Waffle

Now that The Rite of Serfdom is finally lumbering towards a dénouement, I'd like to solicit input from you, the readers to help me wrap it up as neatly as possible. To start with, remember this outburst from Maghreid?

In this forum thread, reader gwalla writes:

Bad time for a rant! Sheesh. As a politician, she should know better than to badmouth the goals of her allies.

Yup, and she's chosen the wrong moment for it too. But I was wondering if any of you regular readers were on to the game Maghreid has so far been playing (which, incidentally, she will have lost as a result of this moment of honesty - even though she echos my own feelings on the subject almost exactly). I know what she's up to but I wonder how much work I need to do to make it clear before the story ends.

So: what variant of the political game do you think she has been playing? Post it in the forum thread, which is open to unregistered guests!

How do you feel the story and art in Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan are coming along? What needs fixing? What should I stay the course with?

In the forum, the recent use of a vaguely John Allison-like style has sparked some discussion! The topic has already drifted to, of all things, the economics of the comic's fictional universe:

From BCWolf:

gwalla wrote:
the "bag of loot" with the modern Euro symbol on it.

Actually, that temporal inconsistency bothered me -- we're set in the Dark Ages, that symbol won't be a glint in anyone's eye for a millenia yet. Granted, you're writing for a modern audience, but still... it's as jarring as having them whip out a cell phone and ordering a DVD.

Read my answer, and the ensuing discussion in the thread.

I don't think this is actually good enough to post as a finished work of art, or indeed as a stand-alone illustration at all, but I could use some advice from experienced vector artists here.
The drawing is a more elaborate version of the second panel from last Friday's ROCR comic, and was done in a vector drawing program I'm experimenting with: Microsoft Expression(*). After using it in the comic, I've changed the strokes so they looked more lively and organic, changed the outline colors and added shading and texture to parts of the image. At that point I started to get stuck a bit. The shading method I've used, creating translucent duplicates of paths and adding gradients to these, plus creating individual shadow shapes, is hideously time-consuming. Is there a better way to create shading? The textures included by default are not very subtle, but creating my own in a bitmap program looks like a lot of work, and I didn't get the tileability right when I tried to create a skin tone. How do other artists create these textures?

I'm also unsure whether I use the right tools (within the program) for the right things. I used the B-spline tool to create Kangra's torso, but maybe it would have been easier to draw it freehand and then manipulate it?

Here are some source files if you want to take a closer look and play with the image yourselves:
Expression file (500 KB) || Expression color palette (if needed)
|| Exported Illustrator 9 file (100 KB)

I've got autotrace installed and am running delineate now. I'd like to thank Aric Campling of Hosers. To be honest, though, I eventually located a precompiled version of autotrace on SuSE's ftp servers and took the way of least resistance from there.

I've been playing with delineate and inkscape both at home and at the studio. I've got some really interesting effects out of vectorisation, especially when vectorising large, complex images, and I'm learning what the programs can and cannot do. The image on the left is a portrait of Kel from the Cast page. The one on the right is a vectorised version, re-exported to PNG with only minor changes from the SVG file. The SVG file is here. It's only 12 paths, unlike the monstrosities I created at the studio. See if you can read, manipulate and validate it!

After today's appearance of Tamlin in Dangerous and Fluffy, Reinder decided to convince me to put the rest of the RoCR cast into it - and quickly. Whilst I have no objection - a cameo for the Green Knight is already forming in my head - I wasn't sure I could fit the whole cast in very quickly. The following conversation then ensued:

Reinder:
Barmaids, vagabonds, street artists, and that funny little man shagging sheep in the background.

Reinder
I suspect Jake.

So, now we know...

Putting complex images through the vectoriser (Autotrace) and back can result in some weeeeeiird effects. Here's a panel from tomorrow's (Wednesday's) ROCR comic:

And no, I'm not afraid of spoiling anything here. The effect is even cooler at the size this image was originally exported at:

And this one looks cute too:

I'll have to use this style somewhere. I'll have to remember to feed the vectoriser images without word balloons and text (which I'll have to add later) though.

