While doing a project for the comics museum in Groningen, I've been somewhat embarrassed by the lack of a website for people involved to link to. Now, at least, there is a web page about the project by Libema, who are sponsoring and developing the venue.
I took today off from my busy drawing schedule to go to Amsterdam for a meeting. I went to Lambiek's new warehouse to talk to the warm bodies of Stripster's editor Henk and the site's technician Aart, as well as Margreet and Bas, who run Comiclopedia. Both these sites will be extensively featured in a project I'm working on for the Comics Museum I mentioned earlier. My project is a digital exhibit about webcomics, and Stripster will be included as an example of the Dutch approach to putting comics online, which is mainly to build group sites. Comiclopedia will supply a lot of the biographical information about the featured artists, and will hopefully get a lot of new biographical info in return for its participation.
All that stuff has to be integrated and scripted, so despite it being a six-hour round trip by train (plus lots of walking) for a short meeting it was useful for me to show them what my plans were and ask them what they needed to make it work. Plus it was nice to see Amsterdam again... I keep telling myself I don't like Amsterdam much, but that is mainly a result of the mood I'm in when I arrive. This afternoon, it was quite a good place to be in.
After the meeting was concluded and some scurrilous gossip exchanged, I had some time to go shopping! First I browsed Lambiek's own warehouse in the Utrechtsedwarsstraat, then I went to the actual shop that is located near its original location in de Kerkstraat (which it had to leave and which Lambiek's owner is now selling). I was going to go to the Concerto music store in the Utrechtsestraat, quite near the warehouse, but it turned out the walk to the shop was a bit longer than I thought so I didn't go back for the happy vinyl-browsing I'd promised myself. At any rate I managed to spend quite a bit of money at Lambiek, and I felt some grumpy, tired, Amsterdam-hating vibes coming on, so I walked towards the train station, stopping only at the American Bookstore in de Kalverstraat, where I found and bought a Glen Cook novel for the first time in many years, and in Fame records store. Because you know, the day wouldn't be complete some record shopping.
One interesting thing about the American Bookstore was that it had quite a nice selection of manga. If I knew the first thing about what is and isn't good manga I'd have bought some there.Unfortunately Fame had gone downhill a bit since I last shopped there; the rock section was nowhere to be found, everything was overpriced despite there being a 'sale' going on, and the basement was full of generic movie DVDs.
As I left Fame, I was momentarily disoriented. This is normal for me, because I'm spatially disadvantaged, but it was extra embarrassing because I was at Dam Square, which is just about the most familiar location in the Netherlands and I'd been there several times before!
I'll blog some of the books I've bought after I've blogged the ones I've been reading.
Today I've been to the Comics Museum to pick up a computer to set up the digital exhibit on. Work on the Museum is now definitely progressing.
I caught a glimpse of the pillars in which the computers will be mounted! The artwork is looking really good; it should, for the work involved in the production of the files drove me nuts. I've taken some pictures which I'll upload and post as soon as I've located the cable that came with my camera.
Mars Gremmen posts a sketched comic on his weblog that Hello You have turned down. That sucks for him, and the story in question is every bit as great as the ones that have made it into the magazine so far.
However, I take great comfort in knowing that he is still submitting scripts for issue 8 (the April issue) of the magazine, whereas I'm all done with my work for issue 9. The moral of this is that I have even more slack in my deadlines than I thought I had.
Still, if I was as good as him, I'd probably have the confidence to just be late too.
Here are some pictures I took of the workstation columns for the comics museum:
The columns, still in their wrapping.
A partially-unwrapped half-column, with artwork by Adrian Ramos.
Another one with art by Jesse Hamm.
The printed area on each column is 120 centimeters tall!
The black and white art will look a lot tighter than the color art because I could vectorise it and enlarge the vectorized version. There's a bit of a trade-off though; up close, it no longer looks like the artist's original linework. On the other hand, the color art, which was simply scaled in Photoshop, looks pixelated up close. From normal viewing distances, both look fine - quite impressive, in fact.
Despite being as swamped with work as I've ever been, I want to, indeed have to, look at the future a bit - and at the past.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of my first webcomic. Back in November of 1994, I first put a Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story online, in Dutch and with terrible scan quality. Since October I've been working intermittently to translate the comic into English and make those old, crudely-drawn episodes presentable for the web. Back then, I had no idea what I was doing; now, I have at least a vague idea. "The Stone of Contention" will run either exclusively on Modern Tales while a contemporary ROCR story is running as well, or it will run on ROCR.net and Modern Tales while the regular ROCR takes a hiatus. I haven't decided yet. See a preview.
One series that will probably not run on ROCR.net is a collaborative series I'm planning with Geir Strøm and Daniel Østvold. This is a collection of stories that the three of us have been involved in since 1995, several of which I have published as minicomics. It's called "Chronicles of the Witch Queen" and will also not run on Modern Tales but instead on a new Webcomicsnation.com site. It will probably be subscription-based unless we change our minds. We will start by reissuing the early stories (which will allow us to build a buffer of no less than six months!) , followed by new material including a sequel to Courtly Manners. Of this sequel, seven pages are drawn.
