With the airing of the June 12th, 2009 installment of Schlock Mercenary I celebrate three things:
1) Nine full years of Schlock online.
2) The beginning of the tenth year of Schlock online.
3) The recycling of a nine-year-old punchline. Under the current conditions, that’s the very oldest of my punchlines I can re-use.
It’s been a great nine years. Here’s to nine more, only I want them to be even better.
One of the hardest lessons to learn in any business is when to do something yourself, and when to subcontract it, or outsource it, or otherwise partner with someone else in order to finish the job.
There are two object lessons in this blog post. The first and most obvious one is that I am a much better cartoonist than I am a handy-man, so Sandra and I made the wise decision to hire some folks from 3 Day Kitchen and Bath to remodel my office for us.
The second, less-obvious one is that while I’m a reasonably adept blogger and photo-poster, I don’t do it very often. Why not? Because my own processes really aren’t optimized for that kind of thing. But Flickr does it quite well, so I’m experimenting with using Flickr’s tools for this instead of my own.
All this comes back to a fundamental business principle: Just because you CAN do something yourself doesn’t mean you SHOULD. The trick, of course, lies in knowing where to draw the line.
So, with the overly long and somewhat preachy explanation out of the way, here is Howard’s very first Flickr set. And just to demonstrate the value in having somebody else manage the photos, here it is as a slide-show.
On March 31st I announced that I’d be illustrating a gaming supplement for Tracy and Curtis Hickman. As of today, four weeks and one-hundred-and-thirty-three illustrations later, I’m done.
Well… MOSTLY done. There are proofreaders working over the book, and I’m sure some of my illustrations may need to get nudged around, and it is possible a few of them may even need to be modified. But the hard part, the thinky, inky, stare-at-the-blank-page-without-blinky part of the project is done.
I’ve learned a lot about illustrating during the last four weeks. The most notable thing is that I’m still a rank amateur when it comes to digital color. I drew that picture above, but I hired my good friend Jim Zubkavich to color it for the cover. I told him that a quick-and-dirty cartoon-style coloring job would be fine. Looking at it I’m now forced to reclassify every bit of coloring work I’ve ever done somehow LOWER than “quick-and-dirty cartoon style.” In fact, every time I look at it I discover two or three new techniques I don’t have time to learn.
But I did have time to learn a few things about line, and a zillion things about hands. I’m quite pleased with the interior of the book, and I think my illustrations nicely fit with the fun-yet-educational tone of the tome. No, pre-orders are not open yet, but yes, you WILL be able to order XDM: XTreme Dungeon Mastery from the Schlock Mercenary Bookstore sometime in July. Watch this space.
The XDM: X-treme Dungeon Mastery project has devoured my schedule. It has not, however, devoured every last scrap of thought I have. I remain a man possessed of wild ideas, flights of fancy, and the desire to publicly comment on stuff from all over. I just don’t have the time to actually sit down and articulate those ideas clearly. I feel a little bit like this guy…
A haughtier, more self-obsessed artist might pout and complain that the world is somehow being impoverished for the absence of his bloated ramblings on this or that. Me, I think that I’m the one being impoverished, because I don’t really know what I think about something until I’ve seen what I’m able to say about it.
I tweet in order to let people know that I’m still alive, but I don’t bother putting opinions of any weight in the 140-character format. They come across as indefensible, unsupported statements of fact, and would then get debated in 140-character rebuttals and counter-arguments. Pointless.
But I am having deep thoughts on stuff. The state of newspapers and editorial cartooning takes the fore, but lesser matters like the splitting of the final volume of The Wheel of Time into three books also vie for cycles. Religion, politics, home-life, diet, a zillion little business things I’ve been meaning to blog about, the fact that I split the front of my face open on my son’s head… and as I mention these I find I’m just scratching the surface. There’s more, much more down deeper. Like the epic fantasy I want to write, and my secret dreams of ruling the world.
I’ve now said too much while saying too little. I’m just not a very good blogger, I guess. Fortunately, blogging is not what you folks pay me to do. On that note, I think I shall get back to work.
Today, March 1st of 2009, is the 60th day of the year. So was February 29th of 1968, which means that a full 41 years have passed since I escaped the womb.