Traces of Maritza Campos of College Roomies From Hell in this detail from Friday's ROCR comic. People, especially artists, outside the webcomics world are often baffled by the success of CRFH, because they can't get over the technical faults in the artwork. But Maritza's art is actually highly skilled in those areas where it counts, such as effectively conmmunicating facial expressions. In my sketchbook, I've often spotted the influence of her way of drawing faces, and it's worming its way into the finished art as well.

Previous attempts at doing an open thread kind of thing here haven't worked all that well, but now that the blog is included in the Modern Tales pages, and the "Rite of Serfdom" story is slowly inching towards its end, it may be a good idea to try again. What I'd like to hear from you is your questions. If you're confused about something in the current ultra-long and convoluted storyline, if you were wondering about this loose end or that, or have a question about the world in which the story is set, ask away! The most challenging, silly or embarrassing questions will be turned into one-page comics to run after "The Rite of Serfdom"! It's even quite likely that the one-pagers will answer them!

The fade-ins were made with Layer Masks. I hadn't really used layer masks since late 2000 when I was still working with The GIMP for everything except the lettering, but I found the layer mask implementation in Paint Shop Pro 8 easy enough to use.

Tamlin, long missing from RoCR (for shame!) continues his Dangerous and Fluffy cameo in this week's comic. The background cameo concludes next week. HEre's a smidgen of that script:

"drink"

...I didn't say it was a useful smidgen.

Several people wrote in to say that they didn't think the fade-outs were working. I think I agree, so this will be the last page with fade-ins and fade-outs for now.

I think they *ought to* work, though, so I'll revisit the idea at a later date.

I'm having a friendly chat with René van Densen of The Grim DotCom. If you can speak Dutch, read it, and throw peanuts at us from the sideline.

Pushed by the many spontanious fans of his character design for Grimborgsman, Reinder will soon announce that Grimborgsman will become a permanent, recurring character, or the popular Dutch cartoonist will be given a wedgie.

When Timmeryn was not asked for comment, he did not say, but probably would have, "Reinder best not make a character like that only appear for one sequence. If he does, I can see no alternative but to call in the Mafia."

Faced with these comments, Reinder replied, "Oh, bugger."

Speculation on whether this implies Grimborgsman having a romantic comedy plot featuring the Green Knight remains in debate.

Over the past couple of months I've made a few avatars which I thought I'd share with you. I haven't done them up in any systematic way; I've simply used whatever I thought would be nice for use on a forum or on MSN.

These are all my original work (one of them is from next Monday's comic). You have my permission to use them. Please don't hotlink to the server they're on now, though; save them to your local machine (for MSN and other messaging clients) or to a webserver of your own (for forum use).

In the Reinder Dijkhuis Forum recently:

• Rob nitpicks spelling and speculates about the Grimborgsman
• Rob comments on old-guy humor
• Bo forwards that English Court Jester newspost
• In the Nitpick thread, people are now discussing the Grimborg, Sinn Fae, and the eventual return of Tamlin to the story. Oh, and there is more speculation about the Grimborgsman.

I can tell from the site statistics for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan that the school year has started again: they're up after a long slump.
With free comics, the expected behaviour of readers in schools and colleges coming back after a long absense is for them to trawl the archives. But with subscription comics, this is not such an easy option. Of course, what I'd like all of those returning readers to do is subscribe, but let's be realistic: most Modern Tales subscribers are out of college and in the workforce. It's not technically impossible for most students to do the legwork and fork up the money to subscribe, but I can't blame them for choosing to spend their pennies on something else.
Maybe Modern Tales should have "back to school/college" events allowing student readers to catch up more easily or cheaply. I know that MT is working on day passes-those could fulfill the same functions. Perhaps a Salon style arrangement could be implemented in which people can get a peek into the archives in exchange for sitting through a long ad.
But none of these ideas could be implemented in time for people coming back to school and wanting to catch up with ROCR *now*.
I'll think of something. I may make a visual summary of the past weeks that will at least inform readers of what they missed. Something like that, yeah.

Geir Strøm provides a translation for Tamlin's Ghostly Apparition's runic dialogue.
Tangent takes the campaign to save Clan of the Cats to the ROCR forum.

Friday's page has

• a larger canvas than usual;


• detailed backgrounds;


• an unfamilliar setting and characters, requiring, nay demanding adaptations to the color scheme especially for them.

It's taken me twice as long as many recent pages already, and it's still not finished. It's fun to work on though. I want to do more real drawing in ROCR in the future. It's so much more satisfying.

