sequential daze

Crossoverkill is go!

2010-10-10T16:35:00.000+11:00

As mentioned in a previous post, Hoodoo from Force Magellan will be participating in a crossover/team-up with characters from a number of other superhero webcomics over the coming months. Today it all kicks off with an superlative cover drawn by Aisuku (of Hero Academy) with gorgeous colours by TV’s Mr Neil (of Dasien) – check it out here!

The first page, drawn by Essay Bee (of Fusion) will go up this coming Tuesday… I’ve seen it already and have to say it is awesome, awesome stuff. I should add that the extremely nifty series logo as seen above was designed by The Red Death (of Bad Guy High).

Magellan has moved... magellanverse.com

2010-10-06T18:39:00.000+11:00

I've moved the main Magellan site to a new address...

magellanverse.com

The site itself is still a work in progess as I try to get my brain around ComicPress css etc but all the pages are there - including today's brand new page. It also has comment features, RSS and a drop down archive list so you can pick any page you want.

please check it out!

Crossoverkill

2010-09-28T18:27:00.004+10:00

Things are still on track for Magellan updates to recommence on Wednesday October 6. Yay! At this stage updates will only be once a week because I can’t guarantee more than that – I’ve found that having more breathing space for story writing and artwork was a blessed relief over rushing to finish pages, updating late or missing weeks altogether.

There are a couple of other separate Magellan based projects in development at the moment – one of which I can reveal today… Force Magellan’s witch extraordinaire, Hoodoo, will be joining forces with other webcomic superheroes in the reality spanning epic adventure Crossoverkill which will kick off next month. Crossoverkill is a colaborative effort between myself and the talented webcartoonists of Mindmistress, Bad Guy High, Fusion, Energize, Majestic Knight and Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki… plus other guests.

Even if you’ve been reading Magellan for a while, you’d be excused if you couldn’t place Hoodoo from the previous goings on within the webcomic – so for veterans and newbies alike I’ve put together a Who is Hoodoo page to get you up to speed. She emerged as a fan fave during the Bad Karma storyline (well, three or five fans said they really liked her, so that counts as a fan fave, right?). For those of you already familiar with her you might have noticed that she has changed her costume from blue to a red theme which will debut in Crossoverkill.

I can’t give away too many details about Crossoverkill just yet, but it’s planned to kick off on October 10 and I’ll keep reminding you to check it out during it’s run.

More Magellan news in the run up to October 6!

Two steps forward... one step back...

2010-08-24T18:39:00.002+10:00

Having spent time at the writing desk yesterday I had a bit of a rethink about some of those pages and rewrote them today. I'm not a fan of the info-dump style of story telling and found that's exactly what I had been doing. Anyway I cut out some of what I had written about the origin of the transmogrified freaks and compacted it - at the same time a fair bit of the horror element I was describing, and a tad uneasy about, yesterday has been scrubbed from it as a result. What really has to happen is that I need to sort out exactly how it's all going to finish... I've had a vague idea ever since page one, but not the exact blow by blow details. It's good though, Worst Field Trip Ever is finally coming together - and one thing's for sure, it's not going to finish under 100 pages, probably closer to 120-130. I don't want it to go on for too much longer though.

I've been reading back over a lot of older material of late and it kind of feels that some element of the earlier Magellan stories is missing from Worst Field Trip either. I think in large part it's because stories like Great Leap Forward and especially Bad Karma were more expansive with more cadets and the likes of Charisma, Billy, Sioni, Maya etc and their interaction and snarking. Some of the other cadets were meant to fill those roles in this story (Joe, Louis, Jenna, Gifford, Maya) but they've been out of commission for most of it. hmmm. hmmm. hmmm...

Also continued work on the cast page... gonna be working on that thing forever. Started to work on an improved archive page... given there are 500+ pages in the archive I think I'll be working on that for a while too!

Practicing Zen

2010-08-23T17:46:00.004+10:00

So I was doing more work on the Cast Page today. Probably had done about an hours worth of really good, productive work; so of course I was fully engrossed in what I was doing and forgot to save for about 45 minutes or so (not every 5-10 that I do usually)... and of course the computer decided to crash meaning I lost most of that work. Many swear words were said. Then I just decided to turn it all off and walk away and forget about it. Just be Zen, not worth getting my blood in a boil over it. But I gotta say it was really disappointing.

Did some more writing on the Chapter 5 story today too. I'm now outlining how the transmogs became how they are. I think I can say that without it being a spoiler of anything. It's a fairly traumatic, horrifying sequence... how do I think of this stuff?? Sometimes I have to wonder about what goes on in my brain. Anyway, I'm happy with the progress of the story - the hiatus was needed in large part due to massive writer's block. Can't do any cartooning with that sitting in the way. Seems to be mostly resolved now.

Having calmed down from the earlier Cast Page disaster I decided to spend a bit more time on it later today. Instead of working on the stuff I'd lost I instead worked on the villain section: the bad, the mean and the nasty! And there sure has been some nasty pieces of work in Magellan... Master Drake, the Q'Arth demons, DragonKlaw and Miasma. I've even included the Red Path Ninja who cut a swathe through Chapter 3. Charmers one and all!

Cast pages RULE!

2010-08-22T17:52:00.004+10:00

Being a Sunday I've opted for a slightly less work intensive day Magellan-wise but have still done some stuff none the less! Mostly I have been working on the cast page... no wonder I have been putting it off, it is a rather time consuming enterprise. I've listed all the cadets who have shown up in some capacity at any point, including those who might have only ever been in one or two panels hundreds of pages ago. In addition to all of the freshers this also includes second, third, fourth and sixth year cadets - in total 42! Others to be added to the list include the faculty (eg Freya, Tom, etc), the academy (eg Mary/Glamour; Ken/Nitroman, etc), Force Magellan, Oz Magellan, Magellan USA and others (eg Go!Anna, Wombat-man, Brelvis, etc etc etc). All up I'm not even 25% of the way through the task but it is moving along at least. If I can do an hour a day it'll be finished before I know it... hopefully!

Progress report

2010-08-21T18:24:00.004+10:00

It's been a while since the last post so I thought I'd give a brief update of developments. Everything is still go for Magellan to recommence updates in October as scheduled - YAY! In the meantime I'm starting to fix up a few other things that have been outstanding for a loooong time... mundane things like the cast page and consolidating the content across all mirror sites; and exciting things such as a little undertaking which, at this stage, I will only refer to mysteriously as "Project Omicron" (!) and a few other items which I won't get into listing just at the moment. But I figured it would be good to give a daily run-down of Magellany goodness to get me psyched and to get you psyched about the return of the comic on October 6...!

So, for instance, I spent a fair bit of time working on Project Omicron today... drafting up my fifth page to date. I really want to tell you more about this and I will right at the end of September, I expect you might be pleasantly excited! Also today I have finally pulled the finger out and started to seriously look a proper cast page - all previous attempts have been miserable, miserable failures. In past this has been because there are so many characters in Magellan that every time I attempt to identify them in even the most rudimentary way my brain melts down and I pathetically give up. I'm determined to see it through this time - in part the problem has been the format but I do believe I have hit on a solution this time so we shall see.

More news tomorrow!

On hiatus - Magellan returns October 6, 2010

2010-04-09T22:33:00.000+10:00

After a fair bit of deliberation I've decided I really need to take an extended break from working on Magellan - and by extended break I mean 6 months. Rotten, I know.

But the current storyline is being dragged out by late updates and missed updates and I hate doing that to you, my reader - it's totally unfair on you. The bottom line is that my day job has been taking very large chunks out of my life at the moment and it's leaving me exhausted and little real time to properly focus on developing the story nor to turn in artwork that I'm very happy with.

Apart from the six weeks I needed to take off due to shoulder injury at the end of 2009 this will be the first actual break I've taken from Magellan since starting it back in 2004.

I know this is possibly the worst moment in the course of the story to tke a break - poor Kaycee!!! That's why I did up this little 'to be continued' page to at least give her jaw a rest.

If you're thinking "he's never going to finish it" I say "I fully intend to finish it". For all my other cartooning projects in the past where I've had to take a break I have always returned to finish the story, so don't worry about that. I expect that when I do get back to production that the pages will be at 2-3 pages a week to make up for the snail's pace so far this year.

I hope you can stand by - mark October 6 2010 in your calendars as the day Magellan returns! I thank you for your readership and patience so far, I have not and will not abandon you or these fantastic characters... but I seriously need a break from it all. It will be even better when it returns.

If you're new to Magellan, now is the perfect time to catch up on everything - please see the archive.

PANDORAed

2010-03-18T20:44:00.002+11:00

I received a request from the National Library of Australia's electronic archive - PANDORA - seeking permission to archive Magellan...

Quote:

The National Library of Australia aims to build a comprehensive collection of Australian publications to ensure that Australians have access to their documentary heritage now and in the future. The Library has traditionally collected items in print, but it is also committed to preserving electronic publications of lasting research and cultural value.

PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive, was set up by the Library in 1996 to enable the archiving and provision of long-term access to online Australian publications. Since then we have been identifying online publications and archiving those that we consider have national significance. Additional information about PANDORA can be found on the Library's server at: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/index.html

That's pretty cool - and of course I said yes. It means that if Graphic Smash ever goes down the gurgler and I'm run over by a bus that Magellan will at least live on in perpetuity!

Next update - 1 April 2010

2010-03-18T20:36:00.002+11:00

Regrettably, due to a weekend away in the country, Alice in Wonderland, extra real-life job workload overload and general poor time management during my free time there won't be an update of Magellan for the next couple of weeks.

The next update will be next Thursday April 1 (no foolin'). Sorry for the delay...

New update day to be Thursday...

2010-02-09T17:13:00.002+11:00

Scheduling and other matters means Tuesday has stopped being a good day for me to update on - so for the time being, at least until I can start twice a week updates, I'll move the update to Thursday - that means the next page will go up on 11 February... see you then!

Next update - Wednesday 3 February

2010-02-02T16:32:00.000+11:00

Bad news: I'm behind schedule for the next page.
Good news: I'll get it online for Wednesday instead.

Details, details, details...

2010-01-08T22:42:00.003+11:00

Y'know, one of the more challenging artistic aspects of a comic like Magellan (and many other comics too, I'm sure) is remembering to draw in all the details, especially with character's costumes... and usually it's the really small details too, the kind that probably no one else would notice but which I groan out aloud when I realise, once the page is published, that I've missed it. If I'm lucky I'll pick it up during the colouring process... like tonight, The Man Who Can's Magellan insignia over his right chest plate - missing! It's only teeny anyway, but being the pedantic semi-perfectionist that I am it's gotta be there... and so it shall!!! (Just you wait and see.)