Here's a preview, and Modern Tales subscribers can look at some sketches in the Book of all Things.
For Modern Tales subscribers only, I've got some more sketches up in the Book of All Things. These show my layouts for pages from October/November, 2003, when my approach to layout changed a little bit.
There'll be some more sketches later this week. I hope that eventually I'll be able to have what I originally had in mind for the Book of All Things, which was a more or less complete overview of the preliminary work for the Rite of Serfdom storyline, without interruptions.
(I'm afraid the link goes to a whole archive chapter rather than only the new sketches. You will see some sketches you've seen before. Can't be helped, because this is the only way the archives can retain some consistency.)
A request came in from the Comics Museum's graphic designer. She needs a symbol representing webcomics for a placard in the museum. Since she asked two days ago, I've been unable to think of any. Does such a thing exist or will I have to use some of my copious spare time and brainpower to create one?
Update: I thought I had found what I was looking for in Scott McCloud's symbol for Digital Comics (See Page 200 of Reinventing Comics) but the graphics people need something with more of a human touch in it. Hmmmm.
I have decided to phase out reinderdijkhuis.com as anything other than an experimental location. It has proven to be too much of a bother to keep track of the four different locations in which the comic appears, and of those four, the supposedly more reliable Keenprime host, the only one I pay for[*], has been the biggest headache. So I'm removing all links to it from my real home page, www.rocr.net, and rebuilding the cast section on xepher.net, a free host that has a much better track record. There may still be some broken links on the front page and inside the cast section, but at least when I fix those, they will stand a decent chance of staying fixed.
So, if you are linking to reinderdijkhuis.com, please change those links to rocr.xepher.net, rocr.net or to the ROCR space at Modern Tales. These will also be your backup addresses if one of the others fails.
[*]To their credit, the Keenprime people have been very good about not charging for the months in which one way or another it wasn't working. However, I didn't get a Keenprime account to deal with regular interruptions for free.
I will skip Wednesday's update because I'm too swamped with absolutely everything else. Friday's may be delayed, but it will appear.
I will make this past quarter's many missed updates up to you after my other commitments are fulfilled and I've caught up on a month's worth of sleep.
I felt like crap for much of the day. After handing in work for Hello You yesterday, my body is now collecting a long-term loan with compound interest. I was half asleep while trying to do design/development work for the digital exhibit, and decided to give up on trying to get ROCR done in the evening. I won't be able to finish it tomorrow because I need to do more museum work first, so that means I'm postponing until Monday.
If the museum work is done by then, I may be able to devote a few days to ROCR exclusively - so I will try to catch up in the first week of April, unless Hello You asks me to do stuff for the summer special, in which case I'll take a few more days off from ROCR. In other words it could go either way next week.
The one thing I can guarantee is that there will be an update on Monday, and I'll try to make it a nice one.
A nice start to the working day: my comic Floor is currently leading in the popularity poll of Hello You! the magazine it's published in. Strangely, Mars Gremmen's excellent The Girl Is Mine is a distant third...
Makes me feel good, though. I'm always very insecure about my work so it's quite a boost to know it's appreciated.
Yesterday evening I drew and colored a ROCR update in just under 4 hours, no thanks to the studio computer having some sort of epileptic seizure. Strange how that never happens with my home system...
I need another hour and a bit for lettering, scaling and spit and polish, but I think I may run it as Friday's update instead of the one I posted on the blog the other day. That way those of you who are taking the background challenge will have a bit more time (and so will I)... and yes, I know there are some people taking the challenge. I think the original order of the updates works better in the context of the full sequence, but that will be easy to fix in the Modern Tales archives.
Meanwhile, over at Elf Life, Carson has announced an end to negativity, and an end to the crisis he's been in. Pity, really, because I really had a few choice words to say to the spoiled know-nothings who couldn't be bothered to find out the whole story and wouldn't know empathy if it smacked them in the face and then felt their pain fine, upstanding, principled webcartoonists populating the not-really-PvP-forums-anymore forums, but well, I'll just keep them to myself.
One thing needs to be pointed out, though. In a response to my earlier blog entry about the situation (which I can't find because there's something wrong with Carson's blog archiving), Carson (mildly) criticises me and others for handwringing over his actions. While I'm sure Carson did not in any way mean to lump me in with those webcartoonists who called him names over the decision to pressurize people into buying art, I want to point out for the rest of the world that any handwringing I did was over the fact that he *had* to do this, not over him actually doing it. The fact that all he got out of five years' hard work *and* moderate success was the threat of another eviction. This threat now seems to have been evaded, thanks largely to Amber Panyko of the Dan and Mab, who deserves large amounts of good karma coming her way.
So that's it! No more negativity! I'm looking forward to seeing the art I bought, and to getting back to normal.
Just a quick heads-up: due to a combination of crunch time for the museum exhibit (and lemme tell ya, it's hair-raisin'), teaching work later in the month, and a family matter requiring me to travel to England over the Easter holiday weekend, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan will appear twice a week throughout the month, on Mondays and Fridays. I'll be hard-pressed to stick even to that schedule...
However, I'll try and make something special of these more sporadic updates.