I'm in the middle of yet another work-intensive page right now (Monday's! When will I ever get a buffer done again?), but I thought I oughtta take some time out to credit two sources for the detail work on today's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic.
I always have to do a lot of research for scenes set in the Sinn Fae environment, the abandoned human enclave colonised by faerie radicals. I look for architecture, wood carvings, knotworks to serve as body art on the extras, and other little odds and ends as well. Most of the time, the sources are public domain, but this time, I swiped quite brazenly from living artists, so they deserve credit.

Yarr, ye salty dogs! In honour of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, there's a special version of the latest Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic at ROCR.net, and only there (semi-permanent URL until I clean the archives out again: http://www.rocr.net/d/20040919.html).
Stephen Dann keeps a clearinghouse of pirate themed comics for the day.

I used an English to Pirate translator to get a basic text for the comic, but refined its output quite a bit.

Other pirate links, courtesy of Boing Boing:

pirate info
pirate bath 1
pirates and pivateers
capn crimson
which pirate are you?
spooneye! the card game
pirate bath 2
pirates of the bahamas
pirate flags
pirates of penzance
pirate supplies
yar! pirate zen 2003
and for a limited time...
david byrne's pirates (this will disappear on 09.20.04)

Well, the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic for Wednesday, September 29 did get done in time after all, thanks to me getting second wind with my scriptwriting for Floor and my dogged determination. It's not my best, visually, but my philosophy has always been that the most important thing is to keep the story going.
I sometimes get frustrated about having to do pages full of talking heads when I'm capable of drawing much more. Visually, the entire trial sequence is not among my best. However:
-The court sequence has other, redeeming qualities. I think the dialogue and characterisation, and the revelations about the back story, are at least keeping it interesting for the readers even if the visuals occasionally let it down.
- Even a talking heads sequence can teach me new tricks that I can apply later to make similar sequence more interesting. Talking heads can be visually appealing if you put a bit more thought into composition. For example, one of my studio-mates is in favor of isocephaly - the idea that between two panels, you keep the heads at more or less the same height. This makes for a quieter, less crowded looking, more readable layout - but only if everything else varies between these two panels. I have applied the idea in many sequences in this story, and it does help anchor the flow of a page if there are many changes in "camera" angle and zoom. In sequences with talking heads, though, using it makes it dull, and now I'm learning to avoid it in those sequences after having used it for so long. Expect the next part of the trial sequence to be more 'baroque' composition-wise.

I do think I can draw much better than I have been doing lately, and I have proved it to myself with a drawing that you will see cropping up in places later. The Grimborg sequence, which will follow the Trial, will have much more emphasis on the art. And for future storylines, my intention is to change the format so that I can spend more time planning and drawing the comic, and less time coloring and tweaking it. Coloring, lettering and final tweaks are the big time sinks, and freeing up that time will help the art a lot.

Via Spike, here's a test to see if a character in original fiction is a Mary Sue. I've given it the once over but haven't got around to actually doing the test on Kel, Jodoque and the likes. I think many of them will score higher on Mary-Sue-ism than Spike's characters, but hopefully not that high. I make an effort to spread it over many characters.

Update: I have now done the test for the core characters *):

The Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic for Monday is uploaded and ready to go. However, I am still at risk from running late during next week, because I'll have to draw Floor as well.
I have filler material ready, should it be needed (thanks Timmerryn), and of course I can always run some sketchbook stuff if needs must. But like last week, I will try to get it all done in time anyway. My working habits have become a bit more disciplined in the last week, and if I can keep myself away from distractions by playing 70-minute CDs on my headphones, I have a good chance at getting everything done in time.

... is a hard color to create harmonious combinations with. Bleagh.

Modern Tales finally allows authors to set sequences from their subscription archives as free samples without having to nag management about it. I can set free up to 10 % of my existing archives, and have just done so. The 2001 Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan storyline "Dolphins and Dragons" (note to those unfamiliar with the series: the title was intended as a send-up of gooy new age-inspired fantasy stories. In this one, dolphins are nasty, predatory creatures appearing in the lead character's nightmares. Dragons are sort of manageable, if handled with care, though.) is now available as a free sample at Modern Tales (use the back button to go back from each chapter to the sample page), and as a page-by-page archive at the ole' Keenspace site (I may need to do some integrity-checking for that one).

