Going Under, a Little

I'm barely hanging on by my fingernails to the one-week buffer I had remaining on Hero Go Home. I should be able to hang on for another two weeks or so, but any disruption of my schedule will put me on hiatus. So I'm debating whether to go ahead and schedule a small break when my guys finally get to the hotel and start the next phase of the story.

Back when I first decided to launch the strip, Sandra Tayler, wife of Schlock Mercenary's Howard Tayler, advised me that consistency was the number one thing I could do to make the strip a success. "Don't miss updates" was the gist.

But I need to get some strips worked out ahead again. SO I have a few choices: struggle along as is and hope nothing unexpected ever happens, change the update frequency, change the artwork, or take a break and work ahead again. I'm already pushing the low-output limit with only three strips (not pages) a week. I could switch to black-and-white and save a ton of the time I spend on coloring, but that might be too drastic a change (plus my pen rendering isn't great--at least with color, I get a chance to cover some of my weaknesses).

So in a couple of weeks, I may be announcing a hiatus on the strip of at least one week, maybe more. The only upside to this is that, given the disruption in my schedule and my anticipating that this might happen, I haven't really made any efforts to publicize the strip, so there aren't a lot of readers to lose. If I take the break now, I'll have a stronger product when I do decide to advertise.

At least, that's where I'm leaning right now.

Diminishing Returns

A turbulent and busy personal life has taken its toll on the webcomic experiment. In the last two and a half weeks, I've barely managed to pencil and ink one page and have yet to letter or color. That means my almost six-week bumper has fallen to less than three. When I was completely unemployed, I was able to spend hours noodling with the colors, but it looks as if that's going to have to change now. In a few weeks, expect the coloring to simplify a little bit.

You may not even notice the change, given the way the strip's look has evolved continuously since launch.Anyway, I'm hoping to finish up the page I'm currently working on this week and get back on proper schedule next week.

Fine-the-frick-a-lee

Hero Go Home is now officially live. It will be updating every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

As I've mentioned before, the first couple of weeks are going to look really rough, because I didn't have the technical steps in the process worked out. I've got the process pretty well mapped out now, so by the time you read the strips I worked on today (in five weeks time), technical problems will no longer be an excuse and any weaknesses in the strip will be purely my own.

Another caveat: this is not a gag a day strip. I'm adapting the plot of what would have been a Digger novel, so things may move slowly. In fact, the first month could be considered the pre-credits sequence in a movie. But stick with me, and I'll try to give you a ride worth taking.

Consistency

I am officially unemployed. There's not much else I can say to that right now.

Still plugging away at the webcomic, trying to get that last strip finished to make a five-week buffer before the official launch tomorrow.

I've come a long way in the last month. I've gotten back into the swing of penciling and gotten a lot of practice with the graphics pad. My pencils have gotten a little tighter and my inks are getting cleaner. The big problem I have right now is consistency.

One hallmark of professional strips is their consistent look. Dilbert is poorly drawn, but Dilbert and Dogbert and Wally and the rest have a consistent look from panel to panel, crude as that look may be. In animation terms, that's known as being "on model."

And that's what I haven't yet achieved in Hero Go Home. You can recognize Digger by his costume and hairstyle, but I have been unable to draw a consistently recognizable face from panel to panel. I should be able to draw Digger in a dress (and that may be real concern at some point in the future) and have him be recognizable by his posture and facial features. But I haven't achieved that degree of consistency yet. That's something I need to aim for going forward.

It's Real

I have uploaded the first week's worth of strips to the site. They'll update automatically on the scheduled days (I can do the same thing here--I'm doing it now, in fact--but I should probably do it more, so I don't have to scramble on Wednesday nights to do a Big Audio update, or do a ton of scanning on Saturday mornings for the Vault).

So now I just sit back and wait until the strip launches itself (and by "sit back and wait," I mean "work frantically on week five's strips").

And no, I still don't know what I'm going to do for a day job. I've had two opportunities that looked good fall through, but I'm still employed through Friday. Freefall starts Saturday.

Snowed In

We finally got a decent-sized winter storm. I drove home from work last evening, bundled up and started working on the webcomic, then got a call from work. Had to go back to work at 10 p.m. and work all night.

The great thing about driving in treacherous conditions at 10 p.m. is that hardly anyone else is out on the road, so got to work safely. Drove home at 6:30 a.m., exhausted, put the car in the garage. Fell into bed and slept a while. Got up and spent the day listening to Webcomics Weekly podcasts and coloring pg. 5.

The tricky thing about the strip I'm doing, and I'm not sure I'll be able to pull it off, is that I'm trying to do a continuing story in three and four-panel increments. So I've got to on the one hand tell an overall story, while at the same time making each day's strip a sort-of self-contained bit in itself. I'm getting better with every page, but I'm still faking the funk when it comes time to draw the backgrounds. That's something I'm going to have to work on more when I get into the story proper.

Impatient

I've been trying to put this thing together in a systematic way, applying the lessons of a lifetime studying film and comics and writing, and learning from the successes of people like Scott Kurtz and Howard Tayler. So I set a launch date far enough out to give me a five-week buffer of finished strips. That is, if I could maintain a schedule of at least a page a week. The long lead time was also meant to let me see if I could do that and put out an acceptable product.