Finally... an update!

2010-01-05T21:35:00.001+11:00

YAY! Thanks for your patience and for hanging in there while my drawing wing recovered. It's a lot better but not 100% - but I'm hoping to produce one page a week for the next month or so before kicking it back up to twice a week.

Injury forced hiatus update: some bad news, some good news

2009-12-01T17:46:00.001+11:00

Well, the good news is that the injury to my shoulder is healing nicely and a lot of the pain and difficulty I have had with it over the last two months has subsided significantly;

The bad news is that it isn't enough for me to yet resume cartooning duties in any significant way - I have been working on the story over the past month but that is all, no actual drawing as that tends to inflame the injury;

The good news is that it should be 100% better by the end of december;

The bad news is that means the hiatus will be extended until the end of December;

The good news is that it means the comic isvery likely to start updating again from the first week of January 2010! yay!

Thanks for your patience in the meantime!

Bad news: injured shoulder = hiatus :(

2009-10-29T16:56:00.001+11:00

Ye gods, I'm having a bad month of things. Unfortunately I have injured my right shoulder and, whilst it hasn't incapacitated me entirely, it IS making drawing and using the computer to colour my artwork difficult and painful. To proceed as such would probably cause more injury from which the likelihood of recovery would be considerably lessened. While I get treatment for it I have decided it is indeed time for a short break from tooning and I will take the rest of October all of November off.

As long as the physio goes according to plan I anticipate being back on deck from December. So, sorry about that - no comics for the next month but I'll be using the time to write, etc since that's much less dependant on my right hand...

Back & Forth

2009-09-25T06:49:00.002+10:00

Usually when the story gets to a certain point there isn't much I can add via commentary... stuff is happening and that's about it. Despite that, I haven't said much for a while so I should say that the current batch of pages are all about trying to advance the story at a reasonable pace. Cutting between Kaycee and Fatima/Tom and Freya/the Mutates and Oz Magellan HQ allows me to avoid some exposition and allows each participant to be further advanced in the story after each cut. Haven't tried anything like this before, will be interesting to see how it works out - hopefully it doesn't end up being a confusing mess but I thin it's working out OK so far...

Wombat-Man Fan Art

2009-09-25T06:44:00.001+10:00

(Just realised I hadn't posted this to the blog and really should have...)
Check out this awesome fan-art of Wombat-Man by Joey here...

Apart from the fan-art comp I ran earlier this year it's been so long since I received any freely offered fan-art I'd almost forgotten what fan-art was...! And then, out of the blue I got this wonderful, wonderful piece from Joey

Check more of his art:
http://www.drunkduck.com/The_Order_vol_1/index.php
http://joeyjarin.blogspot.com/

CROSSOVERLORD: Rochelle & Charisma cameo

2009-08-14T09:30:00.000+10:00

For any readers familiar with The Crossoverlord this may be old news... the cover image for the latest chapter is a brilliant take on the Crisis on Infinite Earths' death of Supergirl cover and features a whole grab-bag of webcomic superheroes... including Magellan's very own Rochelle Kwon and Charisma Epoch. Check it out here... see if you can spot them without using the reference guide.

In fact Charisma's appearance is a bit of an error - Al Schroder, who as you know is the cartoonist behind Mindmistress (also one of the lead characters in The Crossoverlord and seen in the pages of Magellan here) suggested to cover artist Neil Purcell (of Daisen) to use "Rochelle and Epoch" but Neil's (self-confessed) unfamiliarity with Magellan and my own hugely inadequate cast page meant he ended up using Charisma instead. Oh well! I don't mind... and I'm certainly sure that Charisma doesn't mind!! Score one for her over her father, eh?

Great cover, Neil!

5.45-5.46: The battle continues...!

2009-08-02T06:30:00.002+10:00

The battle so far has taken less than a minute so anything could happen!

We've seen a bit of what the Forn can do now - control of the elements... with "the elements" being earth, wind, fire, water. I had an email from one reader saying "ugh, more magic", however the Forn's control is no more mystical than Storm's is of weather, or Terra's is of earth, or the Human Torch's of fire... it's an ability inherent in all Forn like singing is in humans, it's just that some Forn can do it much better than others (like singing in humans!). Jenna's down for the count but we'll get to see Bif in action shortly.

Also we see Lin-Lin (aka Hidden Dragon) in action, or do we? She is meant to be invisible after all. I was tempted not to draw her in the frame at all but opted for an Invisible Woman approach - even so I faded her blue outline right back. I like the fact that when I look at that last frame she's not immediately apparent. Anyway, she's not the only invisible character to appear in Magellan - there was also Vanishing Vanessa from The Baxter Gang (in Go!Anna's dream sequence).

Girl-A-Matic relaunch

2009-08-01T18:05:00.003+10:00

In exciting news for the Modern Tales group of webcomics, Girl-A-Matic (GAM) - a sister site to Graphic Smash (where Magellan is primarily housed) - has relaunched with a new look and a new code base.

This code base will eventually be moved over to Graphic Smash and I'm happy to say that the comments feature appears to now be placed under the previous/next navigation buttons... the fact that, in the current/old coding the comments sit above those navigation buttons was causing a number of headaches (mainly breaking navigation on some browsers but also meaning readers had to scroll past many screens worth of comments before they could click on 'next') so I shut it down some months ago.

I always greatly appreciated the comments of readers - not only was it a great source of quick feedback it also became a community for fans of the comic. There's no date for the relaunch of Graphic Smash on that code-base but rest assured, if all goes to plan, it will be sooner rather than later and comments will return.

I must admit I haven't read all that many comics on GAM... which is naughty of me, the webcomics there are entertaining and high quality. Now the new site is up and running I plan on redressing that oversight!

5.43 - ATTACK!!

2009-07-22T07:12:00.000+10:00

Both Kaycee and Go! miss their chance to save the day and so today's update kicks off "Newb cadets v Oz Magellan and freaky monsters"! Who will win??

I was quite happy with how the last panel of page 5.43 turned out - there's a fair bit happening but it's not too confusing. I had hoped to include everyone but couldn't squeeze in Lin-Lin, Bif or Joe.

Anyway there will be plenty of action for the next few pages!

5.40 - Welcoming Committee

2009-07-10T22:32:00.002+10:00

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

2009-07-03T17:22:00.001+10:00

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

2009-06-25T22:31:00.002+10:00

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

2009-06-19T22:18:00.003+10:00

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

2009-05-07T19:12:00.000+10:00

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!

____________________________________________________

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

2009-04-28T12:55:00.001+10:00

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!

2009-04-23T15:14:00.002+10:00

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!

5.15 - on changing Jenna Zots!

2009-04-08T18:01:00.001+10:00

I mentioned in a small note under page 5.15 that I've changed the colour of Jenna Zots eyes... the bit that would normally be the white and iris are now solid red and the bit that would normally be the pupil is now yellow. It looks quite freaky, but that was the intention... I wanted to "demon her up" a bit more. As part of doing that I went back thru the other pages in this scene (5.12-5.14) and recoloured her eyes. I probably should go back thru the previous 500 pages and change her eyes wherever she appears throughout (not all that often) and also change any instances where other Forn (Jenna's people) appear.

If you've read through the whole archive you would have noticed the horned, blue skins have turned up several times.

Bif Zots - as noted, Jenna's older cousin
Dr. Biskart En - Faculty Head of Demonology
"John" - security guard
a waitresess

Here's a bit of creative background to the Forn. Bif's first appearance (noted above) was also the first instance of any character with blue skin, horns and a shaved head. The very next scene (page 1.19) shows "John" (who doesn't have a shaved head) and Biskart En (who appears partially bald).

So far, so good - I was thinking to myself that these were maybe a race of refugee demons who work on Magellan Island - but didn't do an awful lot of design or development beyond that. When I got to page 1.21 I had one First Year cadet that I really didn't like (she had utterly lame powers, so lame I won't even say!) and decided to replace her with a first year cadet from those race of horned, blue skinned demons... and that's where Jenna Zots (who also appears partially bald) came into the picture. It isn't until the History special that her people are officially named as refugee Forn demons from the realm of Fassique.

As noted, Jenna has had a very minimal role in stories to date. She's been seen in backgrounds but today's update is the first time she's ever spoken! We've seen Biskart En and "John" in other scenes. Over time I have been slowly building up a profile of the Forn in my mind (like what is the significance of the head shaving/non hair shaving? etc) plus a backstory which I really hope to get a chance to tell at some point (it sure isn't going to happen in this story!). Something else that's been building up around the Forn has been their visual design. On page 2.39 Jenna can be seen ascending the Tower - and clearly does not have a tail and, given that she is wearing boots, probably isn't likely to have cloven hooves either! Also, until recently, all Forn have had white horns not black horns.

All these visual inconsistencies are a result of how I created the vast Magellan universe. Five years ago, as I populated the many, many background characters that were to most form the background story a lot of visual concepts and characteristics were very simply thought through. Case in point being the Forn.

Now that I'm at a point where a Forn is going to feature in a story I'm revising some of the earlier designs. As I work on this story I might think (for example) "it would be so much cooler if Jenna and the Forn had black horns, or cloven hooves, or red eys, etc". Since these small details haven't played any major role in previous back continuity I'm doing an "in-continuity ret-con" (if that even makes sense!). (And that isn't the only instance of this type of redesign, you may have noticed the look of the cadet's uniform has changed from chapter to chapter.)

I'm much happier now with the visual design of Jenna and the Forn so there probably won't be any more changes. But there might be for other characters and/or their costumes along the way. They will all be subtle (like Fatima isn't going to suddenly get legs instead of tentacles) and won't effect back story but they will all hopefully help to mature the visual appeal of characters and their overall design.

Comp-art competition

2009-04-07T13:01:00.001+10:00

OK - the competition is now closed. Many thanks to the entrants!

There weren't as many entries as I might have expected - 9 submissions from 7 entrants... but I'm extremely grateful for, and awed by, what I have received.

The GALLERY OF ENTRIES is online here.

Winners to be announced soon... making a decision WILL NOT be easy!

