Blógünder Schlock

I like being on my A-game. Monday and Tuesday of this week I knocked down a week of comics, scripting, pencilling, inking, and coloring. And it wasn’t just talking-head stuff, either. The week I scripted and drew had elephants, fancy equipment, and impending peril.

(Peril is difficult to draw.)

Anyway, that leaves the whole rest of the week for goofing off coloring the Bonus Story, in hopes of maybe, just maybe, SOMEDAY finishing this next book: Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars.

I’m sorry it’s taken so long. I swear, I will get this thing sent off to the printer, and the moment I do, I’ll start work on the next one so they’re not spaced quite so far apart.

A little over three years ago my friend Richard Bliss saved my life, or at the very least saved Schlock Mercenary. He provided me with some contract cartooning for a deep-pocketed corporate client, and that was when “GWAVAMan” was born.

For GWAVA, Inc. this black-and-green muscleman stood for their flagship product, the GroupWise Anti-Virus Agent. For me he represented the finest in mercenary traditions — getting paid, and living to spend it. Today, three years after the final issues of GWAVAMan aired, there is a seven-foot-tall GWAVAMan mascot walking around at Novell Brainshare in Salt Lake City.

Naturally, I have to be there.

Richard is blogging the details over at gwbliss.blogspot.com, and I’m going up at around 5:00pm to shoot an interview and get my picture taken with my creation. I’m told the interview will air at 6:30pm Mountain Daylight Time on GWAVA TV.

I’ve been looking high and low for my GWAVAMan t-shirt, but can’t find it. This saddens me. What if, unauthenticated by attire, he false-postives me as spam and hucks me out of the convention?

Hopefully if it goes down that way the cameras will be rolling.

I’m between books right now. That means I’m laying the groundwork for the next Schlock Mercenary story arc. To celebrate, I went out to the wiki that my buddy Dave has generously hosted for me for the last 4 years and transferred all the data by hand into WikiDPad on my local drive. It’s less elegant than a true wiki, but I can back it up all by myself.

Anyway, in so doing I found the block-quoted gem below: It’s the original set of notes for the time travel storyline found in Book 6. I present it to you so that you can have a peek at my creative process, and see how different the end product is from what I may have been imagining at the outset.

Please note that I’ve not touched these notes up at all. If it looks like there are thoughts missing, or ideas not fully fleshed out, that’s because they are missing, and they weren’t fully fleshed out. This was basically a scratch-pad for an idea that had a slightly more robust shape in my brain. It’s not even an outline.

TIME TRAVEL
End of Story X: In the last 7 days before the climactic scene, it is critically important that Kevyn be present to save the day, which he does.

Story Y: a ZPE experiment results in a universe being born inside ours. It’s growing at lightspeed, destroying all in its path. No biggie (eventual doom, but not in YOUR lifetime, right?). Then they discover it’s moving faster than light. The b-universe has different physical laws, and is exponentially accelerating the c-limit as it gains a foothold in ours.

Kevyn is called upon because of his contacts in the Physics community. They decide that time-travel should be tried, and should be powered by yet another ZPE system. This will accelerate the death of the universe, and guarantee the death of the time traveler when the loop is closed. Kevyn volunteers.

He jumps back into story X just before the D-minus-7 point. During the time-jump he gets a head injury (not bad, just visible) and damages the magic cryokit. He sneaks around looking for a shuttle and some gear. CONTINUITY FLAW: the artist now goes back into the archives, and draws Kevin into some backgrounds where he wasn’t before.

He bumps into himself at the critical juncture, and derails Story X. At this point in the ARCHIVES of Story X, two strips are aired, and one links you to the same point in Story Y.

They save the day by assaulting the ZPE experiment before it can be launched, but they abandon friends trapped in Story X. They come back successful, and Kevyn Tau tells Kevyn how to save his friends in a different way. Then the loop closes (Kevyn Tau reaches the same point in the timeline from which he left) and he dies.

