Waffle

Aggie's been very busy (and very lovely, but that's a whole 'nother matter). Not only has she done a
Thursday update in colour to catch up with the one-a-week schedule, but she's also gone back and added watercolours to the update for April 8. That one, in which Krakatoa dreamed of running with a pack of wolves, was already one of the best pages in the sequence she's done, but it's even better now, so go have another look at it.

Of course, uploading it to the mirror site at Webcomicsnation accomplished nothing but the breaking of that particular archive page, because Webcomicsnation has been a bit crappy lately. But that's a whole 'nother story.

Meanwhile, I've also been busy with drawing Aggie's American Gothic, in a new style based on pencil greytones. I like using pencils this way a lot and I'll definitely be using that style more often in future projects. It's a little bit faster because I don't have to wait for ink to dry, but it's mostly more expressive than the tight ink lines I've been going for in the past decade or so. I've also done some work on Invasion and on a remaster project for some of the work published onsite in 2001.

Since I have a very large image in this post and have some space to fill next to it so I don't screw up the lay-out of the blog, let me mention that I'm unlikely ever to order anything from Amazon again, but that that's not Amazon's fault. The problem with ordering from Amazon is that their deliveries to the Netherlands are going to ship with TNT, which means that if you work full-time, you will either end up

1) going to the post office on a Saturday morning, if yours happens to be even open on a Saturday morning, to wait in a Soviet-style line to be told that yes, they were supposed to have your package but they can't find it in any of the three different locations within the space they keep packages in; or
2) finding a note saying they've delivered it to your neighbours at a number that doesn't exist. I think I know which address they do mean, and I have no idea who lives there and whether they can be trusted not to open the box. They're not my neighbours unless they live in the same block.

If ever there's one privatised service that needs to be renationalised, stat, it's the mail.

Aggie has already announced it in her newsblog so it's time I did the same. The art swap we've been doing will end in June, and Aggie will return to drawing American Gothic Daily herself. However, she will continue drawing Feral for a little longer. The reasons for that are simple: Aggie is a faster artist than me, she wants to see me write the story towards the end and is willing to twist my arm into writing it, and I want to get back to that other ROCR storyline, Invasion, which I've now scripted to the end. So she'll continue to draw Feral while I write it and work on Invasion (and both of us hold down full-time jobs).

The response to the swap has been interesting. Initially, a lot of AGD fans didn't like my style, but as I evolved towards the pencilled greyscale style, the response became more favourable. That, or the critics abandoned the comic. Meanwhile, response to Aggie's work on ROCR was mostly favourable, but the one commenter who hated it, really hated it.
Today, I took Aggie's coloured wolfpack dream sequence and turned it into a tower ad by shrinking it to the required size, adding a border and a URL, and posted that on a few sites that I thought it would work on through Project Wonderful. It's doing extremely well there, and I think that reflects the appeal of Aggie's art and colouring at its very best. Colour isn't always possible with our schedules, but when she adds it, it works really, really well. Also, tower ads that are simply mini-comics have always done very well for me. I will make some more ads based on her art, and in the light of our plans to stick with her as an artist, she gets full credit on the Webcomicsnation mirror, where I can do that on a per-story basis.

Like a moron, I put my trousers in the washer with my cell phone still in them (it was pretty much the only time in history I had my cell phone in a trouser pocket to start with). Needless to say, you can't call me on it right now. Strangely, the Internet says it might well blink back to life, but it's gonna take a day or two.

I'll live.