5.12: Understanding Terran Culture Support Group

2009-03-26T20:37:00.003+11:00

The purpose of this scene will become a bit clearer over the next three pages - but I'm looking to refresh everyone's memories of a few characters and also expand the Magellan universe a bit more. Like I've mentioned, all of these characters have been seen at least once somewhere in the last 500 pages, this is a chance for some of them to get at least a few extra frames exposure, or even a few words of dialogue. It can be hard in a comic with so many characters to explore their backstory - for a few of them, like Fatima, the Zots, Chiq and Lyta that backstory is quite extensive I just haven't had an opportunity to tell it. Gifford is one of the few lucky characters to get a full origin tale.

Here's the cast info for the Understanding Terran Culture Support Group scene...

Jaqi Leffee: member of faculty; first significant appearance on page 4.149; teaches business studies and costume design.
Lyta: first year cadet; most notable appearance to date on pages 2.40 thru 2.44; she's a 'demi-goddess'from the realm of Arkan.
Gifford Foss: first year cadet; recently had his own origin story Reckless Hero; he's a Grorb goblin from the realm of Byron.
Chiq: first year cadet; he (yes... he) hasn't really had any notable appearances to date - but can be seen in the background of a number earlier scenes; he's an alien from the planet Pareya.
Jenna Zots: first year cadet; she also hasn't had any notable appearances so far but like wise has been seen in a few scenes; she's a Forn demoness from the realm of Fassique (a number of her people also live on Earth as refugees).
Briar O'Hennessy: second year cadet; glimpsed briefly on page 4.212; she's from the realm colloquially known as 'Centaur Ireland' since apparently it's almost the same as Ireland on Earth except everyone is a centaur/centauress.
Dane: member of faculty; briefly seen on page 1.19 (yes, a loooong time ago); it (genderless) teaches Xenology and hails from the planet Haaj.
Fatima Hussein: first year cadet; has had many notable appearances - like the one on pages 2.20-2.23 (which may or may not be relevant to the rest of this story...); she's a cephelamaid from the underwater kingdom PherNia (on Earth).
Polly Tenu: third year cadet; first notable appearance on page 4.161; she's a shape changer from the realm of Shlos.
V'reis Bol-lob Sier'v: third year cadet; first notable appearance was also on page 4.161; he's a phaser (ie. walks through solid objects) from the realm of Akti-itka.
Bif Zots: sixth year cadet; briefly glimpsed on page 1.16; like Jenna he's a Fassique Forn demon. They're cousins.

$$$ for Fan-Art Competition!

2009-03-14T07:28:00.004+11:00

Magellan recently turned 5 years old and with 500 pages under my belt as we start the 5th chapter I thought it was a good time to have a competition to bolster the fan-art stocks. I guess it's not technically fan-art if it comes in via a competition...? Anyway...

Magellan Comp-Art competition!

First Prize: $US100
2xRunners up prizes: $US25

Paid via Paypal - or if you don't have a PP account I'll send you a cheque (but you'll have to wear any banking fees at your end).

Rules, requirements and regs...

Send your art - which can be of any Magellan character/s - to xmung-one(at)bigpond(dot)com. Include your name and email address.
Enter as many times as you like but you can only win one prize.
File format can be tif, jpg, png - nothing over 1MB thanks.
I'll publish entries as they come in. If you have a webcomic, deviant-art page or art blog, etc send the link with your entry and I'll link to it.
Competition closes 3 April 2009.
The winners will be decided by myself and a small panel of other prominent (non-bribable) webcartoonists.
Most awesome entry wins!
The judges decision will be final, no correspondence will be entered into, etc... plus by entering the competition you agree not to flame us if you don't win.
Have fun!

Any questions, clarifications, please post to this blog entry...

5.07-5.08... Robo-mat!

2009-03-13T14:21:00.001+11:00

So now we make our way back to Magellan Island and the Academy... woo! Note also that the clock has been turned back three days from the events of the first six pages. Overall though we are now six months further along from the end of the Bad Karma storyline... all the cadets have been knuckling down with their studies - no doubt there have been dramas and problems along the way, some of those will be picked up on as the current story progresses.

I wanted to kick off with a robo-mat sequence. It's a pre-used environment which first featured in Chapter 4 so hopefully most readers will be familiar with it and its function. It's the principle tactical training ground for not just the cadets but graduates as well. I see it as a great way for groups to work on their team dynamics going up against facsimiles of various villains in difficult situations.

In terms of writing and drawing them, the robots themselves are fun to work with. The idea is that they are essentially blank templates that can be programed to fulfill any particular role and their parameters are locked for single exercises. They also work from a central computer rather than having their own individual core programing, they cannot function outside the Robo-mat - that security feature is intended to stop them from running amok, escaping and becoming robot villains. The robots outer casing is designed to - in most instances- replicate the qualities of a human body so punching one is like punching a person (don't let their shiny metallic appearance fool you!). While most of the robots are human-standard in terms of strength and vulnerabilities, some of the robot units are designed to mimic the strength and powers of other villains and heroes.

Explosions and ammunition in the robo-mat are all simulated. The central robo-mat computer will calculate the effect of various impacts and blows so as to referee the session - it will declare if a cadet or robot participant is 'killed', 'injured' (and to what degree) or rendered 'unconscious' - the cadet then becomes a non-participant in the exercise. For example, we see Bill being declared unconscious for one minute - something which the robo-mat calculated would have been the likely result of a real encounter between him and a bazooka rocket blast - any other cadet probably would have been 'killed' or at least severely 'injured'. It's still possible for cadets to be injured during a robo-mat exercise of course, should they fall or get in the way of their own team mates actions than anything is possible but obviously all effort is made to ensure safety.

I should also mention that this is a good way for some cadets to learn how to minimise their powers - plenty of 'human-standard' robots have had their heads blasted, ripped or otherwise knocked off by cadets - something they would need to avoid doing in real life situations.

Once this sequence finishes in a couple more weeks we'll be catching with more more cadets...

5.06: There be monsters! (Character genesis/evolution)

2009-03-05T21:11:00.002+11:00

I mentioned a few posts ago that both Good-Guy and the monsters being used in the Chapter 5 opening sequence had their origins in a comic I was working on many years ago... 1993 to be exact. This was pretty early in my days attempting to be a cartoonist and certainly in the dim dark days before the internet had any real accessibility (they might have invented Netscape v1 by then but I don't think so)... so this early effort has remained unseen by other eyes... until now that is!!

I don't know if it's ill advised of me to share this early art, story and character design, but what the hey, I'll do it anyway. In those days I was big on scratchy detail, worked in B&W and only had the attention span to enable me to produce two pages before I lost interest. Actually it was less than two pages - as you'll see some parts of the two pages remain incomplete. Oh, well! Also, I've censored out the names of the characters... I'm not sure if I'll be using those names in this version of their story and I want to keep my options (and any potential mystery about their names) open.

Finally, you'll notice this story starts in the countryside and in very early musings about this new Magellan story I had considered doing the same. But the story became something much, much more than the 1993 version could or ever would have been and for that reason it's been moved to the city.

Anyway, there are three characters in the 1993 story that bear some passing resemblance to three of those in page 5.06... I have modified and evolved their appearances for Worst Field Trip Ever - quiet extensively in two cases. For reasons unremembered, the fourth character in the 1993 story was never drawn and I've indicated where he was meant to have been with some grey shading in a couple of the panels. At any rate, that fourth character hasn't made it to Worst Field Trip, the fourth one in today's update (the ssspiky one) is a new character. Enough rambling - here are the pages...

Whatcha think?? I should stress (very, very strongly) that despite assertions by the farmer, the characters aren't necessarily 'aliens'... and I can assure you that, unlike claims made on page 2, the updated characters definitely won't have gained their appearance/powers through the consumption of 'radioactive beer'...!

My favourite part is that 'Captain Good-Guy' has a yellow pages listing under 'Superheroes'. If you can't read the small print it says: "No crisis too small! * From catastrophe to cat in a tree!! * Prompt service * Package deal!!" I still think the 'from catastrophe to cat in a tree' is pretty witty. Other superheroes listed include Captain Dynamic, Captain New South Wales (oh brother!) and Duperman.

OK - moving on...! The next update will take us back to the Academy on Magellan Island. I'm pretty sure you're as excited by this as I am... despite the recent Mindmistress/Rochelle story it seems like ages since we were there last - it's certainly been some months since we saw Kaycee last. That will be remedied from next week!

5.05: I love the Photoshop Warp tool!

2009-03-03T19:11:00.005+11:00

Today's update (5.05) features Oz Magellan's Good-Guy (aka Jacob Twain... I did give him a slightly different name in an earlier blog post but changed my mind - I'm fickle like that). His power is light based and as we'll see over the course of the story it has some interesting properties.

The GG symbol Good-Guy uses is a very basic affair I cooked up in Illustrator (ai). Despite its simplicity though it's a total bastard to draw and make it look right - so I decided that, in most instances I'd be drawing his chest blank and importing the ai file into photoshop and merging it with the artwork. Nice in theory but only when Good-Guy is standing straight and direct to the frame like he was in page 4. Page 5 was a whole different challenge. When he's side on or stooped over not even the distort tool in Photoshop (which gets the symbol to more or less the right overall shape) can make it look like it's really a part of his uniform.

Thank you Photoshop warp tool -it really helps to make it the symbol look as if it is form fitting and figure hugging. I might need a bit more practice but essentially it worked a treat on page 5.

See below...

I'm pretty sure they use this method for the Superman "S" symbol - I could be wrong but it looks like it to me...

5.04: Oz Magellan

2009-02-26T10:31:00.007+11:00

Oz Magellan is the Australian based Magellan group (and as mentioned previously in the History, there are various Magellan groups around the world). In the course of the past few chapters we've met Captain Victoria plus Red Centre and The Man Who Can.

Page 5.04 introduces two more Oz Magellan members - Tassie Tigress and Good-Guy.

For those readers unfamiliar with Australian fauna the Tasmanian Tiger (or Thylacine) was a carnivorous marsupial found on the island state of Tasmania... until European settlers wiped it out in the early 1900s. Taking the code-name of a now extinct species might of course not prove the wisest of decisions perhaps...! I added the pronunciation guide of 'Tazzie' and 'Taz' since that's the way it's said around these parts. Anyway - Tassie Tigress has as her principle abilities speed, strength and agility - her civilian name is Jilly Barnes. She graduated from the Academy in 2006 and joined Oz Magellan two years ago.

I should note that someone doesn't have to be Australian to be in Oz Magellan (nor do they have to be European to be in Euro Magellan, American to be in Magellan USA and so forth - they are regional organisations rather than nationalistic ones). That said, Tassie Tigress is Australian unlike Good-Guy who hails from South Africa.

