5.40 - Welcoming Committee

Whew! Finally got that page - #5.40 - drawn and coloured. It ended up being a lot more involved to produce than I expected... but I shouldn't be all that surprised given the number of characters involved. So this page brings us roughly to the mid-way point of the story.

I had expected this story would take only 50 pages... clearly I'm wrong in that regard! So I'm thinking 80 or so. I don't want it to be much longer than that. Despite my intention for brevity it was the defeat of Oz Magellan which bumped up the page count. Originally it was intended to only take a few pages but then I started using it as a way to properly introduce each character - plus I wanted to show them being picked off one by one to make their defeat seem a bit more plausible.

There's still a fair bit of ground to cover in the story but things should speed up somewhat from here on in...

Oz Magellan

I've been a bit quiet on the progress of the story for the last few pages - mainly because I didn't think there was anything constructive I could add.

It was always my intention to introduce the characters in battle with their as yet unnamed foes. At some point it occurred to me it would be good to have a juxtaposing voiceover from Kaycee describing each character in turn as they got their arses kicked by the invaders. It took a few pages longer than I expected but hopefully acted as a reasonable introduction to the Oz Magellan team and their powers.

And as the latest update shows none of them have been eaten or slaughtered... those who thought I might be indulging in some pointless minor character killing spree can rest easy (for now...)

A brief recap...

• Good-Guy: uses light force to generate a field of energy that allows him to fly and to levitate objects; can also glow/shine with blinding brilliance
  
• Tassie Tigress: great agility and reflexes combined with a sixth sense that makes her almost untouchable in hand to hand combat, even when she is outnumbered
  
• The Man Who Can: high intelligence combined with an electronic telepathy allows him to psychically communicate with and control computers and machines
  
• Slow-Mo: can manipulate the flow of time within a localised area, can't stop it completely but can get to near absolute. The larger the area and the stronger the manipulation the greater the concentration required
  
• Captain Victoria: Flying powerhouse but not as strong or as invulnerable as Charisma Epoch - long term member, highly regarded and favored by the Australian public
  
• Oz Magellan HQ: Located on Spectacle Island which lies within Sydney Harbour
  
• Cassie Bloom: hapless and lazy security guard, formerly employed at Magellan Island but forced to leave by a very annoyed Maya Applecross
  
• Other Magellan HQ staff... yet to be seen in full but include a chef ("Marco"), Medical, Janitor/cleaner, Maintenance engineer and an admin/finance person.

It also gave us some clues to the nature and skills/powers of their foes...

• Big green warty guy: very, very strong
  
• Spidery one: blue venom from mouth, presumably has some incapacitating and control effect. Can also shoot webbing out its backside!
  
• Hairy one: exhibits rational thinking, attacks tactically... also does a bit of sniffing
  
• Spikey one: talkss with lotss of sssess!

I think that covers the basics...

Sydney Supanova update

Preparations continue for Supanova - I took delivery today of the promotional 8 page comics (well, 10 pages - 'cos there's a wrap around cover) titled What Goes Up. They look rather spiffy. I ended up pushing the cover price up to $AU2. I can hear the jaws of US readers (and probably all readers) hitting the floor... but a bit of perspective, it's larger than standard comic page size, better quality paper, that's $AU not $US... most new release US comics cost us poor Australians between $6 & $7.50 (after importation and currency conversion) so $2 compares pretty well... and also, most importantly, it's 8 pages of Magellan awesomeness!

Another consideration in the setting of the price higher was that I didn't want to run out of copies 2 hours into the first day... and a low price would no doubt have resulted in that. As it is, they look so great I'm concerned I might still sell out before the end of the weekend. We'll see - after all it's possible I mightn't sell more than ten or so (over the last few years I've certainly seen lots of long faces in Artist Alley on Sunday arvo when they realise there's no way they're going to sell that stack of copies they'd optimistically expected to offload prior to the convention). Will I sell or all or none? Reality might lie somewhere in between. Whatever I don't sell at Supanova I'll try and sell via the web... and might give a few away as prizes.

I also had a large poster produced (from the cover of Bad Karma) to act as a backdrop for my half of the table. I just need to fix up some extra hand outs and a special webpage and I should be good to go.

Will stick up some pics as I get them.

Sydney Supanova 27-28 June

It's convention time again - woo! I know that a percentage of my readers are in Sydney, Australia... hopefully some of you are going to the Sydney Supanova next weekend. I'll be there, sharing a stall with my webcartooning bud Noemz of Zeera the Space Pirate. If you are there I'd love nothing more than for you do drop around to our table in Artists Alley (table G) and say hi!

This year, amazingly, I actually have something to sell - an 8 page comic with a full colour excerpt of this scene from chapter 2 of Magellan. It'll sell for the princely sum of 75c and also have a wrap around cover featuring new art...

It's essentially a promotional publication, but I'm also doing it to prove to myself that I can and finally get something in print. Magellan is not easy to publish, the chapters are all lengthy and full colour and as such quite costly to print.

