Blógünder Schlock

I skipped out on Penguicon this year (it’s my favorite out-of-state convention), and it’s probably a good thing. All of Tuesday night was spent making trips to the bathroom to shout at the porcelain, and while this sort of thing usually kills a day or two, I was still running a fever and losing precious sleep Friday night, and stumbling around all achey like a zombie on a no-brains diet on Saturday.

Penguiconners, I missed you this weekend, and for this you should be thankful. Whatever I’ve got, you don’t want.

I colored two pages of Bonus Story before falling ill, and then, in spite of the illin’ an’ chillin’, I actually managed to bang out a week of comics on Friday and Saturday. They’ll probably need touch-ups when Smart Howard checks back in for work Monday, but most of the heavy lifting is done.

I know, I know… the buffer is supposed to give me time off for sickness, but with book deadlines crushing me, and conventions coming in May (Hello, Leprecon!) I really don’t want to lose a week just because the new entrees from Panda Express thought so much of themselves they demanded I taste them twice.

When I called my friend Bob Defendi to let him know I couldn’t join his game Wednesday night, I told him I probably wouldn’t be eating at Panda for a looong time to come. “The taste of chinese food on the way back up is one of those memories that just won’t let go,” I said. Bob told me that would be a great first line for a book. It made me laugh, but laughing still hurt a lot.

Sorry for the huge quantities of “Too Much Information.” I’m sure you’ll agree (to complete the song lyric in the title of this post,) “these are the things we can do without.”

You can read the latest Schlock Mercenary (as well as the latest of each of the Blank Label Comics) at the new-and-improved Blank Label Comics home page.

Our initial page layout (credit: Maggie, David Willis, and Me) was pretty good, but Elizabeth Dean (espoused to Greg Dean of Real Life Comics) took one look at it and sprouted a patch of grey hairs. Then she got to work.

Less than six hours later she had a new layout mocked up. Twenty-four hours after that, Greg had made her design live.

I have never seen this woman touch a page design without turning it into gold. She is Queen WebMidas, with a golden touch. In this case the gold comes in desaturated cerulean shades highlighted with shining Blank Label Orange, but it is gold nonetheless. It is gorgeous… kind of like the tri-color Black Hills Gold, only without Indian Burial Grounds or Mount Rushmore.

So… go have a look. Read all of the Blank Label Comics in one handy place.

Now then… here are some answers to common questions:

Q: What will this do to ad revenue?
A: The same thing RSS feeds do. It will dilute ad revenue slightly, while expanding the reach of the comics and increasing page-views overall. Ultimately, it’s OUR problem, not yours. This page is for readers to enjoy. If you feel guilty enjoying it, you can buy some merchandise someday.

Q: Can I have an RSS feed for this new page?
A: Hmmm… No. The page updates every ten minutes, and updated content (especially blog entries) may appear at any time during the day. If you want to be up-to-the-minute on all that stuff, the best way is to subscribe to individual Blank Label Comics RSS feeds. This page is a once-a-day trawl spot for people who don’t want to bother with all those feeds.

Q: But Schlock Mercenary doesn’t have a feed.
A: Yet. I’m working on that. It’s a separate project.

Q: Why is Real Life on top?
A: Because for now we all wanted it there. The vertical orientation is perfect. Eventually we may auto-rotate the position of the strips, but that’s a version 2.0 task.

Q: Shouldn’t there be plugs for your merchandise, and store links, and forum links, and all that?
A: You’re absolutely right. There should be. That’s a version 1.1 task, and to hear Greg bubble enthusiastically about it, some of that may be in place before this blog entry gets posted.

Q: Do you have plans to add any other comics to the lineup here?
A: No, but the architecture is flexible enough that it would be easy to do. Six seems like the right number right now.

Q: What happened to the Blank Label Comics blog?
A: You can find it at www.blanklabelcomics.com/blog. Yes, this probably broke a lot of trackbacks and pings. Sorry! We’ll look at getting it incorporated into the main page at some future point.

Q: I have a bug to report!
A: Email it to me, or use the “contact” link at the top of the Blank Label Comics home page.

I’d like you to visit the new Blank Label Comics hub. The link will pop you into a new window. Feel free to come back here and discuss what you see…

I say “I’ve been working on” this. Truth be told, the heavy lifting was done by my friend John from Novell, and it couldn’t have happened without the cooperation of our Blank Label’s generous hosts at Bookworm Computing and Dumbrella Hosting. David Willis did the page layout.

All I did was crack the whip, cajole, beg, and then try to get all the different pieces to work together nicely.

If you’re still wondering what I’m talking about, by all means, go have a look.

In conjunction with some of this week’s news (the Blank Label/Halfpixel fission) I was interviewed by the editor over at Comixtalk.

You can read the interview here.

This has been a big week for Webcomics news:

1) Melonpool is back! Blank Label Cartoonist Steve Troop was one of the very first webcartoonists, and Melonpool is one of the longest-running properties online. He’s been burning the candle at both ends professionally puppetteering for the last several months, but he’s back on his inkin’ game now.

