll start by making sure the art doesn’t confuse people about what happens in the story.

Permalink · Comments { 7 }