Sorry I haven't been as frequent in updating Waffle readers about the digital exhibit. So much of my time has been taken up these past weeks by actually putting it together, checking that all materials are complete, designing and building the pages, etc, etc, that I haven't had the energy at the end of a day to write about it.
However, it is now inching towards completion, and I hope to be able to deliver the first version to the museum on Tuesday or Wednesday. I also hope to shoot some more pictures then. Then in the final week before the museum opens (which will be April 21), I'll iron out the kinks and upload the final corrections.
I've spent all day working on the exhibit, and there's good news and bad news, both resulting from the guy in charge of hardware cracking the whip. He called insisting that I install the bulk of the exhibit today. So I slaved away with the HTML until 6 PM, then slaved some more installing it on the museum's computers, which turned out to be a considerably greater hassle than just copying a bunch of files should be.
The good news, then, is: it's almost finished, and a first version is already installed.
The bad news is: there is a lot left to do, and unless I do it tomorrow, I may not be allowed to do it.
The to-do list includes:
1. fixing some faults that showed up in the exhibit once I'd copied it to a real system, ranging from missing images to the rather stupid oversight on my part that there wasn't an obvious way to get back to the exhibit's front page. Those are easy. I'll take a floppy with fixes to the museum tomorrow and fix those.
2. adding some materials from people, who, for whatever reasons, didn't get their material in on time. This is the most frustrating one for me because the people involved all did extra work for the exhibit. I'm not sure I even know how to break it to them that unless I have it in the mail tomorrow morning, I may not be able to use it before the museum opens. As always, I'll see what I can do *provided* that it doesn't lead to me canceling my trip to England, or showing up there empty handed and/or looking like a vagrant. Those possibilities are out of the question.
3. House style compliance. This may also not happen, but I don't find it that frustrating, simply because the house style was still under development while I was already putting stuff together, and I only got a CD of fonts last Friday, after emailing and phoning people repeatedly. Those fonts, of the Neutratext family, all turned out to be mac versions... When the museum gets its hands on some PC versions, it will be easy enough to change the CSS files so that everything is in Neutratext, and matches the museum's stationary.
4. Security. Turns out that the people from the hardware firm thought I knew about that, whereas I thought the museum's own computer people would do the necessary stuff to keep the exhibit vandalism proof. I'll phone around tomorrow to see who can do what, but I for one can only do the most obvious things.
Another bit of not-so-good news is that some of the prints on the columns were already showing damage from the wear and tear of raising them up! I hope the museum people find ways to cover these small tears and stains up a bit; otherwise we may find that the prints won't survive long.
One thing I didn't mention in my last blog entry was that there is still this huge configuration problem with the monitors. The photos in which I tried to show the monitor setup were all useless, but there are TV screens mounted above the regular monitors which are *supposed* to show the same thing as the regular monitors. However, they're doing nothing of the sort. Some show only a Windows desktop background with nothing on top, some seemingly arbitrarily show a secondary desktop, so that windows open on the TV screens but not on the monitors. In neither case can the mouse cursor be made visible on the TV screens.
The museum's computer workers haven't quite figured out what they're doing wrong, and I, not being nearly as good at that sort of stuff as people automatically assume I am, also don't know how to make it work properly. It's not my job, but I would find it embarrassing if it still wasn't working come opening day. So how do you make two different screens show the same picture in Windows XP professional? Something tells me that it shouldn't be that difficult, but apparently it is (note that I can't try things at home, this being a linux machine and all)...
I've been back to the museum to copy some more work to it. I ended up staying there a little longer than I anticipated, but I didn't mind because in daylight, with a fresher eye, the exhibit looks a lot better. I've fixed a few glaring errors in the exhibit itself, and spent some time trying to get those monitors working properly. They still aren't (Danny's suggestion in this morning's comments was followed up but I couldn't find the setting he referred to) but I now know who to ask - and if I can't reach that person, well, the monitors have to be configured through through NVidia Nview (surely someone reading this has worked with that?)
I mentioned damage to the prints covering the columns yesterday, but I'm glad to report that I saw rolled-up replacement prints in the room today. Also, there will be opportunities to install an updated version next week. Things are looking up!
By the way, I have new pictures, but infuriatingly, the linux system won't let me upload them from the digital camera even though I did exactly the same things I to get to them as yesterday. Computers? We're better off scratching pictures into the sand with sticks!
I'm back from a trip to England, but won't be blogging much as I'm still overwhelmed by work. I've already put in the first hours of a two-week string of workshops and put in some more tweaks of the exhibit (now running in kiosk mode and with Stripster's massive collection included as the latest update) and will spend this evening working on next Friday's ROCR page and preparing for Friday's workshops in which I will be teaching adults. Whew!
I'm offering only 50% chance that Friday's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan update will be on time. Workshops and the museum continue to demand way too much of my time...
...like I warned in yesterday's blog entry, I can't get Friday's update done in time, at least not without either driving myself insane or showing up groggy and late at tomorrow's workshops. I hope that this will be the last canceled update for 2004 (having already missed more updates in the first 3 1/2 months of this year than in the 3 1/2 years before that put together, or so it seems), and I do expect things to get back to nearly normal next week, but for now, last Monday's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan update will stay up until next Monday. I would rather that it didn't, for reasons that I will go into when I have more time and energy (sigh), but that's how it's gonna be.
