Apophenia Stories

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Sat Feb 04, 2006 1:19 pm

It seems the edit has been fixed. I just went into my profile and selected Sub-Silver to get the classic phpbb look.

Jackalope · Post by **Jackalope** » Sat Feb 04, 2006 10:37 pm

18 pages completely done, the rest partially done. Hell, I might actually get this done by this weekend. I'd have more done right now, but I wasted an hour beating on Illustrator trying to find the hidden setting I'd accidentally flipped that suddenly made everything act wonky.

George was looking over my shoulder while I was doig the Sky Pirates page and shouted, "Butt Pirates of Mars!" I told him it was too late for that idea to go into my script. However, he says anyone else should feel free to use the idea...

Jackalope · Post by **Jackalope** » Sun Feb 05, 2006 6:11 pm

Woohoo! Done! Now I just have to convert all the pages back to jpgs and put them in a zip archive for Ghastly...

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Sun Feb 05, 2006 8:03 pm

New story by Andrew Johnston is up. This one is probably the most whacked out entry yet.

He modified some of the artwork in his version. Typically though, I'd prefer it if the artwork wasn't modified as the object of the exercise is to create your story that fits the artwork rather than modify the artwork to fit your story.

Moo Cow · Post by **Moo Cow** » Sun Feb 05, 2006 8:09 pm

Dude, that is seriously fucked up... i liked it!

~Sara

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Sun Feb 05, 2006 8:38 pm

Incidently the Helmsman has been officially added to the cast now.

Jackalope · Post by **Jackalope** » Sun Feb 05, 2006 11:16 pm

Okay, I've converted all the files, zip'd them up and mailed them. Ghastly, if they don't appear on your end please let me know. Gmail didn't choke when I attached the file, so it should go through okay. However, since the zip archive is something like 9.2M, I'll wait until it actually shows up on your end. I've known gmail to choke on files as small as 6M before.

Squidflakes · Post by **Squidflakes** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 7:56 am

Ghastly wrote:Incidently the Helmsman has been officially added to the cast now.

Woo! I found Waldo!

3 pages complete. Jesus H this is a lot of work.

StarDrifter · Post by **StarDrifter** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 8:02 am

I apologize again for taking some liberties with that comic. GreenAdder got me into lettering this then encouraged me to finish then submit the comic. The idea to start playing loose with the pictures was entirely mine. If just one page got him to say "that is wrong," then my job was done.

I'm torn on one angle. On one hand, I'd love to do chapter two properly. This means setting aside one or two mornings a week to letter so that future pages are a suprise. This would also mean no more manipulating the pictures. On the other, I'd like to resolve the schoolgirl story line. I haven't looked at what's up yet, but there's probably a good way of accomplishing all of these goals.

Thanks again Ghastly!

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 8:46 am

It's okay, don't sweat it, I never actually stated the images couldn't be manipulated and you didn't really change a lot. I did have one person ask me if they could cut and paste panels and rearrange pages to make it fit their story to which I said "no". That would kind of defeat the whole purpose of this little project as it would basically reduce the original to a collection of clip-art.

In other news, Jackalope's submission has arrived and is up. It looks very good and makes a very interesting story. I'm sure many of you will enjoy it.

I also got an e-mail from a reader in Japan asking if he could letter it in japanese since he doesn't speak english very well. By all means if you are uncomfortable lettering it in english feel free to submit it in your native language instead. If you can submit an english version as well that would be great. If not then perhaps another reader will be able to submit a translated version of your story. So please let me know what language it is you're submitting it in so I can ask for a translator.

Also, please e-mail me in english if at all possible. Dispite being Canadian my french is extremely poor and even though I studied Japanese in university it's been about 7 years since I used it regularily and I have nearly forgotten all my kanji. It takes me a long time with the Kodansha kanji dictionary playing "hunt the radical" to translate an e-mail in Japanese.

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 8:52 am

squidflakes wrote:
Ghastly wrote:Incidently the Helmsman has been officially added to the cast now.
Woo! I found Waldo!

3 pages complete. Jesus H this is a lot of work.

It takes me about 2 to 3 hours on average to pencil a page, 1 to 2 hours to ink it and anywhere from 2.5 to 4.5 hours to colour it. The page that is up today took me 4.5 hours to colour. It was just very slow going for some reason. The monochrome blue page before it took me about an hour to colour, maybe less. Needless to say life would be much simpler if I had decided not to do this comic in full colour. Shit, next time I do a comic I'm going the Fred Gallagher route and stopping at the pencils.

Chaszmyr Mae'Val · Post by **Chaszmyr Mae'Val** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 11:04 am

Just got back from a dirty weekend in Wales.