So here I am, three pages into the project, and trying to double my output this week, because I decided to do a splash page (I'm approaching this with an eye toward a finished printed product, so even though I'm splitting the pages into strips, I'm laying them out a page at a time, which means that even though each strip will have a constant width, the the height of strips will vary depending on the layout I'm following for that page).

In addition to the increased workload, I opened a Project Wonderful account with an eye toward putting ads on the site (I've got holes in the site layout specifically for ads), but I can't put Project Wonderful ads on my webcomic blog until I've got 30 strips published, which means 10 weeks. And I'm determined not to solicit readers until I've got at least a month's worth of strips for them to read coming in.

So that means another week-and-a-half before I've got anything published at all, another month after that before I begin getting any kind of real traffic (if ever), another month or two after that before I can fill my ad holes, and who knows how many months after that before I can pay for a beer out of my income from the strip. And probably two years before I collect enough pages to do a printed collection. And I'm kind of anxious say, "To hell with the schedule and the buffer and being systematic. Let's just throw stuff out there right now."

In the meantime, I'm going to be unemployed in nine days.

So both my confidence and my motivation are taking a hit at the moment. But I am frantically inking pages 4 and 5 right now, and as a small preview, here's a look at a portion of page 4. I almost hate to ink over this, because I think it kinda looks cool with all the perspective lines.

And no, it's not upside down.

2 Weeks and Counting

So all in all, it was a productive weekend. Had a meeting concerning what may turn out to be my new day job. Did some Vaulting and listened to a lot of old radio. Found my next Big Audio Wednesday, featuring an early appearance by a very familiar personality.

Colored the third week's worth of strips and finally solved my inking/lettering problems. The third week's strips look as good as I can make them right now, which is to say, any flaws therein (and there are many) are entirely due to my own limitations as an artist and not artifacts of the production process.

I started to despair late Sunday afternoon, because although I'd seemed well ahead of schedule early in the week, the coloring had seemed to expand to fill the remaining space, so by Sunday evening, I was racing to get done. But when I actually finished it and saw that the final result was pretty good, I was filled with enthusiasm and penciled all of page four right then.

I had been awaiting page four with some trepidation, because I was planning it as a splash page, meaning I was going to have to do some more extensive background work than I had done up to that time. As it turned out, the pencils look pretty darned good. Now I'm afraid to start inking them.

Meanwhile, since page four is a splash page, I'll need to move on to page five this week to complete week four's strips. I'm determined to have five weeks' worth of strips ready to go by the time I launch two weeks from tonight.

Inking

One of the things I've had to decide about the webcomic has been how often and how much to post. No two comics seem to post the same. PVP updates a single strip 5 days a week. Schlock Mercenary updates like a newspaper strip, with single strips six days a week, and a larger one on Sundays. Girl Genius updates full pages three days a week. No Need for Bushido and Atland update once a week.

For Hero Go Home, I made the decision to update single strips three days a week, Mon-Wed-Fri. This comes out to approximately a page a week, which is a schedule I think I can handle. This week, I seem to be ahead of schedule. The last two weeks, I penciled Tues-Wed, inked Thu-Fri, and colored Sat-Sun. This week, I finished inking last night (Wed),and I'm ready to scan, letter and start coloring tonight.

Inking has been a challenge, but I'm hoping that I've about solved it. The first week, my inking was totally random and haphazard, which I justified internally by telling myself I wasn't really working on a real strip, just testing a concept. The second week, I was more careful, but still sloppy.

The common problem I had both weeks was that I tried to ink according to the traditional model of putting down the thickest lines possible. With normal production practices, oversize artwork is shrunk down to its printed proportions through a photostatic process. Lines that are drawn too fine will simply disappear.

However, the computer scanning process I've been using tends to thicken up the lines, so I need to work counter-intuitively and draw the lines as thin as I can. At least, I'm hoping that inking with thinner lines will give me a better result when I'm done with this week's strips.

I'm also debating about what tools to use. I'm currently using Faber-Castell PITT artist pens, which supposedly use an archival quality ink. I see other technical pens recommended by manga artists, but I don't know if switching would give me any better results. When I first tried inking, I used the traditional crow-quill pen with India ink, but that scritchy sound of the nib scratching across paper put my teeth on edge, as bad as fingernails on a chalkboard, plus it was really slow and prone to blotches if you pressed the nib down too hard. But now I'm looking at on-line inking tutorials like this one and wondering if I should give the crow quill another shot.

I've also experimented with inking digitally in Inkscape with the graphics tablet, which could potentially give me the cleanest result, but I'll need more practice before I can do that with any chance of staying on schedule.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to solve my lettering problem. The balloons and letters look great in Inkscape, but look awful when I output to .png and paste them into GIMP. But I learned that GIMP can also import the .svg files directly. Perfect, except that for some reason, GIMP uses a default font in the balloons and won't let me replace them. If I white out the letters and retype them in GIMP, they look a little better, but still not very good. Maybe if I made them bigger, but it's hard to tell what size to make them in Inkscape. Or if I typed in the text, then converted the letters into paths, but that seems like an awful lot of steps for what should be a straightforward process.