One question that keeps coming up in the recent workshops I've been doing for kids aged 9-12 is "do you have a website?" At that point I tend to hem and haw and turn more than a bit weasely, because while I think that an intelligent kid who's into fantasy and read it with some parental guidance would not find the material in ROCR objectionable or harmful (I read much stranger stuff at that age), I still wouldn't want it to be the first thing made by me that a child saw.
So I need a kid-friendly website, featuring maybe a few Floor material, some info on workshops and space to put other things I might do in the future, aimed at young readers (particularly English-as-a-second-language learners). I have my hands full, so I'm calling for volunteers to design it!
What I'm looking for:
* Kid-friendly design, with particular attention to usability aimed at kids. (this is probably easier than designing usability for adults because kids are more patient about waiting for stuff to load, and are more likely to read instructions).
* Design need not be consistent with the style of my other sites.
* Standards-compliance prefered; not limited to a single browser or platform.
* Extensible - site needs to be able to accommodate future work
* Dutch and English versions of texts (supplied by me) on the same page (English dominant); English with glossaries in the style of Hello You to be used for comic pages.
I don't have a big budget and don't expect anything fancy; if no volunteers are forthcoming I might go with an inexpensive design agency, but first I'd like to see if any of my readers are interested in doing this for me. If so, contact reinder@despammed.com
After the spate of work on the comics museum project (speaking of which, there is a whole batch of new photographs on the studio computer which I hope to upload as soon as internet access from there is restored, but before the museum's opening day even if it isn't), the final pages for this school year's Hello You, the ROCR work and the trip to England which was as hectic as any of the above, I was pretty exhausted. Much more exhausted than I thought I was, testimony to which are the pile of forgotten bills on my desk, the odd errors in the ROCR comics just before the Sparknoodle sequence we're in now and my own inability to get out of bed if I don't absolutely have to go out and teach at a fixed time. I'm getting better now, but I still find myself having to take naps in the afternoon, which was unheard of this time last year.
Nevertheless, I will have an ROCR update on Wednesday. I'm not resuming the regular Mon/Wed/Fri schedule just yet, but I wanted to have this one out on Wednesday to make up for Friday's missed update. And there will be one on Friday the 23rd, before we go back to the reduced schedule for the rest of April.
Also, I've decided to cancel my plans to do a 24-hour comic on the 24th. If I can't get through a regular working day without a nap now, then it's unlikely that I'll be fit enough to do a 24-hour comic next week. Some other time.
If you have submitted HTML pages instead of just graphics to the digital exhibit, and any of them have code in them causing links to jump out of the window or frame (including target=_top) please contact me now at reinder@despammed.com . They are causing the exhibit to break. I don't know why they didn't break the exhibit while I was testing it, but they are breaking it now that it has gone live. I will try to hunt down the instances I know about so that I can either destroy them or (in cases where they are really essential) make them safe, but I *know* I won't catch them all.
(And yes, I'd much rather be writing here about the opening ceremonies and how nice it all has turned out, and send some much needed personal communications to people about the various bigger and smaller things that went wrong during the process of building this but I can't because I have to fix this killer problem first, so that only the first 1000 or so visitors will see the broken exhibit.)
[Update: I think the reason I missed instances of this in material sent to me by Demian5 and Charley Parker is that they are easy, indeed almost automatic, to ignore when you have a full interface, with a keyboard, a mouse and a back button in the browser. In kiosk mode, with only a trackball for your input, you will notice them and be unable to get back to the exhibit's start page or even the previous page. Lesson learned.]
Okay... so now I have a bit of time to write about the museum. My workshops for the week are over, and I've managed to put in an emergency update. Instead of writing one massive update, I'll jot down some of my observations as and when they pop up in my head.
The opening was interesting. Not that I saw much of the actual ceremony; the room chosen wasn't really suitable for mass gatherings. Not only did Jeroen and I not see the speakers, but we also didn't see the screens that were supposed to relay visuals of the speakers to us. Speakers included the Mayor of Groningen, the municipality's public works bigwig, and Bert Lips of Libema, who allegedly introduced cartoonist Henk Kuijpers as "Henk Knippers"! After the opening it was time to go and tour the place, and drink drinks. I hobnobbed with Barbara Stok, Ricky van Duuren, Jeroen, the Lamelos brothers, Gerrie Hondius, Erik Wielaert and some other guys from Gr'nn, Mark Retera, Gerben Valkema and many others who I'll doubtless remember again after posting this.
I also spoke to several of the museum's committee, including the famous collector, archivist and Toonder scholar Hans Matla. I saw Jan Kruis but didn't speak to him this time. I got to see and old Toonder animation with fantastic backgrounds and exchange rumors about Toonder's health (another bout of pneumonia prevented him from dropping by or even recording a video message) and that of Jean Dulieu whose section in the exhibit has revealed him to be a major cartooning innovator and one of the best living fantasy illustrators. I'll write some more about him later.
