How are you doing, comic-wise?

[robotthepirate]

[stuff in invisible ink]

Yeah, that might just help.

Just finished a RTP page! First page in over a year. Woo!

hei feive

I have no hands.

Yeah I do! High Five!

ssshhhh

[LibertyCabbage]

Naming stuff after the names of other stuff is always fun.

I've been using song titles and lyrics in my comics for a while.

I like doing it with chapter titles, often using song lyrics I feel are appropriate to the particular chapter. For those who get the reference I feel like it adds a bit of depth and possibly puts a song in their heads that might be "playing" as they read something.

Yeah.

I kinda don't like when things are named after other things because I figure that as a writer, one is supposed to be able to come up with memorable phrases instead of borrowing other people's.
On the other hand, coming up with memorable phrases is hard.

I feel like trying to be 100 percent original all the time's too much of a drag. Everything's been done already anyways, so I think it's better to just have fun and do what you want as long as it isn't outright plagiarism.

[Cope]

I named the last chapter of my first comic after an obscure Australian poem. Making references that only I will get is just part of my masturbation. I mean, genius.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Last night I inked the new set of "yearbook" pictures that go on the individual cast bio pages I'll be putting up. I am *really really pleased* with how they came out. Everyone looks so on-model ;u; I hope I can maintain this level of correctness forevermore

[McDuffies]

I kinda don't like when things are named after other things because I figure that as a writer, one is supposed to be able to come up with memorable phrases instead of borrowing other people's.
On the other hand, coming up with memorable phrases is hard.

I feel like trying to be 100 percent original all the time's too much of a drag. Everything's been done already anyways, so I think it's better to just have fun and do what you want as long as it isn't outright plagiarism.

Then again, title is about the first thing that anyone sees of your comic.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Last night I dreamed that LC and JSConner were the same person, and they wrote my next chapter for me. I read the script and some of it was really genius, but then you guys got way too meta and self-referential and I had to break out the red pen. I wish I remembered the beginning of it, it was really tops. The only part I remember is you wrote that Cecilia started beating the shit out of Joseph to make him spit a chunk of meth out of his mouth. Then he would go to rehab.



In actual things, I'm sorting through the nominations for some of the categories in the SmackJeeves awards and it's really a long haul. Some comics were nominated for categories that don't really seem to have anything to do with the comic :? There's one comic in particular called Kaito Shuno which is a rapey BL comic that got nominated for comedy? It also got nominated for Yaoi/BL by a whole bunch of people, but the art has got to be the most low-effort I've ever seen in a BL, there's thousands of fans and thousands of pages and all of the pages are the same quality, there's really no sense of improvement despite the comic going for years. I really don't want to include it in the Yaoi/BL category because on so many levels it is just *not a good comic* and the awards at their core are about giving good comics more exposure. There's 41 other comics nominated in that cateogory so it's not like we're hard up for gay porn (ha ha ha) but I feel like if it's not included people are gonna get pissay -_-

o well!

[RobboAKAscooby]

but I feel like if it's not included people are gonna get pissay -_-

Don't include it.

Seriously, people need to learn that quality counts for something.

[Dr Legostar]

So far the fact that I'm doing a Discworld storyline is going over rather well. I hope my readers like where it goes. I'm actually rearranging some things to do three extra comics on the Sundays during the storyline to include a few characters I just couldn't shoehorn into the main storyline.

[Sortelli]

rapey BL comic that got nominated for comedy?

I'm laughing as I read this so maybe there's something to the idea. Oh wait I'm also breaking things and flipping tables. This is hysteria, neverminnnnd.

[robotthepirate]

Last night I dreamed that LC and JSConner were the same person, and they wrote my next chapter for me.

Last night I dreamt I was pulling people from cars before they exploded. There was something about a rally car crashing on a busy road and lots of upturned cars. I ran around smashing glass with my bear hands and dragging people free of their cars (something I think I got from watching Captain America yesterday). I think I woke up when I started to question whether these people really needed saving (it'd been quite a while since I was expecting an explosion) or I was just getting into the swing of it and wrecking people's perfectly fine windows. Fun!

I'm almost finished with my second new RTP page but I'm trying to work out how to do lighting effects. I'm having to learn new ways of doing everything. Starting to look good though.

[JSConner800]

Last night I dreamed that LC and JSConner were the same person, and they wrote my next chapter for me. I read the script and some of it was really genius, but then you guys got way too meta and self-referential and I had to break out the red pen. I wish I remembered the beginning of it, it was really tops. The only part I remember is you wrote that Cecilia started beating the shit out of Joseph to make him spit a chunk of meth out of his mouth. Then he would go to rehab.