Good-Guy, aka Markus Twain, is derived from one of the first super-hero characters I ever created (circa 1993!) and he finally gets his day in the sun... he was a lot cheesier in the original comic (in fact called "Captain Good-Guy") but I've toned that back somewhat here although his do-gooder demeanour remains intact. His powers center around light - he emits it (up to laser intensity) and uses it to help him (and others) fly at great speed... whilst in this state he is effectively invulnerable to physical injury. More info on Good-Guy, Tassie Tigress and the rest of Oz Magellan as the story progresses.

Spectacle Island is an actual island located within the extended Sydney Harbour. Anyone who reads other superhero comics would know that the headquarters of super groups tend to come in for extensive punishment and regular demolition from the bad guys... so why would they put their HQ in the middle of a densely populated city where people are placed at risk during an attack? At least on an island it reduces the threat to bystanders since there are none. I was going to base Oz Magellan on Cockatoo Island - which is near Spectacle Island and much bigger. Having been there I can say Cockatoo Island is awesome but it is probably too big for an outfit the size of Oz Magellan... Spectacle Island is more modest but is still large enough for a base with VTOL airpads, heli-pads, docking for boats and subs plus easy defence. Neat, huh?

Feedback/questions/comments welcome...

5.03: Run, Tracy, run!

2009-02-24T17:38:00.004+11:00

Page 5.03: I've had a fair but of fun working on the first three pages for this new chapter. They've been a real change of pace to Magellan Island and have offered up some interesting artistic challenges - not only from a drawing point of view but mainly in terms of colouring. I'm still not sure if it looks right, there probably should have been more black - but for some reason I have difficulty working with solid black.

Also, the first three pages have been fast and frenetic - rather than building up any major suspense or atmosphere around going down into the drain I chose to get straight to the action... hopefully it has been scary all the same.

The next update will introduce a couple of new characters from Oz Magellan!

5.02: Beware... Monsters!

2009-02-20T11:34:00.003+11:00

We get a sneek peek at the chapter 5 antagonists. It's very early days yet so I'm not going to say too much at the moment but there are two things...

I really hope I can tell this story in a way that avoids it from becoming just your basic 'monster of the week' outing... I don't think it will be but I need to know if it is, so someone tell me m'kay? The monsters are actual characters (rather than just dumb homicidal monsters) so that might help.
The monster characters are based on a design for one of my first real attempts at a superhero comic which I started many, many years ago. Like most of my projects in the 1990s it never got past 2 pages, but I saved those pages and the development/evolution of these early characters has taken Chapter 5 in some very interesting directions. Once the story has advanced a few more pages I'll share the 1990s designs (and even the original 2 pages)...

Page 2 is a bit graphic... I would always advise that Magellan carries a "strong violence content" warning. Obviously not all the time, I don't believe in non-stop full-force force violence (yawn) but when you least expect it... lookout! One reader emailed me to say he almost lost his lunch... so was it a bit too much? Let me know!

Things to do

2009-01-23T17:28:00.002+11:00

There's a lot I'd like to do with Magellan on top of just producing the 2-3 pages of comics per week (actually I'd like to produce more than that but it would be pretty much impossible given that I also have a full time job). Maybe if I write it down in a list it won't seem too harrowing:

Fully updated and easily maintained cast list
Fully updated and easily Magellan info list (eg about the different forces, the island, etc)
Magellan symbol t-shirt/sleeveless training top... that would be cool, huh? I'd wear it!
Magellan symbol badge
Bad Karma commentary - at least I've written something about the cover... only 300 pages to go. It's not essential I know but I think it would give me additional useful insight into the creative processes and developments and maybe be of interest to some readers
Promotional material - primarily some postcards for local comic shops to leave out in some hopeful attempt to lure print comic readers onto the good ship Magellan. I think people are more accepting of webcomics now and might make the leap.
Update the Magellan entry in the comixpedia wiki
A convention comic with a totally original story. It would be maybe 12 pages and in colour or more pages and in B&W... I'm thinking the latter since that will give people more to read.

OK - that's it for now. Not so much after all...! Now I just have to do it. I am actually working on the cast page but it's so extensive I just keep tripping over myself. But I figure I'll just keep chipping away at it and hopefully it'll get finished.

Beyond MM & Rochelle x-over... a few hints on the next story

2009-01-21T10:07:00.000+11:00

This is a bit brief, but won't contain any spoilers...

Chapter 5 will be set about 4 months after the current cross-over story, which itself is set about 2 months after Bad Karma. So yes, it'll be jumping six months ahead. The cadets, indeed the entire population of Magellan Island, have been working hard to put the events of Bad Karma behind them. We will pick up a few of those threads but this will be essentially a completely new story, with a lot of familiar faces and some totally new ones as well. Titled "Worst Field Trip Ever" it will kick off in just over two weeks time.

Part of my reason in moving ahead so many months is that the Bad Karma story, which took almost three years to tell, covered roughly two weeks of Magellan time. Since the first year for Kaycee and Co is set in 2009, and it is now 2009 in our world too, I wanted to stabilise the time differential! Does that mean, should Magellan make it to 2010, that the cadets will move on to 2010 and their second year at the academy too? You bet it does! Does that mean this next story will not be 300 pages/3 years long? Oh, yeah!! I'm writing this one to be 50-60 pages. I learned a lot out of the processes of writing Bad Karma, notably to do with pre-advance plotting and also keeping the narrative compact - so I hope to be bringing all that and more to Chapter 5 and that it will be a very tight, very kickass story still with all the character development and nuance you expect from Magellan.

So. What's it about? The title gives away a lot. And that's all I'm saying! The story will feature Kaycee and several other cadets, some who've had a bit of screen time and some who've had almost none. We'll also see how things are going for Maya in the fall-out of Bad Karma. Plus... how is Go!Anna managing with her grand plan to train Brelvis into future cadet/super-hero material? And also, bad things... very bad things... are brewing over in Sydney, Australia - as Oz Magellan (which includes Captain Victoria... remember her? and Red Centre and The Man Who Can... remember them?) will soon discover. We'll be meeting the entire Oz Magellan line-up and some rather unpleasant individuals.

I've been working on the story for several weeks now and all the pieces are falling into place and I'm feeling rather excited by this one - hope you are too and that you can join me after the current story wraps up...

Bad Karma commentary - cover

2009-01-16T10:09:00.003+11:00

When I get started on the commentary proper I'll probably be covering 15-20 pages of the story per post, covering broadly what I was hoping to convey in the comic, what worked, what didn't work and what, on reflection I would have done differently. However, to kick the process off I just wanted to write briefly about the cover image.

It is a bit silly to talk about a 'cover' for a webcomic... cover to what exactly? I only started doing covers for Magellan when it moved to Graphic Smash. Their online publishing process requires a promotional image of very specific dimensions that will then be displayed on the front Graphic Smash page on days that the comic updates. Certainly it's a good idea but usually then leaves me grasping for an appropriate image to on one hand convey a sense of excitement, drama, enticement and what the story is about without giving it away. I think most other Graphic Smash cartoonists just have a cover image for their whole series, it never occurred to me (until just 10 seconds ago) that I probably could have done the same thing - I suppose that since I have discreet chapters it's good to do one that's specific to that story. So as a result I needed to devise a cover for Bad Karma - and since, at the time, the new story was intended to start soon I needed that cover quickly.

In case it's not evident, this commentary will contain numerous spoilers, so if you're reading this before you've read the comic itself, consider yourself forewarned...!

Anyway, I knew that this chapter would be the big reveal on who Karma Joffe really was, who the mysterious man snuggling up with her at the end of Chapter 2 was (pages 61-62), what their plans were and why Karma appeared to have it in for Kaycee Jones. Ever since inception Karma Joffe was intended to be a future version of cadet Maya Applecross so I knew she was really an illusion-maker rather than a precog, which was Karma's 'thing' - but didn't want to give any of that away in the cover.

Problem was, I was originally playing around with a daft idea of showing everyone as marionette puppets of a giant/looming Karma. Attempts to make it work as a visual concept didn't work well and I really didn't like the literal interpretation of it - "ooh, they're all under her control". Instead I came up with the scenario as depicted above. I knew that evil future Maya and Chang (Miasma and DragonKlaw) were plotting to bring down some kind of apocalyptic scenario - so I thought I'd depict that instead. As it turns out, of course, they got no where near that kind destruction by the end of the story and as events unfolded it seemed that the cover would ultimately be more an illustrative rather than actual depiction of the chaos the two had wrought. Fortunately, as I was writing the penultimate confrontation against Kaycee and Miasma some 20 months later, I still had some of my synapses firing and incorporated the cover image into Miasma's mind attack on Kaycee - see here. I love it when that kind of thing comes together, but believe me, when I created that cover image I had no idea I'd be using it so effectively at the right moment in the story.

As for the image itself, I personally love how it turned out and it is still one of my favourite drawings from the series - it is strong and emotive, the looming moon and colour scheme adding to the drama, as an apparently defeated Kaycee is tossed limply onto a pile of corpses of other cadets.

So much for the great commentary...

2009-01-12T14:38:00.003+11:00

I had all these big plans to give a bit of commentary on the Bad Karma storyline and then nothing happened. grrr!

In large part it was because I was so busy working on current Magellan stuff, firstly the lettering on Jean-François Poulin's art for the Gifford Foss story (lettering five pages a week is a lot more work than I had anticipated) and then three pages a week for the current Mindmistress crossover story. In amongst that I started working on the next Magellan story which will kick off after the crossover finishes - around early February.

I would still like to get to the commentary - I did actually make quite a go of it before Christmas but got totally bogged down in detail so I need to rethink the way I approach it. At any rate there's a great year for Magellan ahead - hope you can join in the fun and the mayhem. Will try my best to make this blog more of an ongoing concern too!

Bad Karma – cartoonist’s commentary

2008-11-07T18:43:00.002+11:00

When I first devised the Bad Karma storyline I figured I could get it wrapped in about 100 pages, so that was the first thing I underestimated about this particular 300 page epic. In reality, Bad Karma is a number of shorter stories strung together under a broader plot narrative leading up to the battle against a couple of powerful villains from the future. Were I to re-write the entire chapter I think I could bring it in under 200 pages as I would cut out a few sequences and characters, and tighten up a lot of scenes. So I’m undertaking this process as a kind of creative review. Three hundred pages is a lot to get one’s brain around and I think that there were a lot of rather awesome moments in Bad Karma, but a number of other things that either misfired or could have been done a lot better.