Let battle resume!

EDIT: Hooray! It's back!

Squidflakes · Post by **Squidflakes** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 12:53 pm

Ghastly wrote:
squidflakes wrote:
Ghastly wrote:Incidently the Helmsman has been officially added to the cast now.
Woo! I found Waldo!

3 pages complete. Jesus H this is a lot of work.
It takes me about 2 to 3 hours on average to pencil a page, 1 to 2 hours to ink it and anywhere from 2.5 to 4.5 hours to colour it. The page that is up today took me 4.5 hours to colour. It was just very slow going for some reason. The monochrome blue page before it took me about an hour to colour, maybe less. Needless to say life would be much simpler if I had decided not to do this comic in full colour. Shit, next time I do a comic I'm going the Fred Gallagher route and stopping at the pencils.

Just doing the lettering for this thing I've gotten a new appreciation for how much work these comics take. That you are cranking them out at the rate you do.. just.. wow. I can't imagine how people like Tycho and Gabe or Fred manage to keep their update schedules and still do things like eating and pooping.

Chaszmyr Mae'Val · Post by **Chaszmyr Mae'Val** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 12:59 pm

11 pages done.

20 to go.

And I've learned a lot about PSP as a result.

Jackalope · Post by **Jackalope** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 1:10 pm

To be fair, if you do it all on the computer instead of insisting on drawing, scanning, then cleaning up before you start the real computer work, it goes a lot faster. Especially after you get past the learning curve. My first 10 pages or so went slow, because I was building up some specific shapes, swatches and lettering to use. Then it went along much, much faster. And it'd have gone even faster still if I hadn't insisted on drawing all those sound effects (which were more than just colored-in fonts, I did a fair amount of manipulation and drawing to make stuff look like that).

When I work as a graphic artist, how long a job will take depends on if I can grab somethng out of my huge library of pre-drawn images (all mine, no stealing) and modify it to fit what the client wants. If I can, it takes almost no time at all. If I have to start again from scratch, then I start wracking up the hours.

Moo Cow · Post by **Moo Cow** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 5:30 pm

*reads Jackalope's version*

Ooh, that was so fun!

On a purely superficial level i like how you did the lettering itself. Your use of fonts, color, and shape of bubbles really added to the mood.

Now on to the story. I really like what you did with it, and you had some great lines in it.
"you boys go down faster than a sorority girl at a kegger" - AWESOME line! *giggles wildly*
I like the depth added to the schoolgirl especially.

~Sara

Jackalope · Post by **Jackalope** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 11:12 pm

Hah. That one line is what made George almost snort his drink out his nose when he was reading over my shoulder. The script was just gettin' too angstful, and so when it came time to write dialogue for the fight scene I just let the snarky comments fly.

I got about halfway through and realized that Shirow Masumune's work has influenced me more than I thought. He puts sound effects in for just about *everything*. Check out his crowd scenes in Ghost in the Shell and Man-Machine Interface sometime. And the speech bubbles with graphics in them was something I always loved about Dave Sim's stuff in Cerebus. Some of those can still make me laugh, even though I've seen them a gazillion times. The hand-colored lettering is just a quirk of mine. Fancy lettering is one of those things I just love to do. That's more than half the fun of doing comics. It's just easier to do really insane stuff when you're doing it all on the computer.

GreenAdder · Post by **GreenAdder** » Wed Feb 08, 2006 7:25 pm

Speaking of Fred Gallagher, I'm surprised that I didn't get one piece of hatemail so far for the "Johnny reading Megatokyo slash fan-fiction" gag.

I thought MT fans were like, you know, omnipotent. Like, right now, they could read me calling it "the ultimate Mary-Sue comic" that was "better when the other guy was still around." Then their Spider-Sense would kick in and I'd get an inbox full of hate-mail and laughs.

But nope. Just a couple e-mails telling me I was "pretty funny" and one asking what it was like to work with Ghastly. I set the record straight on A357 as nicely as I could with that one.

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Wed Feb 08, 2006 7:47 pm

Seeing Fred Gallagher and Spidey-sense in the same message just made me think of that "How do I drawed shit" picture someone sent me from 4chan.

Heheheh... That Piro, always draweding shit.

GreenAdder · Post by **GreenAdder** » Wed Feb 08, 2006 7:53 pm

Ghastly wrote:Seeing Fred Gallagher and Spidey-sense in the same message just made me think of that "How do I drawed shit" picture someone sent me from 4chan.

Heheheh... That Piro, always draweding shit.

I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with that image. Then again, I'm not exactly a 4chan regular. Matter of fact, I'm kind of afraid of that place. And google doesn't seem to be helping.