Notice for the Weekend of Nov 11-13

[Anywherebuthere]

Allright folks...

Shot myself in the foot and took on way to much this month. So Friday through Sunday I'll be running a three part mega strip again.

I wanted to run the whole thing on Friday, but I couldn't get it done today in time for the update tonight. So you'll just have to read on through.

Sorry, truely very sorry, I hate breaking up the big strips because they REALLY should be read back to back in one setting.

[Salad Hayes]

Dude, (no, not the Dude, you Dude) you are too apologetic. Had I not read the news with tonight's comic, I wouldn't have even known there was supposed to be more today. I think I remember someone saying somewhere sometime that artists shouldn't point out flaws in their work since most viewers wouldn't have noticed it anyway.

Of course, this is not to say I don't enjoy getting more story. Many times I've stayed up until all hours of the night trying to reach a good stopping point in whatever novel I'm reading at the time.

You write a great comic and spoil us readers with efforts like The Tempest and Guardian Devil (the lack of forum activity notwithstanding). Thank you.

And don't apologize for being too apologetic!

[Anywherebuthere]

Here's my reasoning for it.

There are great things about serial comics, and there are horrible things about serial comics.

I'm thinking of For Better or Worse. Not in a bad way. For Better or Worse is one of those strips that I respect the hell out of, because it's a strip about growth. Very character oriented, and there really is some touching stuff in there. For Better or Worse has grown on me like no other strip. It's the only strip outside of Bloom County which I own collected editions of. And the Bloom County trades came when I was in college. I've picked up 3 For Better or Worse trades in the past year. That's how much I dig that strip. And it reads INCREDABLY well as a collected work. There's so much growth to characters, so much change, so much...life to that strip.

Provided you can get a years worth in in one sitting.

But there is a problem that I think it has. It's limited to a finite canvas. Four pannels...that's it.

And it's very limiting. YES, if I chose I could draw out my megastrips out into weeks or months (the tempest was actually about 3 months of strips crammed into a week and a half.) But to me, I need the freedom of space to tell the stories I want to tell.

Oh, comedy is easy to cram into four pannels. It's practicly built for it. Setup, Pitch, Punchline, Reaction.

Four parts, four pannels.

Easy.

But serious stuff, that requires space. Otherwise the breathing room of these tales gets...lost. They become too refined, two chopped down. Too...cartoony.

I need to have the space to make my strip breath. Some days I need a full page, or five pages, or eleven pages to tell a story.

I read comics, I LIKE comics, I love the forum. Serious, humerous, philosophical. I just like comics. I love the whole art forum.

but what I hate is a trend in comics to "pad for the trade". Storylines get drawn out far to long, nothing happens for entire issues at a time. It's the same thing with soap operas. Story lines tend to drag, there's a status quo to maintain.

Hell, you can watch Days of Our Lives, miss a month, and tune back in and nothing more has happened since the last time you've tuned in.

With my strip, I don't want to feel like I'm "padding for the trade". I'm trying to keep things moving along pretty briskly, while still enabling enough time to breath. And that's going to require me to use space.

And when I do strips like the Guardian Devil, or the Tempest, or any other of the "mega" strips that I do, I want my readers to feel satisfied with what they're reading. At the end of my strips...a FULL strip, you should feel moved.

Weither it's to laughter, or tears, or love...I want people to be moved daily. If I'm doing my job, you shouldnt really be wanting more.

Which is WHY I try so hard to get the mega strips done and published together. Because I don't want anyone to have to wait to get to the good parts. It's like Christmas...



I have a very good...friend...who edits my strips. And she has this real problem waiting for Christmas. Well I shouldn't say that I guess. She just likes the excitment of opening her presents as soon as she gets them.

And so do I.

If I was a reader of my strip, as opposed to the writer who knows exactly where things are going (more or less, the characters do tend to surprise me from time to time..thank you Chris for adding an additional four pages to that bloody tempest strip), I wouldn't have the patience to tune in daily if there wasn't some sense of satisfaction and anticipation of what was going on. If I felt like a strip was simply..."padding for the trade" as it is, I wouldn't feel like reading it religiously. I'ld stop by once a month to get in everything that's going on, and that would be it.

So, with my strip, I'm going to do my damnest to make certain that every time someone stops in, they can walk away with something. That every day is Christmas, and that you can open your present right away. It's a challange, but to me it's the right thing to do. Because if I was a reader, that would be the type of strip that would have me eagerly awaiting for updates.

[Hornguard]

Dude....the last two weeks of strips has been my last three months...

Keep it up...I'm stuck on this visual crack.

[Salad Hayes]

I do see your point about avoiding Megatokyo-style storytelling, where it seems like I'm reading a novel a paragraph a day (not even everyday at that). Although, I do think it is possible to tell a serious story four panels at a time without padding (CRFH!!! comes to mind, and Maritza can often make do with less than four panels). To each their own, then.

Anyway...

Christmas everyday? You do spoil us!

Good on you.

[Dutch!]

That's a tough job you've set yourself, Jay (see, I'm learning American nicknames, eh?). Padding for trade...never heard it put that way...gives me something to think about, eh?

