Webcomic coming….
Originally published at shanefitzsimmons.com. You can comment here or there.
A while ago, like, 10 months ago, I got into the webcomic hobby. They’re actually a lot of hard work, even if you’re not actually doing the drawing yourself, but I enjoyed the hell out of making them. Better yet, looking back at them, I still enjoy reading them.
I use the Half-Life 2 Source engine and a program known as Gmod to pose ragdolls and then take screenshots, and then put them together in photoshop to make it very comic-like. I’m not the first one to do this, and there’s a lot of people who put far more time into it than I do. There’s a couple of places where you can find people who will literally work for months at a time getting all the visuals of a given comic just perfect, and will spend (literally) hundreds of hours blurring jagged edges and putting filters over their images to give it the perfect color scheme. And in the end, their writing and story basically sucks beyond all sucking, and people pay about as much attention to their comics as they do the average, thrown-together comic. Because I mean, we’re talking about webcomics here, people aren’t going to be spending hours looking over every pixel, jerking off to the film-like grain you’ve spent weeks adding to the images by hand. And especially in the case of Half-Life comics, you can never make money off of them, short of potential webtraffic through advertisements.
So my philosophy is, make the visuals look presentable enough, but the emphasis needs to be in the writing/story. People remember funny, or interesting stories very easily. There’s so much pretty looking garbage out there that it pretty much all blends together.
At anyrate, the biggest motivation for the webcomic is that it’s just fun to do, and as far as anti-social hobbies go, it ain’t bad. The other motivation is, well, I’ve had this website for like two months now and I haven’t done jack shit with it. This’ll give me something to put up, and that way I’ll be able to update the site with more than just useless blogs that like, 5 people and one anonymous coward reads.
Currently I’m thinking the comic is going to be a continuation of Can’t Live With ‘Em…, but I haven’t set that in stone yet. I’ll probably do at least one more of those just to get myself back into the groove of things, and then later I might go onto something else. We’ll see.