For those not familiar with my webcomic production process, I worked mainly from page to page – sometimes writing up to 10-15 pages ahead of myself and occasionally outlining broader story structure in anticipation of where I wanted everything to finish. In other words I didn’t have all 300 pages of Bad Karma written (let alone drawn) before I started serialising it on-line. Had I waited until all 300 pages were finished before uploading them chances are it never would have seen light of day – for some dumb reason it’s the pressure of the update deadline that motivates me to pump out the pages. No update deadline equals no update! Also, I often can’t see how the next part of the story unfolds until I’m in the thick things. Anyway, bottom line is that Bad Karma is a first draft effort.

The process of working on a lengthy serialised webcomic presents a number of pitfalls – here are some I discovered while working on Bad Karma:

the big picture v details: knowing the overall plot of a story is one thing, knowing how all the pieces fit together and making them credible and easily understood is another matter altogether. For example, I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I didn’t develop the full details of the astral planet Equis until a few weeks before page 166 when it was explained. Some characters were designed the day their page appeared - ditto their powers! It was story writing on the run and very easy to write myself into a corner!
complexity: The initial concept was simple enough but adding other sequences (the attempt on Freya’s life, the Robomat training sequence, Kaycee’s struggle with her hallucinations, the dragon/avatar attack) all expanded the size and scope of the story. In the end there were numerous threads in play – very complex and potentially very confusing. I did try to make it easier to navigate by including some explanation and links back to earlier threads (sometimes from months previous) - had I not done that I probably would have lost a lot of readers.
cast of thousands: I really wanted to flesh out the Magellan universe and include a number of characters, only problem is – if you want that character to be only a shade over two dimensional they need at least a page or more to help flesh them out. Had I really spent as much time developing characters as I would have liked to, the chapter would have been closer to 400 pages in length! Additionally, character overload can make it hard for the reader to identify individual characters let alone sympathise with them. For some reason any attempts at constructing a comprehensive cast page defeated me, but I did try to keep readers informed of who was who through comments and links below updates they appeared in. Having characters who are distinctive and visually different helps in this regard.
fatigue: both the reader and cartoonist can suffer from this. In the case of the reader they have to decide how much longer they can invest their life in an ongoing story (“are we there yet?”) - three years is a long time and I'm in awe of those who had the patience to stick it out for that long. In the case of the cartoonist it’s the risk of burnout from the many, many hours required to turn out each page and trying to balance that within real life demands.
momentum: it’s not easy to maintain suspense when putting out a page every few days. It can be hard enough to maintain that suspense in a comic book where someone is reading from page to page. Add to that the occasional missed day or even week and it slows things down even more. For a few months I managed three updates a week leading up to and during the dragon attack, no doubt helping to kick things along. I tried to end each page with a bit of a cliff-hanger moment or something to pique further interest.

Anyway, enough of the problems - although if you want to discuss further in the comments, please do. The next entry will look at the first 15 pages of Bad Karma…

The Final Countdown

2008-10-03T14:42:00.001+10:00

Today's Magellan update marks page 290 of the epic "Bad Karma" chapter... and as such also marks the final 10 pages of the story. That's right... 10 pages to go!! There are still a few surprises to come as various plotlines reach some form of closure... but it will all be over in 10 more pages.

Providing there are no undue interuptions or delays to the production schedule that means everything should wrap up in 5 more weeks which takes us to early November. Woo!

Then... a treat for you all... a twenty page story featuring a cadet who has very little exposure to date, the little green guy Gifford Foss. See pages 2.47-49 for a reminder...

The story was written by myself and drawn by Canadian reader Jean-Francois Poulin. The story will look at Gifford's life prior to arriving at Magellan and will run every weekday, Mondays thru Fridays.

I know I've been dropping hints about this for a loooooooong time. I've always wanted to run it at the conclusion of Bad Karma, but the story kept getting longer and longer and as an unfortunate result, kept pushing Gifford's story further back. Anyway, the light is at the end of the tunnel.

Beyond that there will be a special 24 page crossover... but more on that shortly.

It's also my intention to write a reflection on Magellan generally, and Bad Karma in particular, with regular installments over November in my long abandoned blog... despite the fact it took forever to deliver, I did in fact, for the most part, hugely enjoy working on Bad Karma and there are many thoughts about the process, the characters and the story I'd like to share for anyone who's interested (think of it as the Director's commentary!) More info soon...

Bad Karma - p209

2007-11-27T12:13:00.000+11:00

Page 4.209 now online - sorry this post has been a bit slow!

Relevant to issues raised in the previous post (ie trying to re-establish the scene, move the story along - all without losing momentum) this page touches base with most of the junior cadets in page 4.181... some 28 pages ago! Despite the fact there are so many characters floating around already I'm never adverse to introducing more... especially when it helps round out the reading experience!

I think it helps to flesh out this large epic world too - if we think of how many people we come into contact with at most educational institutions (whether it be school, college, university an academy, etc) it's a sizable number of folk. Ninety percent of them we can never remember the name of anyway but we might remember their face from somewhere. To that end I'm trying not to draw too many random generic faces in the background... a face seen in the background might very well pop up again later in a slightly expanded role.

So what is the purpose of Hamish and Janice and Ali and Yuki (not seen on this page)? At the moment it's nothing more than friendship and camaraderie for Montana-Rose and Jemima. They're peers (all being witch and wizard super hero cadets) and, because of this, probably more significant in the lives of Montana-Rose and Jemima than their follow first year classmates.

Another thing about this page was an attempt to show how Freya's 'vybe' ability ( the power to change people's emotional state) could be used effectively to calm the nerves of people in stressful situations. Probably quite useful!

Also, we get to see Hoodoo in action summoning the Fiery Scimitar of Qod. This was a fun sequence to draw and the last panel is admittedly rather much more comic-book like however it seems to work nicely with the sudden explosion of bright warm colours. Given that not much is known about these characters (Vertigo and Hoodoo) - I'm still shaping them and discovering aspects of them myself - it's exciting to be able to add this element to what Hoodoo does (so far we've only seen her teleport before this). In part this is what the avatar sequences are all about - adding some physical action but also showing what these super heroes can do and how they work together.

Bad Karma - p208

2007-11-22T20:11:00.000+11:00

Page 208 now online.

A switch in scenery back to Central Tower. The story will continue to cut between the various locations over the next several pages while I try to keep up with everything that's happening. A problem with the serialised action comic format is that it can take a lot of time to publish a short sequence of events and true to form Magellan has taken a number of months to move through what has effectively been one hour at Magellan Island. In fact most of the story in chapter four has taken place in a 24 hour time frame and has been spooling out now for almost two years!

So we're back at Central Tower now which is where Force Magellan and the 'Future Force' (or time travellers/ chroners) have come under attack by two of DragonKlaw's avatar dragons. This page picks up immediately after the last panel of the page we last saw the Central Tower action (page 195) - no relative time has passed between then and this new page. The action at South Tower (with Nadine, Sioni, Charisma and Bill) and at Security HQ (Kaycee, Vostok, Chang, Maya, Redd and Seth) has all been taking place more or less at exactly the same time.

Initially I found this latest page particularly difficult to get off the drawing-board. In large part the problem arose from the need to slot back into the scene at Central Tower without losing momentum. There's a need to re-orient the reader with a reminder of the bio-nexus (which the assembled witches and wizards haven't yet had a chance to start 'hacking' with their incantation) plus there's also Victory Man still tangling with the blue dragon avatar. And if I can say so, that drawing of Victory-Man came up pretty well, eh?! Also, I like having Ranger Bill call him V-M Two - it's about as casual as you can while facing imminent death!

Anyway, there's a lot going on and it isn't about to let up for our heroes and heroines any time soon!

Bad Karma - p207

2007-11-18T10:27:00.000+11:00

Page 4.207 now online!

And so we say goodbye to Vostok... or do we? Most readers probably had a strong inkling that Vostok was going to do a runner (as much as floating bright green gerkin with fluoro-pink tendrils can do a runner) as soon as Kaycee eyed off that toilet door at the end of the last page. Or at least, the readers leaving comments had a fairly strong inkling. How far Vostok gets will remain to be seen!

Of course the main issue here, especially from Kaycee's point of view, is that this is another bungle. Things haven't been going very well for her in this story: the increasingly horrendous hallucinations and nightmares at the worst possible time; being brushed off by her idol and inspiration Go!Anna; derailing her teams tactical training exercise in the Robo-Mat; and now losing Vostok - all with the threat of a reassessment of her cadetship hanging over her head. And since she doesn't realise the reassessment came about due to the machinations of Karma/future Maya/Miasma she's going to be feeling the pressure right about now.

Bad Karma - p206

2007-11-16T07:13:00.000+11:00

Page 4.206 now online.

There's not a lot to say about this particular update - Kaycee's on the hunt for a receptacle full of water in which to place the rapidly dehydrating Vostok whilst the building shakes around her. It's worth noting though that the last several pages have been the most the story has focused on Kaycee in quite some while. Given that she hasn't been a central part of much of the narrative it doesn't seem to have diminished her overall importance within the story, at least I hope not.

Another thing to note is that, if there's any reason that this current chapter has blown out to more than 200 pages when I had originally envisaged 100, it's because of scenes like this. When I initially outlined the story, I expected the whole DragonKlaw/Miasma thing to be sorted within 20 pages of 'Future Force' (Maverick, Victory-Man, et al) appearing on the scene. That would have happened only without all the additional character moments that have developed since that point some 60 pages ago. Those moments include: Kaycee and Vostok; the slowly unravelling mystery around Maverick (future Kaycee); the introduction of second and third year cadets; Charisma's apparent 'future-shock'; etc etc. In the meantime there are also plenty of loose threads still needing to be resolved! Despite all that I don't think the story is out of control - I know pretty much where it is going and what the outcome will be... the issue is how many more pages it will take before it gets there. I decided a while ago to go with the flow and allow the mini-threads to play themselves out without indulging them and, conversely, without abruptly terminating them.

Bad Karma - p205

2007-11-13T20:05:00.000+11:00

A new page of Magellan - 4.205 - online. As mentioned in the last blog entry I'll be blabbing about this new page, might contain spoilers, etc!

So now the crunch is on - six characters (Kaycee, Chang, Maya, Redd (Justine Kef), Seth and Vostok) with a dragon soon to be breathing down their necks. Redd is a decisive in-charge trainer - like Seth her role is fairly functional and she doesn't have a strongly nuanced emotionally driven character. Her background is somewhat a blank, although I do have a fairly extensive back story for her - and I did mention in the comment thread on GS that her red skin and hair colour manifested at the same time as her super strength power did in her early teens.