I drank some more drinks, then spotted those errors that got me in such a bad mood. But actually, on reflection, this problem was not nearly as embarrassing as I thought. There are many parts of the museum that have teething problems. The animatronic caroussel (which I managed to take a ride on when it was still working) has broken down more than once and needs troubleshooting. The signposting and climate control both stink. All computer stuff breaks down as a result of the climate control problems, and there is the smell wafting in from the MacDonalds next to the comics shop. They're working on all these things! So I'm not letting my computer niggles bother me too much. It's actually going to be very easy to put in more emergency updates, provided I come in after 4 PM. By that time today, it was quiet enough not to feel like some sort of stage performer while opening those columns and uploading files...
Enough for now. I'll post some more stuff later. There is a lot to say - I had a blast there yesterday, and will love the place as long as I learn not to let little annoyances get to me. In a week's time, most of these problems will be solved, and the good thing is that it doesn't have to me solving all of them!
Checking on my little room during opening day, as one does, I found Jean-Marc van Tol and the girls from Saiso in conversation (Jean-Marc was getting a Saiso minicomic signed) at one of the columns. It was nice to see Jean-Marc again, and to meet the Saisos for the first time. They'll probably be in the next edition of the digital exhibit, once they've done some more work online. There's something about these two that makes it perfectly natural for them to just corner the Gr'nn guys and tell them "We want to be in the next issue of Gr'nn", and get an "OK" back from them.
The Lamelos crew, by the way, should also be featured in the digital exhibit, and will be come the next update.
A visit to the Stripmuseum to check on the exhibit this morning highlighted two more teething problems. One is the lack of clear visible signposting of opening hours. The museum is closed on Mondays but it doesn't say so anywhere that I could see it. Not that people hadn't told me, but I dropped by anyway in the hope that I'd be able to get in through the back door for maintenance.
That brings me to the second niggle: although there is a formal system in place for telling who can get in for free to do work, it doesn't work too well yet. I have no badge, pass or security key so I depend on the goodwill of the museum's regular staff and whoever else happens to be in to get in.
So I'll do the check first thing tomorrow morning.
I do have a bit of time to finally thank people, and tie up some loose ends. In the process, many things didn't go as planned and so some people got accidentally snubbed - especially in the final weeks when my mood was dominated by the grim determination to get things finished in time no matter what.
What did go very easily was working with webcartoonists in America, Mexico, Canada and the UK. Apart from the ones who, for whatever reason, didn't answer my mail, getting the permissions was easy and everyone I asked to do some extra work was willing to do so. So here's a thank you to:
I still owe the Stripmuseum a maintenance update, removing some of the remaining framing errors from the pages, but I'm already looking at what to do next. Who do I want to include in a few months time?
First of all, I want to have another shot at it with those artists who didn't say no but didn't mail back to give me permission either. That means that I'll hassle Patrick Farley and Scott Kurtz again, as well as the two Dutch collectives Cutie and Nukomix. Out of these two, I might contact some individual artists as well. I love Ray Man's work on the web and in print, and I really dig Floor de Goede's stripblog.
I've already expressed my love for Sparkneedle and Jeepers on this blog, and I'd like to invite them for the next update as well. Sparkneedle because it's a fantasy comic without Tolkien/DnD influences in a format that can really only exist on the Web; Jeepers because, though it can and does exist in print, it's a great example of an eccentric comic that thrives on the Web because it can find its audience there.
I've already invited the Lamelos collective (local boys from Groningen!) and two of them have said yes. They do a lot of work in print but I like the way they present themselves as a group on their website.
I will also look at two other collectives (well, one true collective and a duo) although I still have some reservations about them. I am in the process of rooting through the Probeersel site to look for outstanding work by individuals, and am watching Saiso to see if they put more stuff online. I like the naive energy of their work, which is one property of webcomics and small press comics that is often overlooked.
Oh...
and Flick.
Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan will resume its normal schedule starting on Monday, May the third. From then on, the comic will update three times a week again, on Monday's, Wednesdays and Fridays.
(By the way, this is the 100th entry in the blog!)
Every once in a while, I come across a website or forum post that makes me wonder if I'm doing things the right way. Many fantasy writers make a point of more or less completely developing a fantasy world before starting on the stories themselves. They create species, a history, a technology and changes to the laws of nature before putting individual characters and plots in their world. Reading the post linked above, it's easy for me to see why: with all that background already done, it becomes easier to come up with new story ideas, and the world itself will seem consistent and real right from the start.
I, on the other hand, have always been an indisciplined writer. I've always made up the worlds of Clwyd-Rhan and the Gnomian Republic up as I went along, letting them emerge from the existing story material. I have kept some records, and even have some background material that is almost, nearly, not quite ready for publication as an appendix or guide to the most recent storyline, but that is only created after the fact. The advantage, I suppose, is that it makes the story a journey of discovery for me as well of the characters. Or that's what I tell myself along with that classic excuse "the real world made itself up as it went along too".
Still, I'm not so sure. I'm convinced that as a result of my scattershot approach, there are major inconsistencies waiting to be revealed by a keen-eyed reader, and that the story might not have spun out of control so much if I'd planned more in advance.