I'm happy to have that story back in free publication. It's a fun story from when my webcomics had just started to grow in length and complexity, but it's still concise enough to be read in one sitting, without a crib sheet. I've been meaning to free it up for almost a year (but didn't want to nag the already over-worked Modern Tales management). The reason why I chose this one over other stories, though, is that it is the story that contains the infamous Framed!!! Matrix crossover, which was part of the even more infamous Framed!!! Great Escape mega-crossover. As I wrote earlier, that project has degenerated into a big mess as a result of websites disappearing or moving, and files getting lost. Within the Matrix sub-project, it didn't help that I and No Stereotypes creator Glych moved our archives to Modern Tales and put them behind a subscription wall. Glych's contributions are still missing, but at least mine are back, making that sequence almost understandable.

I hope that readers will still enjoy this story despite the missing Glych comics from the crossover. It's one of my faves, with scary dolphins hunting a school of Kels, pregnant Kel kicking ass and taking names, Jodoque putting his talents to productive use and the Leafy Green Dragon. Oh, and hard salty meat.

One of the things I enjoy most about drawing my comics is drawing art-within-art, and the pages that end up looking best are the ones that have lots of it in them. It's something I don't have enough time for, but I should make time for it.

(Top right and above: details from the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic for Wednesday, October 20, 2004: Sinn Fae logo variant, partial Sheila-na-Gig painted on Sinn Fae activist, "Kangra is innocent" banner)

Found this in my referrers: a listing that includes Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan.

My update schedule is Monday/Wednesday/Friday. It's mentioned at the top of the page. I'm pretty reliable - one missed update every few months, so I'm not up there with Gav Bleuel, but it's a pretty good track record.
My forum is also mentioned near the top of the page. Should I make the link red and blinking? Should I make it automatically pop up a warning with ghastly midi sounds playing a specially composed "go to the forum, my dear friend" tune? Should I make it a column filling image link, left uncompressed so that readers notice it when it finally loads?
I can understand casual readers not noticing these things, really. I know that web readers are lazy, selfish and impatient and that it is right that they should be so and that there's nothing you can do to change that. When I'm surfing the web, I am lazy, selfish and impatient, and I like it that way. It's good to be the king.
But when you make a listing for a comic, you put a bit of work into it. You find out the update schedule, you find out the forum, you look for the about page. I do.

Ah well. A polite note to the webmaster should do the trick.

Update: The mail form on the site turns out to work only with registered members, and when I pressed the back button, it ate my polite note. They'll just have to find it out from this blog entry then.

Yes! I've made it! Friday's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan episode will be a double. 14 panels in total. And I'll have time on Friday and over the weekend to make Monday's episode as well!

What struck me as I was putting the finishing touches to this installment was how much less cute Kel has become recently. It's not intentional; she just flows out of my pen that way. But I do think it's the right way for her to look. Working at the tempo that I've done recently means that I rely less on technique and more on what feels right at the time. I don't think the anatomy is up to the standard that I'm capable of, but the change in how I draw Kel in this sequence does reflect my changed attitude to the character - an awareness that she's not 20 anymore, and is feeling a bit put upon right now.

Or maybe it's just a subconscious attempt to lower the Mary Sue quotient.

This week's Sunday Cycling is canceled because Sidsel will be in Utrecht, so I have an extra day to work (I'll go on a short cycling trip on my own but won't spend a whole day in the saddle). This is a good thing, because Kangra's testimony, which I'm scripting now, will be a bit longer than Kel's. This sequence will fill in some gaps in Kangra's motivation for what she was doing early in the storyline, and it will also take us back to the Stone of Contention storyline, which I first put online 10 years ago and which I'll republish after the WebComicsNation launch. Drawing it will involve some interesting challenges. I'll need to design a war memorial, come up with some credible new characters (for bit parts - don't worry about me adding anyone major. However, this may be an opportunity to test the new, Movable Type-enabled system for adding cast pages) and revisit some old ones from Contention. I'm appalled at how badly drawn the second half of Contention is - it's actually worse than 1992's The Green Knight's Belt which at least was drawn with a lot of care. Re-drawing the bits that will appear in Kangra's testimony will highlight the difference between today's style and that of 1994-6. I'll need to come up with a slightly child-like style in which to render Kangra's flashbacks though. Something to fit her guileless personality.
I'll also have some tasty footnotes about the various tribes that appeared in Contention and the medals that the Resistance gave out at the time. It'll be fun, but it will go on for several pages, and now that I'm caught up I'd like to speed things up a little.
If I can get Wednesday's update in the can by Sunday night, a double update on Friday should be feasible.