2) Comicspace and Webcomicsnation announced a merger. I had some conversations with Joey Manley about this during the summer and again a few weeks ago, but had to keep my mouth shut. Interestingly, I STILL have to keep my mouth shut. Their stuff is really that cool.

3) Zudacomics.com, DC’s big foray into the world of online comics (and buying intellectual properties for peanuts and page-views) launched on the 30th. Their launch was HUGE, with over 23,000 pages viewed in just one day. (Ummm… yeah. To put that in perspective, you people view over a quarter-million pages at schlockmercenary.com each day. DC may get more traffic from this blog post than from their launch.)

4) Blank Label Cartoonists Brad Guigar, David Kellett, and Kristofer Straub, along with BLC Unofficial Advisor Scott Kurtz bid a fond farewell to Blank Label. They’re doing their own things, some of which will be done jointly under the Halfpixel banner. This fission leaves Blank Label Comics with Melonpool, Real Life, Ugly Hill, Wapsi Square, Shortpacked, and of course Schlock Mercenary.

5) That Wikinews article about webcomics and notability (the one I blogged) got slashdotted. As did I, I suppose. Traffic here blipped up by about 8%. Webcomics have come a long way since the days when Slashdot could actually hurt our hosting. More importantly, however, the discussion under that article has lots of very meaningful, articulate posts, and only a few all-caps trolls.

Of all of this stuff, I’m sure the folks at DC would like to think their news is the most worthy. Personally, I think the WCN/CS merger (Item #2) is the biggest news. If comics were geopolitics, that merger is like if England and France teamed up to colonize the Americas in 1530. Zuda is like if Columbus arrived in America in 1906 and tried to announce that he was discovering it. And then unloaded a sack of beads and asked if Manhattan was still for sale.

In case you missed the news, Radiohead (one of the biggest bands of the decade) has decided to release their new album in the same way I released the Strohl Munitions Coloring Book: you name your price, and you get the digital goods.

Okay, I’m not claiming to have invented this, nor am I claiming that Radiohead got the idea from me. People have been doing this for years, starting with a couple of shareware developers in 1984 who made millions of dollars at it.

The official Radiohead site is here. The album will be available in ten days, but you can pay now, naming your price. Personally, I would love to see Radiohead make hojillions of dollars at this, permanently validating that which I know to already be valid. Just because a warm fuzzy is redundant doesn’t mean it’s not warm and fuzzy.

In other news, what do you call a legion of the walking dead who are running out of corpses to feed on, and will drop into a ditch sometime in the next twenty years? RIAA.

This morning the smell of fall was in the air.

It was a trick, of course. We had rain last night, so the smell this morning was actually “wet summer,” but here in the Great Western Desert that’s as good as August gets.

My kids are back in school, and so are more than a few of my readers. For those of you NOT in school, I’ll let you in on a little secret: Kids these days? They read webcomics at school ALL THE TIME.

Yeah, I see you in my server logs. I see your campus proxy servers. I see your frat home-pages. I see your digital footprints, as you sneak around the musty Schlock Mercenary archives…

Your soul is mine. Want it back? Oh, that’s easy… BRING ME MORE SOULS. Hook your friends on Schlock. Find a favorite strip and share it. Loan them your book. (Buy a book, and THEN loan it to them.)

Need help? Here’s a page full of link banners you can use in sigs. But the best way to recruit your new flatmates or fellow dorm-rats is to laugh out loud while you read. Don’t hold it in. That’s not healthy.

I know, I know, they won’t notice. But I’m done doing business with them.

(Note: If you work for Qwest, please read on, and feel free to respond. After all, it only takes one person to completely destroy your company’s image. It’s possible, though only remotely, that one person can save or restore it.)

So… I’m hard at work trying to bang out the last two pages of Bonus Story for the next book. I have seven more rows to color, the flooding is done, and I’m painting. My music is blaring, the house is empty for the next three hours, I’m in my happy place…

And the phone rings. Number Unavailable. Private caller.

I pick up.

“Taylers’, this is Howard.”

“Are you Howard Tayler, of Blank Label Comics?”

Sounds like a salesperson, but he might have legitimate business with our little collective.
“I am.” I say, with that practiced inflection that says if you have legitimate business with me, now is the time to get to it.

“Has anybody from Qwest talked to you about lowering your small-business calling rates?”

“No, they haven’t. Please put me on your no-call list.”

And I hung up, cranked the tunes, and got back to work.

The phone rang again. Number Unavailable. Private Caller.

Ohhh-kay. This is either ILLEGAL (No-call means just that, and there are legal ramifications to calling in spite of it), or accidental, or it’s a coincidence.

“Hello?”

The same voice I spoke to before begins, as if we were old friends who had been cut off accidentally:
“Why would you want us not to call? We’re trying to lower your rates, not raise them.”

I let him have both barrels.
“You are quite possibly the rudest salesperson who has ever called me. When I-”

“I’m not a salesman,” he interrupted. “I’m trying to lower your rates, not-”

“And I said put me on your DO NOT CALL list.” (Note: I may have actually raised my voice at this point.)