There are quite a few writers reading this, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Friday's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic will look gorgeous! Yonaka has really outdone herself this time. She deserves to have as many people looking at her work as possible.
This particular background was hard work for her, but I don't think I could have done it at all. Not at this level.
... I never saw this image on the Modern Tales front page anymore.
I just looked at it on disk to look up the dimensions (because I'm making a new one), and it turned out that this one was 499 pixels wide. That couldn't possibly be right, but when I uploaded it to Modern Tales, the display software didn't check for the exact width so strictly. The latest version of the software does, and doesn't display the large image in the rotating large image slot if the size isn't exactly 500 * 200 pixels.
Suggestion to image software makers: when people scale an image to a specific size, they usually have a reason for scaling to that size and not another. Do not change it behind the user's back.
Suggestion to Joey of Modern Tales: it may be useful to warn people upon upload or database submission if an image is not exactly the right size, because the software used to make the images can't be relied on.
I have put together a few webpages showing the process of creating the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan page for Friday. Yonaka and I live on opposite sides of the Atlantic so it would have taken far too long to send the originals by mail, but apart from our use of our broadband connections to pass scanned art to and fro, it was all surprisingly low-tech and low-budget. Why use trickery when you have Yonaka's raw talent at your disposal?
Also, I've made a new promo graphic:
One of the aspects of doing a webcomic that I like the least (no, make that loathe with a passion) is the need to constantly mind the websites it appears on. Current status: rocr.keenprime.com (aka rocr.reinderdijkhuis.com) is dead, and unless and until I sit down for a few hours and get my file permissions in order, it won't be revived. Not sure if I can be bothered right now.
rocr.xepher.net is chugging along nicely but few people seem to know about it and it should be seen as strictly a mirror site and home for this blog.
rocr.net has been fairly stable lately, but visitor numbers are slowly slipping. I can think of two reasons (beyond the obvious confusion factor):
1. That damned stroboscopic green card ad that has been showing up in the host's ad system!
2. Keenspace's "no Hotlinking" measure which disallows display of the images to browsers when the referrer string isn't a Keenspace-hosted site. Because some Firewalls (Norton especially) strip the referrer string altogether), many people visiting the site for the first time see a broken site.
I understand the need on Keenspace's part to limit bandwidth theft and protect their ad revenues, but I really don't think this is the way to go about it. It causes the sites hosted by them to make a bad first impression to new readers, and it puts the onus of explaining the problem to readers (those that bother to stick around long enough to look for an explanation, and if you know anything about the habits of web users you'll know that that's a vanishingly small minority) on the site owners, many of whom don't understand the problem themselves. This is a serious problem: like I said, most users will not bother to look for an explanation, and from the point of view of those that will, it's not at all obvious where they should look.
Most users do not, and should not, know who hosts the website they're visiting. There is no reason whatsoever to assume that they will look beyond the site they're already on, or at best the forum or blog for the site they're already on, and make the mental connection that "the answer may be on the Keenspace forums" (which I think it is, but by now it has become pretty hard to find). I have answered queries about this in email, on IRC, on third-party forums that were completely unrelated to Keenspace and in person. I only have a vague idea (unless I can look it up) how to solve it. I can (and really, I should) devote real estate on the website to explain the problem, but really would you accept it if CNN.com said "if you can't see the images, dig into the bowels of your computer and make changes whose effect on your privacy you may not really understand"? You'd have to be pretty fanatically devoted to CNN over ABCNews.com to bother with that crap.
There is another solution which I oughtta implement, which is to create a replacement image that will show up in case of an image block (Keenspace's approach does allow for that), and use that to show the explanation. Still doesn't alter the fact that the host has imposed a solution that other parties have to pick up the slack for.
Today's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic was colored by reader Drooling Fan Girl. Yay for her! She's doing a fine job, staying close to the existing style but putting in her own little touches.
We'll see some more DFG-colored comics in a week or so. She's saving me a lot of work this way so I'm finally getting ahead.
Just when I have nearly two weeks' worth of buffer for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, I get word from Hello You! that they don't much like my first Floor script for the next season, and by the way, the final deadline for the art is June 8! They tell me this after letting me wait a whole month for them to announce the magazine's new format.
So the next few days I'll have to come up with a better script which I'll have to start drawing immediately once approved. *If* I succeed, which is by no means certain, I will have no buffer by that time.
Oh to be like Howard Tayler and to be able to crank out a week's worth of comics in thirty minutes...
I now have a script approved and because I'm still buffered, I will be able to start drawing it today. That means I should be able to meet my deadline and stay buffered. Things aren't so bad then:)
I hadn't been to the VOIC's monthly life drawing class for some time, but today I really felt like going. It's exhausting but fun and educational... in fact a little too much so. There's always so much to observe, try out and learn that it can get a bit overwhelming.
Today I brought some newly-bought tools: a charcoal stick, some pastel crayons and some graphite pencils. I quickly settled on a routine of drawing most poses twice: once very quickly with the charcoal, to get the overall shape and test where I might have problems; then with a combination of the other tools, paying more attention to detail and shading. It sort of worked-I still suck at drawing from life but the average quality of observation improved a bit. I don't think I got the hang of using colored crayons yet though...