Time has run out for me to decide whether to run a double ROCR episode on Friday. I've decided not to. I've made some progress, but those Kangra flashbacks are turning out to be more time-consuming than expected. Today I had a setback when I realised that the pages I'd colored were scanned at the wrong resolution. A quick test scaling one of them down to the final size revealed that the line quality would suffer visibly, so I had to re-scan and re-color.
More importantly, though, I have spent several days working well into the night, and even that gets old after a while. So instead, I'll use the progress I made to increase the buffer so I will have time to work on other stuff next week... and have a life.
Look at me, making excuses for not giving you more art than the scheduled 3 pages a week! To think that other cartoonists regularly miss updates. But well, I'd all but promised something extra.

Meanwhile, shrewd readers have picked up on the fact that the flashback style I've chosen for Kangra is based on that great, great comic El Goonish Shive.. I picked that one because it has a cute, friendly style that can still be used for serious story content. When I wrote that I was looking for a slightly childlike style, I was thinking of a children's book or kids' comic style, rather than something that looked like it was by a child. Kangra is a naif but she is not mentally retarded. Dan Shive's style seemed to fit the bill with its soft shapes and big eyes.
Dan Shive's style is actually harder to imitate than it looks. The problem is that a lot of it is generic, and that he's a young guy who is still learning. Shive is a talented and meticulous artist but there is a difference between the way he draws things that he's studied a lot and things that he doesn't have a clear idea how to draw. In a mature artist, that would be considered that artist's style; those artists can then be copied by impersonating their distinctive faults as well as their distinctive strong points. With Shive, it wouldn't be fair to do that, and the imitation would date as soon as Shive overcame those faults - which I'm sure he will.

In the end, I did the best I could with the most prominent signifiers of Shive's style: the eyes and faces, his limited palette (when he uses color at all) and his careful, regular line (the hardest part for me to follow). Oh, and his use of the Comic Sans font and rounded-corner rectangular word balloons. For all that many people loathe Comic Sans, I hadn't even noticed that that was what Shive was using!

In Rebecca Salek's article The Joy of Webcomics, Tart Margaret devotes a long paragraph (out of an extensive enumeration of webcomics she reads) to Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan:

Other webcomics which are definitely worth checking out are Reinder Dijkhuis's Rogues of Clywd-Rhan at Modern Tales, an often amusing fantasy adventure series whose half-faery, half-human heroine, Kel, is currently on trial for, among other things, having managed to develop the ability to use magic without ever having completed the allegedly required ritual. The defense and prosecuting attorneys are gnomes in British-style powdered wigs, her principal accuser is the ambitious evil faery who actually committed most of the crimes Kel is charged with, and one of the witnesses was the decapitated (but still sentient) head of that manipulative — and apparently indestructible — magic-user, the Green Knight, more famously encountered by Sir Gawain in Arthurian legend. Since the local government is controlled by gnomes and faeries, the human-looking half-breed Kel has not received the most even-handed legal treatment. In fact, certain key witnesses had to be rounded up not by the authorities, but by her own friends and relatives, including her eccentric estranged mother, who is a high-ranking faery official, and various of her allies and rivals in the Fae Liberation Front.

Go read the whole article - I'll study it extensively for recommendations, even though I already know many of the comics the Tarties read.

I'd spent so much time researching the fascinating details of humours theory for Rásdondr's testimony in Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan that I managed to mangle the more important issue of which species of giant cat is the biggest. I'll post a corrected version of today's comics this evening - and (bleagh) correct the next installment, which I had just finished, as well. Of course, the biggest factual mistake ever in my comics took place on the day I slept in after yesterday's cycling, and on the day the Talk About Comics forums were offline in those places where the new DNS hadn't propagated yet, so if anyone mentioned it there I haven't seen it. Thanks to reader Mithandir for pointing out the cock-up!