Redd is able to focus the very green cadets (they've only been training at Magellan for about two months after all) to the task at hand. An experienced wizard or witch would have had Seth free with a wave of the hand but for Chang his repertoire of spells is limited and he's having trouble thinking past the last spell he cast - see Red Team vs Evil Weevil. Maya had been panicking when the dragon struck initially but has recovered enough to take direction and to take the initiative in using her illusion powers to relieve Seth's pain.

As for the illusion Maya transports Seth into, it probably says a lot more about Maya than it does about Seth. All illusions she creates are manifestations of her own mind rather than the other way around.

Kaycee meanwhile, having been in a hallucination when the dragons first appeared, emerging abruptly from the hallucination following Vostok's psychic intervention is somewhat disoriented and still a bit in shock. Nevertheless, she is still able to snatch up Vostok and seek to save him from 'suffocation'. I should note that I had her inform Redd of Vostok's peril rather than just dashing out the door on a rescue mission because it would stand to reason Kaycee wouldn't necessarily know if Vostok was a plain water, salt water or some other liquid solution dwelling alien lifeform.

Bad Karma - p204

2007-11-11T14:46:00.000+11:00

New update went up yesterday - page 4.204! This one came in just under the wire. It's lucky that Sydney has switched to summer time and daylight savings has finished in Texas (where the Graphic Smash server sits) - as this gives me a whole extra two hours to work on a page before the auto-updater kicks in. I'd like to be a lot further ahead in my work schedule - have a buffer of pages even - but it just doesn't seem to happen that way. The pressure of a deadline is a definite motivator but I think I need to move a bit beyond that.

Anyway, I thought I'd provide some commentary on the page... it may end up having spoilers so perhaps read the update before you continue...

So it looks like Seth has been pretty badly hurt. Seth is the kind of character that doesn't seem to have been noticed much - admittedly his purpose to date has only been to pump out info (his name probably should have been Exposition Dude) and he doesn't strike much of an emotional chord as a result. Seth is a hard core nerd and probably spends most of his free time gaming or hacking or cracking or solving calculus or whatever it is hard core nerds enjoy doing. He's a decent guy though!

Vostok is in peril too. His robot's fish bowl head has cracked open, spilling him onto the ground where he is as helpless as any fish out of water. (I added the 'flop flop' sound FX for extra dramatic effect!) Vostok is another character that I created in a kind of off-hand way to fill a specific role (refer: Seth, above) but who has quickly developed a cult persona all his own - I enjoy writing for him and the readers appear to dig him immensely. If I was DC or Marvel I'd be preparing a Vostok 8 issue mini-series- there is a massive back story for this little guy that I would so love to tell. Stretched as I am work wise, the chance of that happening are very slim... but there might be another solution. More on that, if and when it happens!

Ego puff!

2007-11-10T07:23:00.000+11:00

Some time ago I dropped off leaflets promoting Magellan into my local comics store and asked if they could display them somewhere on the counter. (They said yes, BTW.) One of the workers there said she'd check out my webcomic. Cool! Several weeks later I asked if she had but she confessed to having lost the leaflet and web address, so hadn't - but did ask for the URL again which I dutifully supplied. Not wanting to seem like I was badgering her though I never asked again if she had read it. If she was going to read it she was going to read it, I figured.

Yesterday, over a year later, I walked into the store to buy my weekly stash of comicky goodness and got greeted with a very enthusiastic "Hey! I finally read your comic and had a real blast!!" That was cool. Very cool! We talked a little bit about it - I mentioned that I had been hoping to self-publish before the recent Supanova Con in Sydney but that the plan got derailed by my poor planning and lack of finance. She said that I should look to Dark Horse since they had recently published the sublime Perry Bible Fellowship (and what a wonderful book it is). It's nice that she thought Magellan was in that kind of category - personally, I'm not expecting any offers from Dark Horse any time soon... but I did leave the store with a small ego boost all the same!

Trying a new approach...

2007-11-06T19:10:00.000+11:00

Despite my various attempts at utilising this blog continually being stymied by my general forgetfulness and busy-ness on other projects I refuse to believe I cannot actually maintain a blog!! Ever the optimist. Anyway, I've decided to try a new approach and make this particular blog be specifically about my ongoing webcomic Magellan and/or anything else that tangentially intersects with it. Short and to the point entries with the purpose being to discuss the creative process and other developments more than anything else. Let's see what transpires!

To that end, I should mention that I've been working on the Magellan Comixpedia page... I'd link to it directly except that 'pedia is down at the moment. Now that I've got my brain around the whole wiki-editing thing I'm really getting into it. Magellan has such a huge cast with so many characters I figure that using Comixpedia constructively will allow me and the readers to keep track of them their affiliations, powers, backgrounds, etc. More info soon!

Also, the current storyline Bad Karma just broke the 200 page barrier. I don't know if this is a good thing or not but it sure is a hell of a lot of pages and the longest story I've ever drawn. Certainly I am having a blast with the story and it's still heading in the right direction, but I really did expect that it would only take about 100 pages not 200+. What has probably caused the blowout - if it can be called that - is that I have added a lot of extra character related moments than I never intended to include. By and large this is what probably gives Magellan it's appeal and I think a lot of readers really enjoy those moments but I guess I get concerned that it might deflate the momentum. At any rate, the end is nigh-ish!!

Arbuckle

2007-04-03T10:42:00.000+10:00

Maybe you've heard of the 'Garfield comic strip fad' in which Garfield's thoughts are deleted from the strip thereby creating a new comic which only contains dialogue (if any at all) from Jon Arbuckle the hapless dude who cohabits with the cat (to call him Garfield's owner seems somehow inaccurate). At any rate, doing so adds a whole new slant on the comic - in theory Jon isn't meant to be able to hear Garfield's thoughts anyway, so what's really going on in his lonely loser life?

Apparently efforts to establish archives of 'refitted' strips has met with 'cease and desist' orders (this may or may not be true), however to side-step this one enterprising guy has set up Arburckle in which an original strip is redrawn by himself or other artists... with some interesting results. Overall they're quite amusing although I found some to be sad in a very touching way... this one for example!

I'm usually one to miss fads and skip the bandwagon but I couldn't resist in this instance. Since I had a spare hour I whipped one up for submission. The request is that any submission shouldn't duplicate anything previously submitted - and I thought I had picked one previously untouched and sent it in. Here's my effort...

(I'm not sure why Blogger is reducing the size of it... should be bigger than that, hopefully I can fix it at some point). Anyway, of course I chose one that had already been done! At this stage I'm not sure if mine will make it to the site but I thought I'd share.

Totally baffled

2007-03-28T14:35:00.000+10:00

I really love me some Perry Bible Fellowship, really I do. But I've got no idea whatsover what this particular strip is about! My friend Miguel who likewise loves PBF, probably even more than me, has no idea what it's about. Do you?

Is it the subject matter or the medium itself?

2007-03-27T12:21:00.000+10:00

A friend of mine is a fairly big geek - she's certainly into things like Lord of the Rings, Buffy/Angel, Serenity, Dr Who and James Bond in a big but not overly obsessive way. She's not a huge geek, certainly a lot less so than myself or her partner, but she is pretty geeky, right?

Anyway, I was telling her about Buffy Season 8 - the Dark Horse comic series that's just started up. She was mildly interested and I offered to loan her the issues but she declined, citing as her reason that she wasn't really into comics. Now if this was Identity Crisis or Infinite Crisis or 52 I was trying to push onto her I could easily understand her lack of interest, she's totally not into superheroes - but she's into both Buffy and Joss Whedon (who is writing the first story), so I find her response odd. It seems it's not the subject matter (likes Buffy, check) but the medium of comics itself that is disinclining her towards reading it. Maybe if it was a book she might read it, I don't know. I certainly haven't read any Buffy books myself but that's not because I don't like books. I guess if someone was trying to push a Buffy PC game on me I'd say no thanks, because I'm not into gaming... but is that the same thing?

A few years ago a similar thing happened when I found out an arty upstairs neighbour was a huge Buffy fan. I showed her some copies of the comic series that were out at the time and she was spectacularly disinterested.

I'm raising this point because it's frequently said that more people generally (and more women specifically) would read comics if they weren't just about superheroes. Of course, increasingly comics aren't just about superheroes, and a lot more people are getting into them, especially online. And yet it seems some people still won't read comics, even comics about something they have a fair degree of passion for, just for the reason they are comics. Did they have a horrible, scarring experience with comics as a child? Who can say?

All the same I'll see if I can't interest my friend once the whole series has played out and the trades are available. I seem to remember she stubbornly resisted my enthusiasm for the TV series of Buffy before giving in and totally loving it and buying all seven seasons worth on DVD!

Dead cat

2007-03-26T10:47:00.000+10:00

I doubt I could make this stuff up if I tried - but that's a real quote by a real person on the train this morning. She also said, during the course of the half hour that I had to endure the conversation between her and some guy, presumably her boyfriend, that she had a fight with her mother last night. When the b/f enquired why they fought so much the response was: "Because my mum's a bitch and I'm stubborn." Riiiight...

Deleted scene

2007-03-25T16:07:00.000+10:00

This isn't so much a deleted scene as one that didn't really get off the drawing board beyond a few sketches - but I thought I'd share!

The Process

When I'm writing I sometimes write out a full script for the scene or sometimes I sketch it out as draft page or two. Usually when there's a lot of dialogue I prefer to script but when there's a lot of action I'll draft/sketch instead... it's generally easier that way. At any rate I'll always draft a page from a script before going to final art - just to ensure I get figures positioned properly and the right expresions and postures. Sometimes when the story changes gears, as has just happened after the "Karmaya gets caught" scene, I can find it a bit hard figuring out how to pick up the new thread and get it moving. Which is what happened here!

The Scene

Very originally I imagined that Kaycee would be sitting on the beach being a bit emo when suddenly Bill and/or Nadine would drop/zip in. The more I thought about it though the more I wondered whether that was rushing it and perhaps it needed a scene back at the robo-mat where Spence berates the cadets before letting them go. In part I was thinking I needed to address an issue about the cadets not training in armour (I found that comment in a reader's blog entry). The problem was that it was too expositionary and added nothing to the story... and the scene itself was just going to kill any momentum up to that point. I hadn't done much work on it by the time I decided to just go straight to the beach. I think I did the right thing but there were a couple of sketches I wanted to show... This one's pretty self-explanatory...