Three Weeks to Go

So three weeks to go until the big debut. And frankly, I'm getting worried. Everything is going more smoothly this week compared to last--the penciling was faster (if not much better), the inking showed promise in places, the lettering and coloring are going more smoothly.

But the end result is disappointing. Not in the sense of, "I'm not as good as my favorite artist, so I quit," but in the way they translate to the final web image. When I transfer the word balloons from Inkscape (where they look awesome--Blambot makes great fonts for comic lettering) to GIMP for coloring, they come out dithered and fuzzy and hard to read. When I transfer the inked, scanned artwork to a new transparent layer in GIMP for coloring, it comes out jagged and fuzzy (and yes, GIMP is the common factor here, but I've used GIMP for years with better results, so I'm kinda' stumped at what the problem is). So I'm still experimenting to find the best way to a decent final product.

And in the meantime, the first couple weeks' worth of strips are going to sort of suck.

And while I know that lots of good webcomics sort of sucked when they first started (look at the first strips of Schlock Mercenary or No Need for Bushido, for instance, and compare them to the present), the competitions tougher now. You've got to be better coming out of the gate.

My one salvation is that I've been working on my storytelling skills for years, so while I'm flailing artistically, I hope the story feels reasonably solid from the first frames.

So mark your calendars: on Feb. 2, the first strip will go live and Hero Go Home will officially debut.

Although, seriously, you might wait until March to actually start reading it. By then, I hope to have worked out much of the initial suckiness.

Lessons Learned So Far

The learning curve has been steep, but progress continues on the webcomic. I've done the first weeks' worth of strips, and while they're not very good, they show promise.

Meanwhile, I've got a logo made and I've spent a few hours playing around with CSS stylesheets trying to find a look I like. I'm getting close to being satisfied with that. After I've got the look and feel down, I'll start working on content. I'm penciling the second week's strips now.

Back to work.

Webcomic Progress Report

So things are starting to take shape now. I got a suspiciously awesome deal on webhosting space, so I now have a domain to use for the comic (and if the comic doesn't work out, I'll at least put up all the Digger stories so far and maybe serialize a novel or something). I bought a graphics pad for input, although it's hard getting used to. I've figured out what my first storyline is going to be (Digger's Big Con, the prequel to Hero Go Home that I was working on for a while), and I've spent several hours working on the first page.

Two big problems so far. First, I made a lot of notes on Digger's Big Con, but I stored them on a mind-mapping software site called maps.kayuda.com, which is no longer active. So all that work is lost, though most of it is in my head still. Second, I have been working for days on this thing and have so far finished three panels. That's it--three. And they're not even great panels (the third one is pretty good, though).

So that's discouraging. But on the other hand, much of the time spent is in learning how to do a bunch of stuff I've never done before, so I can only get better. And I am determined to have something up on the site come Feb. 1. I may not be ready to start the strip then, but I'll have something.

And between now and then, I'll probably give you some updates and teasers.

Stay tuned. Things are going to get a lot more interesting in the next few weeks (I hope).

Happy New Year

Went to a party with friends last night. Small group, but lots of fun. Slept late today, did some Vaulting (more Foglio coming Saturday), cooked up some sausage and onions and listened to some old radio (the Fat Man--he weighed 247 whole pounds, about the same as an average NFL player in 2006 and around 70 pounds lighter than an average offensive lineman).

I'm still working on the webcomic idea. It seems relatively simple on the surface, but in order to do it right, there's a whole range of things that have to be taken into consideration: not just the plethora of things that concern any piece of writing--plot, character, pacing, structure, dialogue--but also artistic considerations--character design, graphic design, logo design, typography, inking, color--and determining what compromises have to made in each in order to establish an efficient workflow that allows you to meet deadlines. In addition, there's website hosting and design and how to monetize it--donation box, advertising, merchandising, subscriptions?

Part of me wants to take time to work all this out before deciding to quit. Another part wants to jump in, get some feedback, spend the money to set up the site and see if it works. If I make money, fine, If I don't, well, it's tuition paid toward learning how to make things better next time.

Wasted Day (Not Really)

As part of my contemplation of a possible Digger webcomic, I decided to look at some successful webcomics to see how they do things. Which led me to Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio.

I've been hearing buzz about Girl Genius for quite awhile. The Foglios had a big booth at Worldcon where they seemed to sell out of Girl Genius collections and merchandise. Some of my fellow fans here in Tulsa also love it, but I've been reluctant to jump onboard because it's been running so long.

Well, I decided to take the plunge yesterday. Read the first couple of volumes last night and have spent all day today reading strips. I'm now about halfway through volume 6 and can't get it to load anymore. I think I killed their bandwidth.

Well, back to working on the T-shirt, I guess. I think I've got the background solved. Just needs a little tweaking and a logo. I tried drawing my own logo, but I suck as a letterer, and when I transferred it to Inkscape to try to edit it, something weird happened in the transfer. So I guess I'll try something with an existing font.