It's Coming
Aaaauuuggghhh...Makeshift Man 15 is half-lettered. It's on its way, seriously. I keep tweaking the dialogue around.
After an unseasonably warm and dry autumn, December first brought the first snowfall of winter, and now the town is blanketed in white...that strange, surreal white accompanied by a uniformly clouded sky, creating the impression of ground and sky the same dirty tinted off-white. One exists floating in a dome of dirty eggshell, and cold, and wet, and slippery, and sharp. Ice is so much like glass. Leaving work, I had to fight for many minutes to chip away the ice from my car door which welded it shut, and then to spend another great few minutes scraping the frosty crust from the windshield, hoping to remove enough such that it wouldn't be revealed later--as my car crept slowly, fishtail wriggling, drunklike through the dark--that I was driving blind. To this do I resign myself until June, and exchange my leather jacket for down-filled coat.
I hate this place.
In more pleasant tidings, today I did officially submit my request to, upon the new year, reducing my work week from forty to thirty hours. This should rightly allow me the time (and mental health) to update every weekday with a new comic page. Sundays shall be spent with acrylics on canvas (and the occasional large watercolor.) All this that I might more readily move towards my goal of self-reliance through comicking. That is, to become an indisputably professional webcartoonist.
In addition, my lunch hours are now spent daily in the company of dear, dear friend Michey and her tiny, talkative, tow-tressed toddler, Trent. We drink coffee and watch Dinosaur Time and this is absolutely the best thing. And today dear Mark was offered the job that he interviewed for! Super hooray! This is all just ducky. Ducky, I say!
Five Hamlet colorist applications have I received. I haven't made my decision, yet, since there are still a couple folk who have expressed strong interest. So, ah...not too late to apply, dig?
Keep thinkin' a lot about Onieros when I'm at work...my crazy, high-concept space fantasy epic. I've been brainstorming how to keep it from becoming dated. You know how in Dis, I've got Hades wearing a necktie and driving a car and treating the management of the Underworld as a bureaucratic paper-pushing job? I think I talked about this in volume 1 and in this lil' interview on DeviantArt...but it was important to me, there, to try to arrange the visual details so that no one would be distracted from the story's purpose and dwell on the incidental details. I feel this is a legitimate concern, because my audience (as near as I can discern) is made up of geeks. Geeks are not charitable people. Geeks thrive on being incorrigible know-it-alls, delighting in picking out perceived flaws in things.
I think I've been (mostly) insulated from people trying to tell me I've got my mythology all wrong, and I've tried to preemptively cut off any critique of my historical accuracy. I need to seek to do this too to Onieros, but something in reverse. So I'm looking for ways to keep the setting more in the realm of space-based fantasy, rather than anything approaching speculative science fiction. I think I've got a good beginning to this. My intention is for a somewhat grungy, undated, far-distant time.
On all this, I was thinking today that perhaps I should make an effort to move away from our contemporary language usage of short, clipped phrases in stripped vernacular, and instead give the general populace a more poetic habit of speech. I feel very confidently that I could keep this up throughout the story, consistently. I am not sure, though, if my cynical readership could accept this. I wouldn't be aiming for the colorful linguistic choices of, say, Stan Lee. Rather, I mean to imply that my characters might express themselves after the model of persons in, say...movies of the 1940s. Newspapers of a hundred years ago. Or perhaps further back into the 19th century?
...This would be in a world where spaceships look like sailing ships, technology is modeled visually after that of the 1980s, and there's a kind of worldbeat patterning going on.
Anybody have any thoughts on this they'd like to offer?
...Sheesh, it's 2am. Gonna go find a thick blanket to curl up in, read a Deadpool comic, and fall asleep.
After an unseasonably warm and dry autumn, December first brought the first snowfall of winter, and now the town is blanketed in white...that strange, surreal white accompanied by a uniformly clouded sky, creating the impression of ground and sky the same dirty tinted off-white. One exists floating in a dome of dirty eggshell, and cold, and wet, and slippery, and sharp. Ice is so much like glass. Leaving work, I had to fight for many minutes to chip away the ice from my car door which welded it shut, and then to spend another great few minutes scraping the frosty crust from the windshield, hoping to remove enough such that it wouldn't be revealed later--as my car crept slowly, fishtail wriggling, drunklike through the dark--that I was driving blind. To this do I resign myself until June, and exchange my leather jacket for down-filled coat.
I hate this place.
In more pleasant tidings, today I did officially submit my request to, upon the new year, reducing my work week from forty to thirty hours. This should rightly allow me the time (and mental health) to update every weekday with a new comic page. Sundays shall be spent with acrylics on canvas (and the occasional large watercolor.) All this that I might more readily move towards my goal of self-reliance through comicking. That is, to become an indisputably professional webcartoonist.
In addition, my lunch hours are now spent daily in the company of dear, dear friend Michey and her tiny, talkative, tow-tressed toddler, Trent. We drink coffee and watch Dinosaur Time and this is absolutely the best thing. And today dear Mark was offered the job that he interviewed for! Super hooray! This is all just ducky. Ducky, I say!
Five Hamlet colorist applications have I received. I haven't made my decision, yet, since there are still a couple folk who have expressed strong interest. So, ah...not too late to apply, dig?
Keep thinkin' a lot about Onieros when I'm at work...my crazy, high-concept space fantasy epic. I've been brainstorming how to keep it from becoming dated. You know how in Dis, I've got Hades wearing a necktie and driving a car and treating the management of the Underworld as a bureaucratic paper-pushing job? I think I talked about this in volume 1 and in this lil' interview on DeviantArt...but it was important to me, there, to try to arrange the visual details so that no one would be distracted from the story's purpose and dwell on the incidental details. I feel this is a legitimate concern, because my audience (as near as I can discern) is made up of geeks. Geeks are not charitable people. Geeks thrive on being incorrigible know-it-alls, delighting in picking out perceived flaws in things.
I think I've been (mostly) insulated from people trying to tell me I've got my mythology all wrong, and I've tried to preemptively cut off any critique of my historical accuracy. I need to seek to do this too to Onieros, but something in reverse. So I'm looking for ways to keep the setting more in the realm of space-based fantasy, rather than anything approaching speculative science fiction. I think I've got a good beginning to this. My intention is for a somewhat grungy, undated, far-distant time.
On all this, I was thinking today that perhaps I should make an effort to move away from our contemporary language usage of short, clipped phrases in stripped vernacular, and instead give the general populace a more poetic habit of speech. I feel very confidently that I could keep this up throughout the story, consistently. I am not sure, though, if my cynical readership could accept this. I wouldn't be aiming for the colorful linguistic choices of, say, Stan Lee. Rather, I mean to imply that my characters might express themselves after the model of persons in, say...movies of the 1940s. Newspapers of a hundred years ago. Or perhaps further back into the 19th century?
...This would be in a world where spaceships look like sailing ships, technology is modeled visually after that of the 1980s, and there's a kind of worldbeat patterning going on.
Anybody have any thoughts on this they'd like to offer?
...Sheesh, it's 2am. Gonna go find a thick blanket to curl up in, read a Deadpool comic, and fall asleep.