Spence enquires into Kaycee's whereabouts and Bill lies. As you'd know, Bill tells Kaycee he's done this in the beach scene and that's good enough for me. Besides I much prefer Kaycee's reaction "never asked you to lie for me". I did like the facial expressions in the draft though. In this one Nadine is pointing out something on her comm... the 'what' that might be will be obvious next week...

Nadine can be a hard character to draw and get right... that hair of hers can be a real pain (one day I'm going to shave it all off, that'll show her!!) I find I often have much better luck with drafts of her than I do the final art, which is annoying and I have no idea why it happens. Anyway, I really liked the simple way I captured her face (and hair!) in this sketch.

And here I was thinking I was chatting to myself!

2006-12-20T11:15:00.000+11:00

My webcomic traffic post from last week has enjoyed a few more eyeballs than I expected - mainly due to a kind link from Comixpedia which was picked up by Digital Strips and Fleen. That'll teach me to spin out half-baked postulations, eh?

Interestingly, the discussion has moved quickly to one of the ratio of "number of readers:making a living/turning a profit", which is an interesting development. Although I never mentioned that thought specifically in my original post I guess the connection has always been in the back of my head: ergo, more readers for my webcomics would naturally mean I'd be able to start making money from my work to the point where it became a 'day job'. Despite always believing this in some non-specific and vague way I never had a magic number of readers that would be a catalyst for this. To be honest, I think my projects would need a helluva lot of readers before financial liberation would ensue. Even if I did reach a magic number I don't actually have anything much in the way of product, plus I hate running advertising (despite having a small Google AdSense thingy on Magellan) - so all of that probably leaves me in a situation of not ever earning much even if I had over 100,000 readers per day.

Merchandising is a drag and I'm somewhat anti-consumerist, but it is still the most likely way I'm ever going to spin some financial gain. Probably the majority of webcartoonists who've ever tried self-publishing will admit that publishing printed versions of their comics is not a great money spinner, especially when printing colour comics (which mine are). And believe me the ratio of people who ask about a printed version and/or say they would buy one compared to the number who actually buy said printed version is (in my experience) somewhat alarmingly unbalanced (that is, plenty want one but then won't buy it once it exists. Yes, I am a bitter man). As for merchandise such as t-shirts, caps or mugs, I'm not sensing an interest from readers for these items. Magellan doesn't lend itself to iconic moments or sayings for a t-shirt although that hasn't stopped other cartoonists, often with very good results.

Possibly my main comic project just isn't merchandisable anyway. If that's so I'm just going to have to get used to doing them for the love not the money, even if I do get a million readers a day!

Nice idea. Needs work.

2006-12-15T16:08:00.000+11:00

Some months ago I had a brief dalliance with the idea of a visual travel blog - which I called a 'Trog'; this may or may not have been a clever name, I still haven't decided. My thinking at the time was that since I spent two half hours a day crammed into a train carriage commuting to and from work it was time that could be used to sketch some of the more interesting, annoying and or obnoxious passengers onboard and then posting it online.

What I realised, once I started working on producing Trog, was that most passengers were not all that obnoxious or interesting, and if they were annoying it was usually loud iPods or half heard phone conversations that were the cause of it - pretty dull stuff. Additionally I tried drawing the subjects covertly (really hard in a crowded, swaying train BTW) and the sketch from the day's journey was what went online, no corrections, no embellishments - so the overall quality was, well, sketchy!

In the two weeks or so I tried this little experiment I only had one truly bizarre moment:
Yes, she really said that! From what I could tell (and it wasn't too hard to deduce because she talked loudly and frequently, mostly about herself) was that she was studying to become a pediatrician (parents - do you know who your children are being examined by?). Anyway, no other Trog entries were anywhere near as interesting as this and I soon lost interest myself... another project bites the dust.

It occurs to me though that Trog still has some merit. Probably the following would improve and sustain it:

only do worthy subjects (usually those having loud un-self-censored conversations with others)
do a sketch, take down some lines of dialogue but do a proper job of it once not on the train (or bus or whatever)
accuracy of the subject's appearance isn't that important, go for caricature but ensure the dialogue is spot on
don't worry about keeping any kind of update schedule, when gold is there - gold is there!

This was all precipitated after my trip home yesterday. To sum it up here would do it no justice, but maybe a Trog posting at some point in the near future might!

Has to count for something, right?

2006-12-14T16:20:00.000+11:00

I don't know about other webcartoonists, but if they're anything like me (at least in this regard) they will care about their stats. They will care how many readers they get and how often and all that stuff. Like I say, I don't know if they do, but I know I do. Most of the time I pretend that I don't care, but really, deep down I do. And I know that because I'm always checking the page views and the Extreme Tracker stats I've stuck on my comic.

There are probably five levels of readership numbers:

Stellar: so many you can't really count them; 100,000+ readers per day; eg Penny Arcade, PvP
Super: high to very high; 10,000-100,000 per day; examples? I don't know!
Maintaining altitude: medium to high; 1,000-10,000 per day
Limping along: low to medium; 250-1,000 per day; eg my comic goes here!
Hello? Hellooo? Anyone?: nothing to low; 0-250 per day; eg many webcomics

Magellan is a bit hard to judge since I have it on Graphic Smash as well as Comic Genesis but I'm guessing the fourth catagory is the best fit.

Readers come and go, I'm sure many only read in blocks (I' myself have taken to doing that now for all but my most favorite - trying to keep up with tens and tens of plot lines on a weekly basis was getting pretty difficult). So daily stats probably don't reflect true reader numbers anyway. All the same, if I could lift the readership into the third category I think I'd be a very happy webcartoonist. It should be possible, maybe that should be my mission for 2007!

So what do you call a dead blog?

2006-12-13T13:05:00.000+11:00

I guess the internet must be littered with them. And it's probably clogged up with zombie blogs too... those that were dead and which get reanimated from time to time - usually only when the writer can be bothered, or is bored, or is depressed, or is procrastinating about something else or all of the above. Fortunately, for the moment, for me, it is none of the above.

OK - I am actually bored. But the current state of Sequential Daze (ie not updating) leads me to do some pondering over what happened to flat-line it in the first place...

Everything blogwise was doing quite well in the earlier part of the year then I just failed to update it. For the longest time I did intend to get back to it - but somehow I forgot I about it altogether as other life priorities took over. Before I knew it, it was eight months later! The other day something jogged my memory and today I checked it out. Oh yeah, there it is... still alive online on the internets! Had this blog been a small mammal instead it's fate would have no doubt been much more tragic.

Anyway. Is this a 'dead blog' or a 'zombie blog' or can it even become a 'made a full recovery blog'? Possibly the trick is to write smaller, less time consuming entries that are still worth reading. A challenge!

Introverted... moi?

2006-03-10T23:28:00.000+11:00

There was an interesting article over at The Webcomics Examiner about 'Introverted and Extroverted Webcomics' by Joe Zabel. A fair bit of hoo-haa ensued in a number of webcomic commentary blogs around the bitpass/payment part of the article. To be honest that was where I started skimming. Sorry, Joe! But before that I read every word... I even pondered them a bit.

As far as personality goes I verge into introvert territory, although I can be an outright extrovert if the mood takes me... and it doesn't need to involve alcohol either! Given that I spend hours of my life producing webcomics I'd have to be at least a bit introverted to not go nuts from spending all that time in my own company! The article caused me to think about where my comics might fall in the spectrum...

Zabel lists a few characteristics relating to introverted <----> extroverted. Although there is a fair bit of 'teh drama' in Magellan I like to edge it with humour where possible. In that vein, my comics are more boisterous than quiet... even though they all have their quiet moments I try to move on as quickly as possible. Not much romance in my comics and they're not all that political... although I suppose some folk might suggest they suffer from political correctness. More engaging than reflective. Probably somewhat derivative but hopefully imaginative too from time to time. Somewhat more perceptive than intuitive, although I do change story points because I feel it's not working at some level... but I don't know if that is the former or the latter! Certainly more idealistic than skeptical - I'm not a big fan of comics that paint negative views of the world... of course I don't subscribe to some rose-coloured view of the world either and certainly less so now than I used to. Neurotic? Manic? I'd say it's more manic although I do like to play around a little with neurotic characters.

So on the basis of the above I'd say that my comics tend to be more extroverted than introverted, which kind of surprises me. Maybe that extroverted part of my personality lives vicariously through my webcomics. I need a release somehow I suppose!

(BTW, the scarcity of posts this last 10 days has been due to me going back to full time employment... so less time for cartooning and for blogging... cartooning comes before blogging, but I do hope to get more stuff in here on at least a weekly schedule.)

Drawing cars... arrgh!

2006-02-22T18:54:00.000+11:00

When I was attending school there were a number of students (all boys) who could do amazing drawings of cars, usually with no photo reference and often with a lot of detail (accurate or otherwise). This never impressed me much at the time mainly because I wasn't interested in cars and therefore not all that interested in drawing them either. These days, I'm still not interested in cars but I have a lot more respect for the skill of motor vehicle drawing.

At some point, several years ago, I made a conscious decision to get serious about drawing cars and other vehicles. It seems many of my comic stories involve conversations in cars as characters get from point A to point B and as a cartoonist I needed to know how to draw something half decent. The cars I used to draw were rather woeful... I'd post a scan of one I did in 1994 except... well, let's just say "woeful!" One thing I started to realise was that cars have a kind of anatomy - the front and rear wheels are almost always placed proportionately in the same place regardless of the length of the car. Since my drawing style is somewhat cartoony there is a lot I can fudge, but I still want to get the various aspects of "car-ness" at least looking right so that readers know they are looking at a sedan, or a van, or a wagon, or a ute, or a 4WD/SUV, etc. Years ago I owned a VW Beetle and feel obliged to include one in just about every comic I draw. Having something to draw from has been useful and to that end I went and bought a few realistic toy cars so that I could draw them from any angle.

Here are a couple of car drawings, both from another project. The first features (surprise surprise) a VW Beetle - I'm particularly happy with this one due to the angle of it... can't remember if I used a reference, possibly not as VWs seem to be stamped into my subconscious. The ute in the second came out rather well too (please note, right-hand drive - we drive on the left side of the road here in Oz!) - I know I didn't use a reference for that as I don't have a toy ute!