There. Done.

Judging from the responses in the forum and on IRC, the good Professor Rásdondr and the stories he's tellin' as part of his testimony are quite popular! Myself, I'm in two minds about him. He's fun to write, his stories come out funny, but writing him makes me feel a bit hypocritical: I've repeatedly decried the use of the Mad Scientist meme on this blog, and while Rásdondr doesn't in fact Meddle With Things Man Was Not Meant To Know (indeed I imagine him as being a well-respected authority in his field and initially wrote in some more stuff about him working in such important areas as the Heron Improvement and Breeding Program, before scrapping it due to space considerations), he's clearly daft as a broom in his own unique way. I apologise; mad scientist characters are just too much fun to write!
So now one reader in the forum is asking for more of him, and for a look at his half-elven assistants. The bad news here is that it's all I can do to keep this monstrosity of a story from eating me alive already, and the only way I can allow any deviations from the general outline is if I have panels to fill on a page before an obvious cliffhanger or punchline.
Not only that but I am now actively looking for things to cut from the existing archives. I am also looking for things to insert (a good overview of the city between the first two chapters would improve the story's sense of location tremendously) and things to tweak (bits of dialogue that are misspelled, badly lettered word balloons, visual continuity details that need to be fixed, drawings that are just plain ugly), but I now think that the existing material can do with some tightening. I'm specifically thinking of the scenes in the jail involving Spig, Bonfire and Clydesdale - those are moderately funny but were primarily added to interrupt the Jodoque/Green Knight sequences, in the hope that that would improve the pacing and build suspense in serialisation. Right now, I don't think they were succesful at that.
Of course, one or two moderately important things happened during those scenes, and it remains to be seen whether the story as a whole can do without those.

Eric Burns of the fantastic Websnark posts a long and devastating critique of the recent storylines in General Protection Fault which raises some concerns that I also have about my own comic, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. Pinpointing the start of what he sees as GPF's decline, he writes of the storylines "The Flood" (which I read at the time) and "Surreptitious Machinations" (which I'm afraid I still haven't read):

As part of my ad campaign on Clan of the Cats, and also partly as a favour to readers who have been away for the thanksgiving weekend, I've made the last few comics free. You can catch up with Rásdondr's testimony starting here.
I wouldn't mind seeing some screenshots of Clan of the Cats pages with the ad on them! I'll probably make them myself, but hey, if you could send me some, please do. I'd be most obliged.

Contrary to my blog entry of last Wednesday, there will be a new Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan page on Monday. I've been able to smooth out the deadline difficulties with Hello You! and to do the actual work on the Monday page, so that one is ready to go. That's a good thing because this bout of 'flu came in the middle of a promotional campaign, and I am not looking forward to having to explain to new readers that the comic has been temporarily interrupted and here are some guest comics in stead.

Of course, that situation is still very likely to arise. I'm still sick, and I will have to catch up on the other work sooner rather than later. So I will still need guest art, just not as urgently as originally anticipated.

The update for Monday didn't appear on the Modern Tales front page because I had entered the wrong date in the control panel. When alerted to this, I changed the date to one in the year 2020, then didn't check that because my brain is barely functional enough to direct my laborious breathing. Then my internet connection blanked out, and I decided to bo back to bed. So it wasn't until well past noon that someone called me out of my fevered half-slumber to tell me that it was still broken.
I have now fixed it again, but because the comic has already been off the front page for most of the day, I have rescheduled it for tomorrow. If you must see it on Monday, come to the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan home page where, thank the stars, it updated normally.

I am a magnet for disaster. Every time I try to promote my comic, or take part in a cross-over event that should direct readers to my website, servers crash, the Internet gets eaten by a virus or images spontaneously corrupt or combust. This time, the first time in three years I'd actually spent money on promotion, it's my body and mind that seize up at the critical moment. My next money making scheme will be to have other artists hosting on servers that my comics are on pay me not to do any promotion — that should benefit my health as well.