The first people who come up to me on both Saturday and Sunday and tells me who their fave Magellan character is will get a free signed copy of the comic.

Captain Victoria & Wombat-Man

To help you remember the threads involving these two characters - Luke (Wombat-Man) McDonald and Vicky (Captain Victoria) Bourke - I'd highly recommend reading all of Chapter 3. It's only 42 pages so won't take you too long!

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The following is all the relevant character info for Captain Victoria which is recycled from a much earlier post in the forum but worth digging up for her return to the storyline...

Captain Victoria: aka Vicky Bourke
Team affiliation: Oz Magellan (Australian based Magellan group)
Graduated from Magellan Academy: 2003 (same year as Go!Anna and Freya Foster)
Abilities: g-n+ (born genetically enhanced); strength (x15); invulnerability (x3) and flight (NB. she's not as strong as someone like Wombat-man for example)

I kind of like how this costume design came out especially once I added the colours (silver and blue) which are the Victorian state colours BTW.

I should note that this costume is possibly one of only a very few 'bathing suit' varieties so far depicted in Magellan. At least it's not a cleavage enhancement device... I never could work out how some other companies' superheroines keep their breasts inside their costumes!

Just a character note...

Captain Victoria is in the vein of those characters who name themselves after nations, except she's named herself after a state in Australia (ie. Victoria) it would be like having a Captain California, or a Captain Yukon, or a Captain Oxford... you get the idea!

She's dressed in the state colours of blue and silver.

She is a graduate of Magellan (she is from the same year as Go!Anna, Luke and Freya) and is currently a team member of Oz Magellan.

I'll look at getting something together about Wombat-Man too...

Project Wonderful adverts

You might have noticed I set up a side column which contains various links and also some Project Wonderful advertising spaces. (This is seperate from the banner adverts running across the top of the Graphic Smash or Comic Genesis sites - the $$$ from those goes to the respective site hosts).

I'm not a huge fan of advertising but Project Wonderful makes it easy for other webcartoonists to advertise their comics at a "market set" rate. It also allows the person offereing the space (in this case me) the chance to make a bit of income. How much money comes in depends, usually, on how popular the comic is. Those with higher readership invariably attract a greater asking price for their site based on an ongoing bidding process.

Magellan advertising space is currently going for between 1 and 2 cents per day... that's opposed to some other comics that can net $10-20 per day per advert! It's only early days yet but hopefully it will increase to a little bit more over the coming months. I certainly don't expect to make a living off of it (although that would be nice) but any additional income is always useful.

Part of what needs to happen is for me to increase the Magellan readership. It's better than it was this time last year and the number of visitors seems to creep up a little bit each month. I'm certainly still doing this for the love not the money - but I believe Magellan is a great webcomic and that a lot more people should be reading it and enjoying it. Anyway, that's for me to think about.

In the meantime, if you do see an ad that takes your fancy - please click on it!

Charisma on Twitter!

I should probably have my head examined for this... charisma_E is using Twitter ...and in some bizarre 4th wall breach our universe's Twitter is somehow relaying her feed! Spooky.

Will be an interesting experiment. I know that John Allison tried something similar with Shelly Winters (aka Dr Lady Sounds) one of his Scary-Go-Round characters but pulled the plug on it after a couple of weeks.

Anyway, check it out - Ms Pop Princess just started her account yesterday and already there's 50+ tweets.

I'm having a total blast with this so far. Let's see how long the novelty lasts! I've not paid all that much attention to Twitter in the past although I can see it's an interesting way of communicating and now I've dabbled a bit I really like the 140 character limit a lot more than I thought I would. It's ideally suited to Charisma too!

The stepping on point was just a few hours prior to the events of the Bad Karma storyline and I'm attempting some in narrative tweeting here... Charisma's tweets might sound familiar because they're referencing events that have already happened from the point of view of the Magellan webcomic reader. What's been really fun about it is that I've retold the events between pages 4.39 and 4.277 as they unfolded in real time using Charisma tweets! Those 236 pages covered a day in Magellan time and took me well over 2.5 years to tell - but about 30 posts over 20 hours on Twitter. So far there have been plenty of cameos from other characters too.

If you want to read from the start you'll have to go to the latest page, scroll to the bottom and click on "More"... and just keep clicking back until there's no more "More". It seems that there is no way of linking to the first post in a way that will then allow readers to then move through the rest of the archive - Twitter could really learn a thing from webcomics which handle archives and navigating thru first/previous/next/current updates a lot better.

So where to next? I definitely won't keep up the pace of updates... once the excitement of the dragon attack wears off and everything settles back to "normal" or what passes for it at Magellan then it'll probably be about 1-2 tweets a day. I still have the next 10 or so days leading up to the ceremony (and we all know how Charisma feels about that!). Beyond that... who knows? There is a certain incident in about two months time that involves a certain blue energy entity and a firebreathing Gabby. Let's see if I can make it that far!