So… my original vision of this storyline was to screw around with the archives as a way to say “this is what time travel does.” It would have been funny to me, and maybe to my brother Randy and my friend Dave, but you guys would have been screaming bloody murder.

I’m sooo glad I thought better of it.

You’ve probably also noticed that the science sounds pretty loosey-goosey, and the plotting feels fairly formulaic. (Hopefully you haven’t noticed those problems in the strip itself, where the tight line-art and bright colors distract you from the loosey-goosey science and the formulaic plotting). This story came out SOOO much better when I finally executed it… and I think that’s because I really started working on it after I’d quit my day-job, and had more time to nurse the headache that plotting this monstrosity turned out to be.

Back in December the editor at ComixTalk, Xaviar Xerexes, posted a call for questions” for Blank Label Comics (the webcomics powerhouse in whose machinery I am but a cog.) The questions led to an interview, and now that interview is live!

Go have a look! I think I may have said two funny things, as well as several very dry and potentially educational things. Fortunately, Xerexes spiced it up with pictures.

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.

Here is a short list of things that I want to do this year. It’s short, because I’m only listing the things that you’re interested in, too.

1) Release two new books. Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars comes first, hopefully by April (but I’m behind schedule on that.)

2) Create some t-shirts for you. We’ll probably start with a “Rule 37″ shirt (”there is no overkill…”) and we might even start with that this month.

3) Do something cool for my 40th birthday, which falls on the 29th of February this year.

4) Make strip originals available for purchase over “the internet.”

5) Put other original art up for auction at least once per week. You’re not buying it as fast as I’m accumulating it, and I think that’s because I haven’t been trying to sell it to you.

6) Create some other non-book, non-shirt, non-original-artwork piece of merchandise. Will it be a plushy, a bumper sticker, or a 28mm-scale Schlock miniature? I just don’t know.

But I’ve got all year for this stuff. First things first… I’m going back to sleep.

I’ll lead with a picture. Last night I finished painting up this guy, and I’m really pleased with how he turned out — especially his face.

Some of those chin-spots are part of the scuplt, but some were free-handed in place. That’s a practice I’ll be returning to for future trollkin, I’m sure. There are more angles available over at his Cool Mini or Not page*. As usual, you can rate him.

Next up: Yesterday’s “Minumus, the One Page RPG” article is now lying to you. Enough of you asked Ken Burnside for clarification that he had to DOUBLE the size of the game. Today it fits on a single sheet of paper, but you have to feed it through your printer twice. If this daily doubling persists, by the end of the month it will be 2 to the 27th power (134,217,728) pages long, or a little more than half the length of the collection of now-obsolete D&D 3.5 manuals you currently regret purchasing.

The good news is that now your $2.00 donation gets you twice as much PDF. Woo-hoo!

And finally… I took a vacation in December following the book release, and earlier this week I discovered that I had forgotten how to draw, and how to grind. I figured out how to draw again (you have to pick up the pencil first) but still don’t have my grind on. I inked a very measly 2 rows yesterday before my hand complained. So I took a pair of advil, and was rewarded with mild tummy cramps.

My buffer-fu New Year’s Resolutions are as follows:
1) Advil Is Not Candy
2) Draw A Little Each Day Rather Than A Lot All At Once, At Least Until Your Hand Gets Better You Moron.

(*Note: some Cool Mini or Not content is NSFW.)

I had to share this one…

Just wanted to say that I got the books I ordered and they are in great shape. I really am impressed with the layout and construction of the books. The glossy pages really stand out compared to my Calvin and Hobbes collection.

My strategy has worked. I’ve long known I’d never be half the cartoonist Bill Watterson is, so instead I’ll show him up by printing on shinier paper.

It’s all I’ve got, man. It’s all I’ve got.

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.

Fellow Blank Label Cartoonist and reknowned funny-man Dave Kellett is airing his 2000th Sheldon strip today. Awesome-sauce!