So the inception worked after all. Nice job, LC. We might want to tone down the meta writing for future dream invasions, though. The subjects don't seem to take too well to it.

As for the SmackJeeves awards, I second Robbo. Stick it to the bastards. I'm really new to this webcomic scene, but it sounds like these awards are for quality, not popularity. From what you've said, it also sounds like this shitty comic isn't hurting for exposure anyway, so promoting them with an award wouldn't do much good compared to, say, a higher quality webcomic with no fans. If people send you pissy e-mails, you'll just have to put your spam folder to work

[McDuffies]

In actual things, I'm sorting through the nominations for some of the categories in the SmackJeeves awards and it's really a long haul. Some comics were nominated for categories that don't really seem to have anything to do with the comic :? There's one comic in particular called Kaito Shuno which is a rapey BL comic that got nominated for comedy? It also got nominated for Yaoi/BL by a whole bunch of people, but the art has got to be the most low-effort I've ever seen in a BL, there's thousands of fans and thousands of pages and all of the pages are the same quality, there's really no sense of improvement despite the comic going for years. I really don't want to include it in the Yaoi/BL category because on so many levels it is just *not a good comic* and the awards at their core are about giving good comics more exposure. There's 41 other comics nominated in that cateogory so it's not like we're hard up for gay porn (ha ha ha) but I feel like if it's not included people are gonna get pissay -_-

o well!

Stick to the propositions. I don't know whether your function is as a jury or just sorting out entries, but in any case don't go beyond what you've previously agreed to.
Also what is BL?

[Cope]

Boy's Love.

[LibertyCabbage]

Then again, title is about the first thing that anyone sees of your comic.

Titles are more important, obviously, than chapter titles, or, in some cases, page titles. But I'll add that an original title isn't automatically a good title.

Last night I dreamed that LC and JSConner were the same person, and they wrote my next chapter for me. I read the script and some of it was really genius, but then you guys got way too meta and self-referential and I had to break out the red pen. I wish I remembered the beginning of it, it was really tops. The only part I remember is you wrote that Cecilia started beating the shit out of Joseph to make him spit a chunk of meth out of his mouth. Then he would go to rehab.

Well, that's... weird? Cool? Both? Anyways, your dream's way more coherent than any of mine would ever be. That scene also sounds like something I would conceivably write if I tried to write a relationship story.

Seriously, people need to learn that quality counts for something.

And I think quality's the basis for having an awards ceremony like this in the first place. The point of having judges is so you can have "experts" separate the good comics from the crappy ones, which isn't something that your average reader can be trusted to do. In addition, only giving awards to the most popular webcomics would be lame and uninteresting, and it'd further the sense of there being a rift between the "haves" and "have-nots."

So the inception worked after all. Nice job, LC. We might want to tone down the meta writing for future dream invasions, though. The subjects don't seem to take too well to it.

I guess dream-me got a little carried away. :X

Also what is BL?

"Boy Love," aka gay romance/porn comics. They're everywhere on Smack Jeeves to an almost ridiculous extent.

Edit: Cope beat me to it. =P I'll add that BLs tend to very formulaic, with a masculine/aggressive "seme" molesting or raping a feminine/passive "uke."

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Stick to the propositions. I don't know whether your function is as a jury or just sorting out entries, but in any case don't go beyond what you've previously agreed to.
Also what is BL?

"Boys Love" or Yaoi.

My job is to take the nominations that came in for a few categories and narrow them down to the 15 true finalists* for each category. All of the "ineligible" comics have already been taken out, whether they didn't have enough pages/hadn't updated recently enough at time of nomination/the creator didn't accept the nomination for that category. Like I said, the category in question has over 40 nominations, so I have a lot of fat to trim in that area. Mostly it's just me marveling over this comic whose literal and only claim to the thousands of fans it has is that it satisfies their craving for cartoon male-on-male "he liked it in in the end so everything's good" rape.

It's not even like people pretend it isn't rape. People in the comments say shit like "Oh I love it when he gets all rapey! It's so cute!" or "[Character] looooves getting raped " I know A LOT of BL comics are like that but it leaves a sour taste in my mouth, and considering there literally isn't anything else good about this comic, on that level I don't have a problem excluding it from a list of comics that I'm supposed to be holding up to the community at large saying "HERE IS A GOOD COMIC YOU WILL ENJOY READING."

