10.8.07

Sick & Tired


Sick
Originally uploaded by xadrian.
So whatever we got this week has really knocked us all out. Mrs. A is absolutely miserable and I'm at work now in a barely conscious state of uncontageous numb. Our HR office has some over the counter stuff for headaches and sniffles and such and I pilfered as much as I could to get me through the day. I'm on my 5th nose and it's already peeling again.

The kids seem to be fairing a bit better. LMA has been sleeping a lot (but I think she's growing a bit) and G-man hasn't missed a beat. At most he sniffs once in a while. I'm kind of pissed because we'd planned on going out to see Mrs. A's family this weekend for her birthday but I don't know if it's worth getting everyone sick. We'd been so looking forward to it, I don't know now.

I stumbled upon this while going through my RSS feeds. Apparently this retired guy is assembling links to 1700 web comics. I didn't see ASJ listed in there, but I think he was looking at more traditional strip type cartoons. ASJ is more super hero, graphic novel type work. Anyway, I don't think he was doing it to become a web comic portal either. In fact, after reading the site, I'm not sure why he was doing it other than maybe he's a bit crazy and has a lot of free time. (For instance, he says it takes him eight hours to make 12 links. I think he's making life too hard on himself, but it's his obsession, not mine.)

What it illustrates to me, though, is there's a lot of crap out there. I stopped by a good number of these - a few I read already - and for the most part, web comics seem to be 80% idea, 15% reliable updates and 5% artistic ability. The few gems you see are the exceptions to this and tweak the art quite a lot, but then they only come out twice a week instead of every day. Unless your whole job is making a comic, you're going to find the easiest way to do things, even if that means taking the same pictures of dinosaurs and adding witty text.

This posits a bit of a paradox for me. I believe I have an artistic quality that would make cartoon strip creation a natural fit, but I don't have the time to make it an every day event. Part of building an audience is saying you will update at certain intervals and those are always kept. Several comics pride themselves on having gone years without missing an update. With the advantage of some back end scripting, as long as you do your work ahead of the queue, you'll always publish on time. The trick is to find out what that time frame is. Can you do three strips a day? A week? To me the hardest part would be the content and writing, not the art itself.

This doesn't get me any closer to actually making anything. I personally don't know anyone making a strip right now. I read a few, but I don't frequently talk with the creators. The people I do know are doing their own thing either with commissioned art, freelance illustration, graphic design or comic books. It might be good for me to stop trying to follow these people and do something on my own...

...using robots, hoboes, zombies and pirates of course.

Carry on.

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