Comics! Games! Anthropology! » selective pressure

There Will Be a Test Afterward

admin — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 04:48:00 +0000

I have finished making annotations for Selective Pressure. You can either start on page (and hour) one from the thumbnails page, or “turn on” annotations from each individual comic page.

Wanna See Something Cool?

admin — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 02:35:00 +0000

I’ve always wanted to add annotations to my comics online. I’m generally a big fan of behind-the-scenes stuff. We’re all familiar with the DVD commentary, which is sometimes really good (for example, Guillermo del Toro movies) or crushingly bad (like Empire Strikes Back). Valve, makers of Half-Life, has been putting developer commentary in their games. The little nodes play an audio track about how they chose the color scheme, or how they got the player to look up at a cool scripted event, stuff like that. It’s kind of fun to run through a level looking for the next spinning speech balloon.

A lot of comic trade paperbacks now have extra material as well, mostly from the DC side of things. I picked up three volumes of DC’s 52. After each weekly edition, they have a few pages of commentary and concept art. Very cool!

I didn’t want to add notes to my comics before because it’s a fine line between making myself sound like a pompous ass (“I’m so clever lol!”) and too self deprecating (“I hate this panel *sniff*”). But, part of 24 hour comics is that the act of making them is an integral part of their being. Just looking at them on the web is missing out on this important context. It just looks like a comic that has worse and worse art over time (like Infinite Crisis. Oh! *zing*).

So instead of writing a long blog post about what happened on 24 hour comics day, I’ll sprinkle little notes through Selective Pressure which talk about the comic and the wacky day that made it. I have a working version of the first page with notes done, you can get a sneak peek at it here. There’s no other way to get to it right now because it’s still in testing. Just wave the mouse over the notes that look like this:

and hopefully some text will magically appear!

Behold!

admin — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 21:07:00 +0000

My 24 Hour Comic, Selective Pressure!

{Click to get started!}

I Don’t Remember the Weekend…

admin — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 04:31:00 +0000

…but I’m holding a comic apparently done by my hand. Cleanup and scanning to commence soon!

Update: Looks like I can piece together my weekend through local news articles, like this one from the Columbia Missourian: “Comic artists burn the midnight oil for 24 Hour Comics Day.”

Update 2: And this blurb from KOMU (though I’m not in it).

Update 3: Hey I am in the KOMU news story, for around 0.05 seconds. Check out the video to the right of the page.

I’d Like My Comics With Jam, Please

admin — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 01:20:00 +0000

24 Hour Comics is an international event where cartoonists draw one page an hour for 24 straight hours. It’s grueling, but sounds like a lot of fun! Last year I suddenly thought about doing it a week after the official day so I was bummed. This year I was all over it. The local comics group, Midmococo (that’s mid-moe-koh-koh). They always seemed like a cool bunch of people but I’ve never been to a meeting on account of me being a loner. Their mailing list announced that their next meeting was going to discuss the upcoming 24 Hour Comics Day, so it was a good excuse for me to finally show up. I was a little worried because at their last meeting they had a comic jam, where each participant would draw a panel in an impromptu comic.

I showed up and everybody was very nice. A student reporter from the university was there with a videocamera to document the meeting for her project. I sometimes glanced unconsciously at the camera like I was on The Office or something.

At the end of the meeting, we had almost “forgot” (I remembered but didn’t say anything, heh) about the comic jam, but it was brought up as a great visual for the journalism student to record. I was a bit nervous drawing on demand but I had fun with my section. You can see the jam at midmococo.com. My panel is the 4th one. I was really hungry when I was thinking of what to do.

24 Hour Comics Day is October 20th. Stop by with food and drinks! Especially the 2-6AM shift lol.