(cue Matthew Broderick saying “what a memory…”)
As a present to myself I’m wrapping up Book 10 today. BAM. Done. See how easy that was? I only finished tweaking the line art on Thursday, which is kind of rare for me. Things got down to the wire there when I decided the first row needed a complete re-write.
Monday’s strip is the first in Book 11. By way of setting your expectations, this is going to be a wonderful story, funny and uplifting with action, adventure, peril, and character development. But there will be NO Schlocktoberfest in 2009. Crafting a one-month mini-arc that maps perfectly to the calendar is hard work, and it just doesn’t fit this time. It might never fit again.
This doesn’t mean I’ll never tell another spooky story, or do another send-up of horror-movie tropes. It doesn’t mean I’m never going to kill off characters or launch the midden into the windmill again. It just means I’m going to do those things when you can’t let the calendar warn you about them. I’m going to relax and let this next story tell itself at the pace it wants to.
I think it wants to go in five directions at once, like an organ fugue written for four hands and shared pedals. It’s a good thing I have a degree in music…
Orem cartoonist rising figure in webcomics world
Oh yeah, I’m a RISING FIGURE. See that figure there, that one that’s RISING? Totally me. And I’m RISING, baby.
Also: the article has a spoiler. You get to see the last panel of March 2nd’s strip if you click on the thumbnail picture.
As I mentioned in my last post, the only thing the cover needed was minor tweaks. They have been twunk.
(Is that word? “Twunk?” It should be. Tweak, twank, twunk…)
This picture is now on the archive page, too.
With the completion of the cover for Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance I’m ready to move on to Bonus Story coloring. Which is what I’m supposed to be doing right now instead of blogging.
Here’s the first draft of the front cover of Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance.
There are some minor problems with it. The glow behind the Schlock logo is a quick-and-dirty version. The text on the cylinder behind Tagon needs to go away because it’s distracting. There need to be some more elements in the upper right of the page because it looks too boring. Maybe I’ll dress the background up a bit more, too. Other than that, it’s pretty much done.
And now you know what the hammer and the angry looks are for. IT RUINED THE TOAST.
Also, you can now tell who wrote the introduction… it’s brilliant, by the way. BRILLIANT.
Two hundred and thirty-three rows of comics, almost a thousand panels, nigh on twelve hundred different Photoshop layers… and it’s finally all done.
Lessons learned:
1) These take ten minutes each, but only if I decide I don’t really care.
2) I really care.
3) Budgeting forty quick-and-dirty hours for a job I’m going to start caring about, and then setting dates based on the budget results in slipped dates.
5) The next recoloring project is going to take six weeks, provided I can avoid problems like that Daystar one.
It feels good to be done, but I’m not DONE done. I don’t get to take a vacation now. The buffer has dropped by a week, the bonus story remains uncolored, and Scrapyard still needs cover art.
Back to work… but not until I’ve had a good night’s sleep.
Most of the recoloring for Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance has been pretty straightforward — adjust colors for CMYK, throw a couple of gradient fills in the backgrounds, and then draw some shadows and highlights on the foreground elements.
Every so often a strip shows up where doing those last two things — gradient filling the backdrop and shading the fore — suggests a more dramatic treatment of the material, and I really start messing around.
Here’s a before-and-after of one such change:
I remember what Flood-Fill Howard thought back in 2004 — “Red is kind of a bloody, painful color, and should serve to underscore what’s going on in this scene.”
Howard Of Aught-Nine thinks differently — “Red isn’t selling it. Let’s make it COLD, with blue and black shading, harsh light, and stark shadows.”
Is one better than the other? Well… in my estimation, absolutely. The second strip is prettier, more dramatic, and easier on the eyes. The details pop more, and the story is better told. If you want a slightly closer look, click on the image.
I resisted the temptation to mess with the line art… that way lies madness. I’m not going to re-draw anything if I can help it. Every so often a strip will have an actual continuity error, usually missing epaulets, but by and large I stay away from changing lines. Life’s too short for that.
Anyway, the process of recoloring continues, and the fruits will not only be a much, much prettier book… you will also see better coloring in the upcoming strips you read online. I’m getting a little bit better at this.