The drawing above was the one where the charcoal technique worked best. The lines are almost like writing (except that I tend to drag my hand over the paper while drawing - a bad habit that charcoal immediately punishes). I cleaned the scans up a bit, but otherwise everything is as it is in the sketchbook.
Ken Silverstone's PNGOUT is a great utility for compressing PNG files. It has cut down the PNGs currently in my folder of finished ROCR pages (only about 75 of them because I prune the folder regularly) from 8.5 MB total to 8 MB. These files were already optimised by Paint Shop Pro 8's PNG exporter, which does quite a good job.
I'm now uploading them to Modern Tales' server, in the hope that the change will make a noticeable difference in the loading speed of the latest archives and the amount of bandwidth eaten up by those archives. According to Modern Tales' rules, bandwidth costs come entirely out of owner Joey Manley's pockets, and I'd like the system to be as profitable as possible for him so that he doesn't have to do work on the side.
If you have any problems with the new versions of the image files, let me know.
Since I came out of scramble mode a few weeks ago, I've had a lot more time, but have accomplished a lot less. This is because structured procrastination is no longer working now that I have so few things left to do. On the other hand, I do need a vacation, so maybe the best way to deal with this is to get away from it all for a week or so, after which the workload will have piled up again.
(Via Brad DeLong, via John Perry.
I am now finally at the point in The Rite of Serfdom where Kel and Kangra go on trial. Unfortunately, this is also the point where my haphazard worldbuilding is biting me in the ass. Beyond creating the character of Kel and Kangra's lawyer, Isolde, I had not really expended a lot of thought on how the Gnomian Republic's court system would work. Would they have trial by jury, by ordeal, by a single judge or a panel of judges? Would the judges be tied to a district or canton, or would they be traveling assizors? Informally-chosen common law adjudicators drawn from the local community? How would a session in court be run? Would there be a strict separation of the defendants, witnesses and the public or would they all wait in the same benches before being called up? Would they take oaths at all, and if they did, would they swear on a holy book, a relic or some symbol of the nation? How would the recent unification of the country affect the legal system?
These questions are now unbelievably urgent. Considering that the country's detention center, the Dyrtforrabyggern is so unlike any prison in the human world that it is hardly recognisable as such, I couldn't follow that up by simply copying what I know of the Dutch, English or American legal system.
I will have to compensate for this laxity by writing the sequence very carefully and thoroughly in advance, cross-checking it with what I already know of the Gnomian Republic. The ideas are flowing, but I'm not going to draw it until I'm sure I've got it right. Not only that but the sequence should be interesting as a story chapter (i.e. not anticlimactic), and (if there is any higher being up there, please, putative higher being) brief.
I've already decided against jury trial, for strictly narrative reasons - I want to keep the number of new characters in this chapter to a minimum (please, putative higher being. I will be good). If that turns out implausible in the context of the rest of the sequence, I'll just have to make it plausible. I will have a panel of judges, one Gnomian, one Elvish, one Faerie. That makes sense in the light of the need for fair representation that would otherwise be filled by a jury (at least in theory). I'm still undecided on the procedural matters and whether there should be opening pleas (recapping what the characters are accused of, perhaps? Is that necessary) although I lean towards having all the characters involved sitting on the same benches while waiting to be questioned. In a modern court, witnesses would be separated so they wouldn't influence one another but that may not have been the case in earlier times.
In any case, I may run a bit late as a result of writing and re-writing this sequence. I'll cross that bridge when I bump into it.
Since I last argued against a post on the Probeersel blog criticising the selection of works for the Webcomics exhibit at the Stripmuseum, author René has revisited the topic twice, the first time backtracking a bit (while expressing joy at getting noticed), the second time - after finally seeing the exhibit - commending the selection. Thanks René! I'm afraid I don't follow the work at Probeersel.com as much as I should, so it took me a while to notice.
I am now getting to the meat of the trial scene, and it's turning into something like an American courtroom drama. Interesting. I've always liked courtroom and procedural dramas, so I'm gonna continue this line of writing and see where it might be going. However, I'm not so sure if courtroom drama works well if there isn't a jury in place.
Juries in courtroom dramas probably serve as proxies for the audience. They are the people the advocates of both sides in the conflict argue at, try to manipulate, ingratiate themselves with, and convince. Instead of talking to judges who are intimately familiar with the law, precedent and the criminal mind, courtroom drama lawyers address people who are regular schmucks (the issue of juries being composed, at least in part, of people who couldn't get out of jury duty is glossed over) just like you, the viewer. Even if the jurors aren't shown, the fact that they are there, and being spoken to, affects the drama.
It's probably no wonder that the Netherlands, which doesn't have jury trials, hasn't generated a lot of classic courtroom drama. The Judge Dee series may count; I haven't read it so I wouldn't know. But that one is set in an exotic locale, and in the distant past, and surely draws a lot of its appeal from that.
On the other hand, the movie Witness for the Prosecution, though set in a country that has jury trials, leaves the jury out of the picture entirely, and is still great and dramatic.