*From the 15 finalists in each category, the community will vote to pick which one is the best. We narrowed it down from just "every nominated comic" because we want to encourage people to actually read (or at least look at) each comic instead of just picking whichever one they already like/recognize and calling it a done day. Doing things this way won't prevent that from happening, but it'll make it much easier for the people who want to contribute meaningfully. Out of each fifteen we are sorting them into tiers of small fanbase "underdogs," mid-fan intermediate comics, and big-fanbase comics that already are pretty popular. The voters get to pick from each set of five which is the best small/medium/large fanbase comic, so that way at least the nobody-knows comics will have a chance against the ones that are already big players on the team. Then I believe out of those three finalists there's one last vote where you pick the *true* winner for the category.
It just sets up a lot of opporutnities for the other comics to get more exposure.

Seriously, people need to learn that quality counts for something.

That's mostly how I feel.

rapey BL comic that got nominated for comedy?

I'm laughing as I read this so maybe there's something to the idea. Oh wait I'm also breaking things and flipping tables. This is hysteria, neverminnnnd.

Yeah, it was really weird. The way I determined comedy comics was, instead of reading the whole archive (which I mostly have to do for the other categories), I just picked a large sample size (like about 30 comics or so) evenly spread out from the archive, and read through them to determine 1. Does this comic usually contain at least one joke? and 2. Is it drawn in a style that supports its humor? I figure if your comic isn't hitting on those two points enough of the time to pass that 30-random-pages test, I don't think it's really what could be considered "comedy." Now granted, the rapey comic has many, many more pages than the others, so perhaps to be fair I should have given it 300 sample pages to *truly* decode whether it is actually funny except lolno.

I'm almost finished with my second new RTP page but I'm trying to work out how to do lighting effects. I'm having to learn new ways of doing everything. Starting to look good though.

Nice! I love that feeling where you figure something kind of obvious out and you're like "ohhhh, so THAT's how everyone else does it..."

So the inception worked after all. Nice job, LC. We might want to tone down the meta writing for future dream invasions, though. The subjects don't seem to take too well to it.

As for the SmackJeeves awards, I second Robbo. Stick it to the bastards. I'm really new to this webcomic scene, but it sounds like these awards are for quality, not popularity. From what you've said, it also sounds like this shitty comic isn't hurting for exposure anyway, so promoting them with an award wouldn't do much good compared to, say, a higher quality webcomic with no fans. If people send you pissy e-mails, you'll just have to put your spam folder to work

That's what I keep coming back to. If this *was* a good comic, I wouldn't have a problem including it, because duh. But it's a scribbled, low-effort, high-page-production that purely on the basis of its fanservice has amassed a battalion of readers (especially when you consider how many are reading that aren't registered with SmackJeeves, that probably bumps the readership up by a few thousands [or the people WITH sj accounts who realize it's a shit comic and don't want to show up in its fan list or have it show up on their faved comics list but follow it anyway]), it really doesn't have much to gain from the awards.

We'll see, though, maybe ~25 of the other comics are less effort + more rape than it, and it deserves to be included anyway! *u*







(I WAS ABOUT TO POST BUT I SEE OTHERS HAVE POSTED, LET'S MAKE THIS POST A BIT LONGER)

Last night I dreamed that LC and JSConner were the same person, and they wrote my next chapter for me. I read the script and some of it was really genius, but then you guys got way too meta and self-referential and I had to break out the red pen. I wish I remembered the beginning of it, it was really tops. The only part I remember is you wrote that Cecilia started beating the shit out of Joseph to make him spit a chunk of meth out of his mouth. Then he would go to rehab.

Well, that's... weird? Cool? Both? Anyways, your dream's way more coherent than any of mine would ever be. That scene also sounds like something I would conceivably write if I tried to write a relationship story.

It was kind of hilarious, you guys(guy?) thought you were *so clever* making all these references to things that are happening now, like weird breaking-the-fourth-wall stuff that wouldn't fit AT ALL

Seriously, people need to learn that quality counts for something.

And I think quality's the basis for having an awards ceremony like this in the first place. The point of having judges is so you can have "experts" separate the good comics from the crappy ones, which isn't something that your average reader can be trusted to do. In addition, only giving awards to the most popular webcomics would be lame and uninteresting, and it'd further the sense of there being a rift between the "haves" and "have-nots."

Exactly, hence our basis for making the awards way more tiers/steps this year than they have before. It's a lot more work for the team, and I'm not sure it's really worth it, but it's gotten me to read a few good comics in my quest for quality control, so there's that at least! And isn't that the True meaning of Christmas?