Maybe I need to do more short storylines instead of the larger twenty strip monsters that...yeah...they take nearly two months...hmm...

I guess that just means holding some of the jokes and stuff back for the next stories they fit into, eh?

Keep it all up. I haven't had a chance to check your stuff out for about two months because my desktop machine is playing silly buggers with the internet and I'm stuck on the school laptop I 'rent'. I have to be careful with what gets uploaded through it

Looking forward to getting back into whatever's been happening in that great expanse of North Dakota.

Cheers.

[Anywherebuthere]

I do see your point about avoiding Megatokyo-style storytelling, where it seems like I'm reading a novel a paragraph a day (not even everyday at that). Although, I do think it is possible to tell a serious story four panels at a time without padding (CRFH!!! comes to mind, and Maritza can often make do with less than four panels). To each their own, then.

Anyway...

Christmas everyday? You do spoil us!

Good on you.

I agree that it's possible. However I also like haveing the breathing room to get reaction shots in, to get just a "bit" of padding in. There's a certain flow to comics that I truely enjoy.

Like, say, it may take four pannels to express a gradual realization that some truth is sinking in. It may take four pannels to really get that slow turn around established.

And I like the fact that on the web I can do this. That I'm not limited to the four pannel structure. While I'm in NO way compairing my skills to that of Bill Watterson, I know he had a simmilar feeling with his Sunday strips. If he COULD have, he would have taken a full page to tell some of his Sundays. And in some ways, I'ld take up a full book just for one conversation. Because with some of my characters, the dynamic in just ONE conversation winds up having that much movement when I write it.

That sounds a bit conceited, but it's the medium.

The dude takes a bit to "warm up" to people. You almost HAVE to dig with him. WHich leads to a few pannels to establish that.

Characters like Buddy or Ken will just say what they're thinking, there's no need to establish anything with them. Heck, even Mongo will get right to the point.

But when there's conflict, you can expect The Dude, and Chris to some part to do some interesting crap that winds up defining their characters.

Like what we'll see in mondays strip (Again, Chris did something while I was thinking about the strip that caused a rewrite. What's that girl so SCARED of anyway? Hmmmmm....)

The other part of this equation is this: Anywhere But Here is a strip with a SET run time. I don't plan to do it forever. What I originally intended to be a five year series is getting cut down to three and a half...with an archive section that will be filled in as I find the time to do so.

Why?

Because the Ending comes in the fifth season. And there's a lot of stuff that I need to get to in order for the ending to work.

Now you can say that "HEY! Well just get to it on your own sweet time, you know, if you wind up taking 7 years to do five seasons, go for it."

And while you have a point, it doesn't quite work that way. The seasons do corilate with real time. Christmas is Christmas, Easter is Easter.

Five Christmasses, Five Easters, Five Halloweens...

That's how it works. So in a round about way, I have a deadline to adhere to.

Hope that makes sense.

And, I do rather like putting out mega strips, it makes me feel like I have a leg up on the competition

[Anywherebuthere]

That's a tough job you've set yourself, Jay (see, I'm learning American nicknames, eh?). Padding for trade...never heard it put that way...gives me something to think about, eh?

Maybe I need to do more short storylines instead of the larger twenty strip monsters that...yeah...they take nearly two months...hmm...

I guess that just means holding some of the jokes and stuff back for the next stories they fit into, eh?

Keep it all up. I haven't had a chance to check your stuff out for about two months because my desktop machine is playing silly buggers with the internet and I'm stuck on the school laptop I 'rent'. I have to be careful with what gets uploaded through it

Looking forward to getting back into whatever's been happening in that great expanse of North Dakota.

Cheers.

Dutch,

I don't have a problem with "padding for the trade", because I just BUY the trades. Which again, could explain my desire to do these larger mega-strips. I like the extra space a "trade" or "Graphic Novel" provides. It's good to have breathing room.

Nor do I have a problem with a joke a day comic doing a story arc that spans a week, or a month, provided each comic can stand on it's own and deliver the goods every time you read it.

Again I look at For Better or Worse. I love those collected editions, because I can read one and feel like I've just gone through a whole lot. But I NEVER really got into the dailys, simply because it was too much, like salad said, reading a novel one paragraph at a time.

Or, look at Mary Worth or Rex Morgan, where there is a WHOLE lot of nothing that goes on week in and week out.

Yes, there is a Spider Man newspaper strip. But I much prefer to read the comic books, which is a month of stories condensed into one little packet.

I'm trying to find a blend here. The web gives me the ability to make a comic as big or small as I want. And I plan to use it to my advantage every chance I get.

So, I guess I'm doing a real hybrid comic. It's part newspaper daily, part graphic novel, part four pannel, part infinate canvas, part comedy, part drama....all I have to do is add some Manga, and some Sprites, a few RPGers, some Gamers, and a Sonic or Mega Man character or two and I'll cover all my bases.

[Salad Hayes]

...all I have to do is add some Manga, and some Sprites, a few RPGers, some Gamers, and a Sonic or Mega Man character or two and I'll cover all my bases.

I was about to recoil in horror, but then I remembered that the first two webcomics I discovered and read regurally were "8-Bit Theatre" and "Bob and George".

*flees in shame*