“-lower them. And you’re the one being rude. Maybe we’ll raise your rates instead. How would you like that?”*

And then he hung up.

Had I the presence of mind to get his name (and had he lacked the presence of mind to refuse it) I would be on the phone with Qwest right now demanding an apology. Or maybe I’d be contacting an attorney, trying to find a way to sue these people for what has to be the most flagrant violation of “do not call” I’ve ever experienced.

Regardless, I don’t currently do business with Qwest. Our land-line is provided through my ISP, Comcast/AT&T. If this guy had my phone number, he also had the ability to look that information up, and could quite easily have determined that “lowering my rates” also required him to sell me something. In fact, I doubt he’s calling existing Qwest customers. He’s calling FORMER Qwest customers, trying to get back their business.

Hey, Qwest! At this point if you want to get my business back, you’ll beat AT&T’s best rate by 95% or more for a period of no less than two years no, wait… screw that. You want me as a customer? Fine. Free phone service for two years, no strings. If I’m satisfied come August of 2009, maybe I’ll decide not to switch back to the folks who are currently taking pretty fine care of me.

These folks, after all, are the ones who provided me with high-speed internet access back in 2001 when you said it couldn’t be done. You whined and made excuses about how the line between my house and the switching station was too long for DSL. AT&T came by and laid new cable — no excuses, just great service.

In fact, now that I think about it, I still have quite a bit of loyalty towards my current provider. Forget it, Qwest. You could offer me free phone service for life, and I’d tell you to offer it to one of my fixed-income neighbors who needs it. But I’d warn her that your salespeople are pushy, and should be hung up on at her earliest convenience.

(*Note: The conversations above were not transcribed real-time, nor do I have recordings. I’ve paraphrased as accurately as I can, but rest assured, I’ve made nothing up. This guy really did threaten to raise my rates.)

I’m going to do the unthinkable. I’m going to take seven very busy days and compress them into one blog post.

I won’t trouble you with the first three days, save to say that I worked hard getting the booth in ship-shape, and demonstrated some real proficiency in using a drill to drive screws. Apparently David Willis was impressed.

(Note: I saw no ladies looking this impressed, but Willis assures me they were there.)

The resulting booth was so pretty we had a team of videographers come by and interview Brad Guigar. See how he drags an unwilling Kristofer Straub into the limelight? Brilliant work, Brad!

I met some really cool people, including Laurell K. Hamilton, who wrote the introduction to Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between. I had neat conversations with recent illustration graduate Kim Herbst, and got a “thank you” book from Templar Arizona’s Spike.

I was treated to lunch by my friend Allison — we did Drama Club stuff together in high school a couple of decades back — and in exchange I drew a caricature of her. And before you ask, the shirt she’s wearing is one that she made with my permission. I don’t have those for sale, but with this picture of her I bet they’d sell off the shelves.

By the way, if you’re ever at a convention with me, and want something like this done, the price-tag is around $50.00. Allison is a good friend, and bought me a VERY nice lunch. Note, however, that if you’re not this good-looking, the price may go up, or I may find myself just too busy to accept the commission.

Tom and Justin of Comics Coast-To-Coast interviewed me for a podcast. You can find the hour-long podcast here, and my segment begins at 14:55. If you like the sound of my voice as much as I appear to, you’ve got to get some of this. Rich Stevens of Diesel Sweeties sent them over to me for the “business angle” on things, and I’m afraid they got a real earful.

I didn’t do any panels, I didn’t do any shopping, and I didn’t see much of San Diego. I did, however, have a great time. And when it came time to take things apart, it went enough faster than I expected it to that I was able to leave for home a day early. For that whole day I lied to Sandra about how far from home I was, so that Monday evening I was able to walk through the door and surprise her.

As much as I love my job, and enjoy conventions, coming home is always the best part.

By Sandra Tayler

There is a story of a couple who had their car towed to a mechanic because the engine had seized up. The mechanic asked the husband when he’d last put oil into the car. The husband said that his wife put oil into the car. The mechanic then went to the wife. She assured him that her husband put oil into the car. Thus the car died for lack of oil.

This story is extremely pertinent today. Howard and I both assumed that renewing the schlockmercenary.com domain name was taken care of. The registrar company knew that it wasn’t, but all of their contact information was 7 years out-of-date, because the last time we renewed we paid for 7 years.

Fortunately our domain registrar has a policy of holding on to accounts for 30 days past the end of registration. I made a phone call this morning and paid up to renew. I’ve updated all the contact information and I’ve marked in red on my calendar when I need to be thinking about renewal again. It won’t happen again.

Many thanks to the fan who posted a link to the hard IP address so that people could still find the comic. Even more thanks to the fans who emailed to make sure we knew something was wrong. And to the couple of fans who actually called on the phone to offer help, thank you very much. We didn’t need the help this time, but it warms my heart to know that there are folks out there who care so much.