Edit: Cope beat me to it. =P I'll add that BLs tend to very formulaic, with a masculine/aggressive "seme" molesting or raping a feminine/passive "uke."

Yes. Formulaic in and of itself isn't the eighth deadly sin, but it just points to this kind of disturbing trend in that genre that, to mix metaphors, is the huge elephant in the room swept under the rug. Not to mention that in this comic (and I'll try to stop bashing on it from this point forward unless I think I need to make a really good point, since it's just one examplary sample of the bad aspects of BL) the only way to tell the two main characters apart is by their eye color. Which isn't even just in their irises, it is photoshop blob painted onto their whole eye-socket area, like they're glowing. (which makes me wonder if the artist ever accidentally put the eye colors on the wrong people, I know I would )

[Sortelli]

I'm not particularly bothered or surprised by the rapey aspect to any yaoi comic, just rubbish the thing for being bad. Unless there's a category for audience pandering.

[JSConner800]

My job is to take the nominations that came in for a few categories and narrow them down to the 15 true finalists* for each category. All of the "ineligible" comics have already been taken out, whether they didn't have enough pages/hadn't updated recently enough at time of nomination/the creator didn't accept the nomination for that category. Like I said, the category in question has over 40 nominations, so I have a lot of fat to trim in that area. Mostly it's just me marveling over this comic whose literal and only claim to the thousands of fans it has is that it satisfies their craving for cartoon male-on-male "he liked it in in the end so everything's good" rape.

It's not even like people pretend it isn't rape. People in the comments say shit like "Oh I love it when he gets all rapey! It's so cute!" or "[Character] looooves getting raped " I know A LOT of BL comics are like that but it leaves a sour taste in my mouth, and considering there literally isn't anything else good about this comic, on that level I don't have a problem excluding it from a list of comics that I'm supposed to be holding up to the community at large saying "HERE IS A GOOD COMIC YOU WILL ENJOY READING."

Christ. I do not envy your position, Cuddly. If I had to choose which comic best represented the "good rape" genre, I'd probably just make my own comic with one panel: just the giant words "YOU'RE ALL TERRIBLE FUCKING PEOPLE" and then nominate that. I doubt it would win, but it would rest easier on my conscience and it might even be a contender if I can court the non-rapist vote. Of course, there's the minimum page limit, but if we can allow shit like this to proliferate, I'd be willing to try and bend the rules a little.

If you can't tell, I'm not a fan of the idea of rape as fanservice. Or characters who casually talk about enjoying rape. These authors clearly don't know the definition of the word. And I realize this is the internet, and it's just one of the many naive fantasies that populate its dark corners, and at least they're (probably) not doing it in real life, yadda yadda, but everybody's gotta draw the line somewhere, and that's where I do.

We'll see, though, maybe ~25 of the other comics are less effort + more rape than it, and it deserves to be included anyway! *u*

That's a terrifying thought. Good luck out there

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

We'll see, though, maybe ~25 of the other comics are less effort + more rape than it, and it deserves to be included anyway! *u*

That's a terrifying thought. Good luck out there

Lol, thanks. I'll keep you guys posted on how things go, I'm working my way through Sci Fi right now and saved Yaoi/BL for last.

[Yeahduff]

I kinda don't like when things are named after other things because I figure that as a writer, one is supposed to be able to come up with memorable phrases instead of borrowing other people's.
On the other hand, coming up with memorable phrases is hard.

I feel like trying to be 100 percent original all the time's too much of a drag. Everything's been done already anyways, so I think it's better to just have fun and do what you want as long as it isn't outright plagiarism.

Then again, title is about the first thing that anyone sees of your comic.

Ideally you want something original, but best laid plans.... I forget how it goes, maybe John Steinbeck can help me out.

[JSConner800]

Ideally you want something original, but best laid plans.... I forget how it goes, maybe John Steinbeck can help me out.

...get choked to death by a mentally handicapped giant? I think that's how it goes.

I'm okay with making references in, say, individual page titles or even chapter titles on occasion, but I think the work in its entirety needs to have an original name, or at least a name with an obscure reference, like my favorite novel of all time, Something Wicked This Way Comes. I work at a library, and I can't count how many books I've seen that have just straight up airlifted the title or lyrics of a popular song and used it as their own. Then again, this is usually a good indication of their quality, so maybe it's for the best that we mark our unoriginal, cliche-ridden work with unoriginal titles so those of us looking for something interesting will know to stay away