You've probably seen this in quite a few courtroom dramas:
The prosecution starts calling witnesses for cross-examination. The defense attorney sits through their testimonies with a smug expression on his/her/its (*)face, paying just enough attention to say "No questions, your honor" when it's his/her/its turn to grill the witnesses, or ask a few trivial, token questions. Only with the later crop of witnesses does the defense get involved.
I've always thought that this was a tension-building device. "What's that old fox up to?" the audience is expected to think. A seemingly self-destructive tactic early in the game, to set the stage on which the defense gets to display his brilliance later. But now that I'm writing something like that myself, I'm beginning to thing that it may have more to do with the deep structure of this kind of drama.
You can't have a defense without first having an attack. That's obvious. But what the attack is made of isn't always that interesting. The prosecution's case is initially based on obvious, immediate facts. Something has been stolen, someone has been murdered. There are clues pointing to this or that person. Possibly, the facts and the clues are known to the audience, because they've seen the crime happen, or they've seen the original investigation. In short, this part is booooring.
The defense's case-building is round 2. Here, new, less obvious facts are brought into the mix, and the existing facts are spun and re-interpreted. If the prosecution asks some probing questions, we get to see the new facts and the spin re-spun and re-re-interpreted, and that's where things get complicated and interesting.
But round one? Bah. Better get it over with as quickly as possible.
I may be way over-generalising with this, but I'm pretty sure it worked like that in the last courtroom drama I saw (the aforementioned Witness for the Prosecution as well as some others that I saw over the years, and I'm very sure indeed that this is what's making the prosecution's cross-examination so much harder for me to write than the defense's.
(*) I'm pretty sure there is some SF/courtroom fiction in which the defense attorney is an it. If not, it's time someone wrote it.
Getting there now. I've got the order in which witnesses appear, I've got a good sense of the space in which things will take place, I've got tactics for the prosecution to follow with each witness, and I've sent copies of the draft scripts to trusted writers for criticism. Tomorrow I'll start sketching out the first few pages, and drawing the first page of the trial. There are some gaps but they occur late in the sequence. I expect I'll be able to fill these in while also working on the first couple of pages.
I'm still developing it at a visual level. I just took half an hour to design a fitting Statue of Justice. I toyed with the idea of using the Lady Justice at the US Department of Justice in her un-burqa'ed glory, but abandoned that when I realised that, judging from the pictures I could find online, it's just not a great sculpture.
I did some very quick research into the origins of the iconography of Lady Justice (nothing deeper than just clicking on a few web links I had in front of me anyway), and then decided it might be more fun if I created my own iconography, unrelated to the Ancient Greek and Egyptian symbols that make up the image of justice in Euro-American culture. The Gnomian Lady Justice is a humanoid female brandishing a sieve and... one other attribute, and is accompanied by a cormorant. She is emphatically not blindfolded.
I won't show a jury, but the lawyers will argue and object as if there was one, because it's just too much fun that way. I'll just have to highlight the fallibility of the panel of judges instead.
I'm having fun with this. Lady Justice and her bird will be in bronze. The bronze looked the most convincing on the bird's wings, for some reason.
A nasty cluster headache ganged up on me today and I got little work done. This may or may not affect Friday's update; there is still time to catch up. Still, it's unwelcome at a time when I'm doing some really difficult writing.
Just as I was about to write about this, a reader asked me why there was an Iframe with this blog on it in an old ROCR archive page at Modern Tales. The answer is simple: because the current Modern Tales system does not allow artists to add a blog (or anything else) to the template for any page, the only way to add a blog is to peg it manually to an episode, at or near update time. If you forget to remove it from the old episode, you get it in the middle of an archive. It's removed now.
Uhm, it's been in that archive location for about three months. I've said this before: I make mistakes. That is annoying but I can live with it. I'll even admit that I sometimes react crabbily when they're pointed out. That depends partly on my mood and partly on the nature of the correction. "You substituted 'different' for 'difficult' in your latest blog entry" is more likely to be accepted with gratitude than "typo in your blog". But even an unspecific heads-up is better than none at all, and if a large Iframe with text is interposed in a continuous archive for no apparent reason, and just sits there for three months like a big elephant in a small room without anyone saying "Hey, what's this? Why is it there?", then it gets unbelievably demotivating when it finally is pointed out. Right now, in my cluster-headache-induced mental haze, I'm wondering who even reads those archives and why I even bother to go on.
I don't ask much from my readers. I don't call on them to buy merchandise or donate anymore, not since I joined Modern Tales. I don't ask readers to shill for the comic on their websites, and I've even given up on expecting feedback on the forum.
But just every once in a while I need some sign that people care. It doesn't hurt my feelings when people point out a typo in the comic or take me to task for some other screwup on the website or in the archives - what hurts my feelings is that they don't ever do. Even when I unexpectedly stopped updating for weeks because I couldn't get into my ftp accounts, it took weeks for people to start asking me if I was still alive. I'm creating in a vacuum and I don't like it a bit.
I'll move the contact link on the front page up a bit so it's more visible. But I think I moved it down in the fairly recent past precisely because no one used it anyway.
My three-paracetamol headache is over, I'm well-rested, fully functional and enthusiastic about my work. Let's rock'n'roll.
Ignore the whinyness in that earlier post.