Bizarrely, despite having relapsed into fever again and having my thoughts interrupted every five seconds by urgent demands from my autonomous nervous system that I sneeze, cough, sweat or zonk out immediately, I have managed to get ahead with work on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. Working only 5 hours a day on average, I've been nearly as productive as during the marathon work sessions of the past few months, with one exception: I've not been able to produce script work for Floor. I just can't do that until I'm fully fit - I find it a lot harder to do than anything about ROCR.
I will need to catch up, and catch up quickly, as soon as I'm really better. So here is my plan for the rest of the month:
ROCR will have two more regular updates in December, on Friday the 10th and Monday the 13th. These are in the can. On Wednesday the 15th, I will run a wallpaper filler based on the ad graphic used in the Clan of the Cats campaign. My search referrals are dominated by searches for wallpapers and while I prefer lighter designs myself, the Grimborg graphic will work well enough, especially with the new readers coming in from COTC.
Starting Friday the 17th, I will start running the guest comics that cartoonists have pledged, for as long as it takes until they run out. When they do, ROCR will go on hiatus until January 3, 2005. That's right, I'm sending the comic on vacation. I won't be on vacation myself (apart from a few days around Christmas spent in England with my brother, his family and my parents), but I need to take time off from the schedule to cover for the consequences of this damned illness, and Christmas is the time to do it, because the number of readers drops precipitously anyway.

... if the kind folks at Keenspot are throwing these ads on Quick Keen in for free with the ad impressions I bought on Clan of the Cats (if so, thanks!), or if there's some other reason the ads are showing up there now. I should ask Keenspot Gav, when I'm a bit more awake than I am now.

Today, for the first time in 2 years, "Previous comic" and "first comic" buttons appeared on the front page of the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan website. In part, this is just a convenience allowing new readers to page through the guest fortnight comics and the chapter that I left up for the benefit of incoming readers from the Clan of the Cats campaign.
But it reflects a more structural change in how ROCR is going to be published in the next year. A few months ago, Joey Manley changed the terms for Modern Tales family cartoonists to allow them to make free up to 10% of their total archives, and giving them the tools to do so. Soon enough, many cartoonists started freeing up the latest chapter of their comics, making it easier for non-subscribing readers to catch up as well as giving new readers a larger sample. I was against this at first, because I thought it diluted and complicated the "last one free, subscribe for the rest" model, but since starting the COTC campaign, I've come to realise that it is possible to bring in many new readers and hook them with such a reasonably-sized sample, and that should benefit me in the long run. It will add a little bit to my workload, because I will have to maintain and prune the archives more actively, but it will improve the comic's accessibility out of proportion to that.
When I return from my break in January, "Rásdondr" will be removed from the free archives, and "Grimborg" will become the free chapter (a few episodes of "Grimborg" are available now, but this is very much unofficial).
This introduces one other change to how ROCR is made: what with the 70 pages of Dolphins and Dragons being already free, I am very close to the 10% norm, and I will have to script chapters from beginning to end before publication, to ensure that they don't exceed my margin, which is about 20 pages. So you'll get more tightly-scripted comics as a result of this change. That's a good thing, trust me.

Sometimes it's just fun to look at your search referrals and click on the link to see what you get. I found that this Google search lead someone to this weblog. I repeated the search and was surprised to find that the top result was actually from a web page dedicated to transformations and were-ism in comics, listing among others The Wotch and El Goonish Shive.
I shouldn't have been too surprised. Interest in transformations is not nearly as specialised as it would seem at first glance. It's a natural offshoot of interest in furries, were-beasts and transgenderism, all of which appear copiously in the two comics mentioned. I could easily add a few well-known comics that the makers of that list missed out on.
In fact, I would hope that anyone finding the blog through a websearch for transformation-related comics would go on to take a look at Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. The comic has a leading character who shapeshifts; more importantly, the current chapter (link will expire when the chapter moves to the paid archives) of the ongoing, epic storyline is all about transformations. The whole idea of the Grimborg is that it's a place a person comes out of as something other than what they went in as. More literally, there will be some interesting transformations when regular updates resume in the new year, including one that, for people who have been following the story the past two years, will put a bit of a sting in the tail. I'd laugh maniacally if I didn't have a bit of a problem with my throat right now.
So if you came here looking for "Anne Onymous transformation", ROCR is the place to go even though Anne Onymous isn't in it.
(By the way, I'm not just saying this to shill for my comic. It ties in to what I just posted in Promotion, part 1. Watch this space.)

I've made some more changes to the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan website and the ROCR archives at Modern Tales