Maybe one day when I'm feeling brave I will post that drawing from 1994! As a footnote, I always thought Ross Carnsew of Streetwize Comics drew the coolest cartoony style cars. (*Shakes fist at Ross*)

Getting the story out

2006-02-21T17:43:00.000+11:00

Spent the weekend away from the computer and the drawing desk - and let me tell you, it was hard going too! My coping mechanism in such situations is to take a notepad (no, not a laptop or PDA) along with me and work on a story thread or two or three. That's what I did last weekend and it worked a treat!

Bad Karma is the current story/chapter being told in Magellan. Broadly speaking, I've known how the story plays out for well over a year now - there are copious scribbles and notes and ideas all over the place. Problem is, only the first 12 pages have been scripted and the rest of it is pretty much out in the ether. Over the last weekend though I was able to deal with that problem.

Firstly I gathered up all the various plot points that I wanted in the story and wrote them all down in one place - in fact, I did that several times until I had each scene represented by a single descriptive sentence and I had each scene in the right order. This allowed me to weed out any scenes that weren't going to move the story forward and to make sure there was a balance to character "screen time".

The next step was to pace each scene. My preference is to keep the scenes in Magellan fairly short and to the point - unless it's a climactic and/or kick arse action scene... those always tend to be a bit longer. Most scenes are around 4-5 pages give or take a page. Usually I start writing a scene with a theoretical max of 3 pages but if I feel I'm trying to get too much info across in that space I will either cut the info (or bump it to another part of the script) or add extra pages as needed. Conversely, if there's no way a scene will pad to three pages I'll only write it two pages long - there's nothing worse than a superfluous page in a webcomic.

Since Magellan is a serialised comic I find it's essential to ensure each page in a scene has its own logic - that is, a reader can work out what's meant to be happening without going back a page and without the first panel being a recap. Probably this reflects the way I read webcomics - I rarely hit the previous button in a story I've been following unless I'm totally confused (actually, that happens a fair bit with some webcomics... no names). Each page has to build the story (and, where applicable, character) and having a hook at the end of each page will hopefully keep the reader coming back for subsequent updates.

A technique I use for writing is to draw a series of small squares and sub-divide those into frames - then I write in dialogue or scribble in stick figures to work out the pacing for each page. It is especially useful as it will quickly reveal any aspect of the story that lacks progression or purpose. Also, it will highlight where too much is (or too little) is happening within the number of pages allocated for that scene. Rather than writing out "Page 1, Frame one, blah blah" I find this the most constructive way to write for myself. Even if I am writing for someone else I will use the scribble/write in squares method before then typing out "Page 1, Frame one, blah blah". When writing for myself I never work from a script - I suppose that is one of the benefits of being a writer/artist.

So anyway, as usual, I've blabbed on way more than I intended. The short version of the above is that I managed to not only sort out the entire storyline and the required scenes for Bad Karma but I have now written up to page 32. Getting away from the desk seems the best way for me to get the story out!

Guess that's why they call it the World Wide Web...

2006-02-15T18:54:00.000+11:00

It's a sad little fact that I am a stats whore - I really love knowing how many people are or (as is usually the case) aren't visiting my webcomics and reading them. To this end I use Extreme trackers on all my sites... technically it only measures hits to the main page, but I have my doubts. At any rate it gives me a ball park figure of traffic and soothes my need for stats.

Recently, Extreme started including little flags which, if you hover over them, give you the name of the country and location of the ISP. For some reason I find this wildly fascinating. The number of different countries I've seen listed has really boggled my brain - North, South and Central America, United Kingdom, Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, New Zealand and various Asian countries. Can't say I've noticed Russia which is a bit odd. China and other communist Asian countries aren't represented either, but that's no surprise.

The US accounts for the majority of visitors to all my various webcomics, which I suppose is to be expected - it seems my work is more widely read overseas than here in Australia. That was a point I tried to impress on the many Australian print based cartoonists at the Supernova Pop Culture Expo late last year. They weren't all that interested in getting their comics online even though they were amazed when I told them how broad my readership was, but that's another story.

What weirds me out though is when I notice a little Australian flag - especially when I hover over it and it reveals that someone in Sydney has checked out my work. Makes me wonder if I've ever been in the same space as that person - like on the same train, or on the same bus, or in the same movie theatre, etc. As you can tell, I seem to have a lot of time for weird thoughts (see the 'walking' entry below, this seems to be when my brain does a lot of rambling of its own!).

Maybe it's just me but I do find it an intriguing concept. Did they like it, did they hate it? If I was in the same room and they found out I was the guy who did such and such a comic would they let me know what they thought of it? Actually it has happened a couple of times over the last few years, fortunately in all instances it has been positive.

Anyway, please don't think I'm spying on you, dear reader. The stats thingy doesn't give me that much to go on anyway and, by and large, I'm really only interested in the number of people visiting my comics. If you do visit any or all of them - thanks!

Walking is good!

2006-02-15T18:42:00.000+11:00

Cartooning is a pretty sedentary undertaking, I do a lot of sitting every day - sit, sit, sit - either in front of a drawing board or in front of the computer. Although I do yoga from time to time and play an occasional round of tennis (which is a blast) I find the exercise I love the most is going for a brisk walk. Since I live near a huge park I've got plenty of space to get out and about in. The park is like being in the country, lots of trees, fresh air and it even has a river running through the middle of it. Walking really gets my blood circulating, and stops me from turning into some kind of stooped-over decrepit cartoonist. Just thought I'd share!

Back in the land of the living...

2006-02-06T10:57:00.000+11:00

Managed to get myself really sick last week - my health is usually pretty good and I don't get ill all that often, but when I do catch a bug it seems to strike with a vengeance! Whatever it was, it came bundled with a fairly fiery fever and it knocked the stuffing out of me. I knew I was really sick when I couldn't be bothered turning on the computer to check my email and... horrors!... I couldn't even sit at the drawing table. About all I was good for was lying in bed and sleeping or (with a marginal improvement in my condition) lying in front of the TV watching DVDs (Batman Begins, Spidermans 1 & 2 and the Fantastic Four - and, as an aside, I'm glad I gave the FF movie a second chance... I've decided it wasn't a dire as Catwoman, it could've been a lot better but at least they were pitching in the light direction - unlike Catwoman. Yes, I am a geek!)

So I'm actually on a planned break from work now - all of February. My intention all along was to get into some serious writing, drawing and sorting out of my cartooning business model. I will be taking some time to go away as well... I'm not a total workaholic!

To date I've managed to get quite a bit done already although, as usual, I've probably planned to do way too much as well.
My drawing skills and speed seem to have passed through a bit of a barrier since January - depending on the complexity of the art required I can draw and colour a whole page in a day - a few Sundays ago I actually managed two whole pages. That's rather wonderful and somewhat astounding, especially considering it used to take me several days to do a page about five years ago. Ten years ago I guess I'd be lucky to even finish a page, let alone a story. The discipline required by the self-imposed deadlines of (too many) webcomics has certainly been a good taskmaster!

New York, New York

2006-01-22T18:40:00.000+11:00

The first page of the latest Magellan chapter starts in New York and, since it's always good to kick off with an establishing shot, I thought I'd stick in a bit of actual skyline rather than some random building. Since I've never been to New York (let alone the United States) I did a little bit of hunting around for some reference shots - these days the Google Images search makes this a rather quick and painless process.

Of course, the search returned a number of skylines that were pre-2001 and therefore include the World Trade Centre. It got me thinking - Magellan is set in similar world to ours but its history started to diverge around the 1930s due to all those superheroic goings-ons. Would 9/11 have happened in the Magellan universe? Probably not. So should my depiction of the skyline include the twin towers? I sought some feedback from fellow Graphic Smashers and the Magellan forum.

Some suggested the towers could have been previously demolished by a super battle - which was plausible considering the number of structures routinely destroyed in comics like the X-Men, et al. The general consensus was that it would be fine as long as it wasn't done in poor taste - although Reinder suggested drawing four towers! I did like that idea but in the end I found an amazing panorama of the skyline - here is a tiny, tiny, tiny, teensy version of it...

The original file was huge! I chose to draw the area shaded red... and, even though it is only a small fraction of the total area, there was still an amazing amount of detail involved. It took forever to draw and colour - and I'm pretty happy with the final result although the angle to the ground is a bit out of whack in a couple of the buildings...

Remarkably I got positive responses from a couple of readers (one a fellow Smasher) who reside in New York. Apparently this is most likely a view from the Empire State Building. The scale of the city is actually a bit beyond my Sydney based brain's capacity to fully take it all in. I've certainly seen New York in plenty of movies and TV shows before but not quite like this. New York looks awesome and I will get there one day.

One thing I like about cartooning is that it gives me ample opportunity to learn new things, and not just about drawing but about places, people and cultures.

When complexes collide...

2006-01-19T22:49:00.000+11:00

The Ledger Awards "have been organised to acknowledge excellence in Australian comic art and publishing" - which probably makes them like the Eisners, Aussie style. Anyhow, Magellan has scored a nomination in the Jury Selection for 'Webcomic or Comic Strip of the Year' (which means 5 venerable cartoonists get to look at it and poke it with a stick and decide if it is worthy of that distinction). Surprisingly, I've also scored a nomination in the 'Talent Deserving Wider Recognition' category - which is a voter poll (that is, popularity contest) - this nomination cites me for both Magellan and Loxie & Zoot.

While I am over the moon about both of these nods I am also quaking in my boots. Of the two assessment methods I don't know which one fill me with greater dread. The problem is that I suffer from the standard artist inferiority complex... as soon as my work is really out there in the public domain (by which I mean, someone says - "Hey, everyone check this out - is this great or not?") I want to run away and stick my head in the sand. On the other hand, I also suffer from the standard artist superiority complex... of course my stuff is great and should win! Twice!!! (mwahahahah!) When the two complexes collide - look out! At least it isn't too long until a decision is made - the Awards will announced on January 26.

Here's the list and voting form. Voting appears to be open all but closes January 23 (Aussie time, we're a day ahead)... so, should you feel the inclination to cast a vote my way, that would be hugely neat! :D

Surprised myself!

2006-01-15T18:34:00.000+11:00

Worked on the "cover" art for Chapter 4 of Magellan today. Technically it's a bit silly to talk about covers for a webcomic... just what are the covering anyway? I never used to do them but the publishing system used by Graphic Smash places a large "Featured today" image on the home page randomised from the titles updating on any given day - and the image is certainly large enough to qualify as a cover in my mind, so that's what it is to me and judging by most of the art produced by the other Smashers (as we call ourselves) it is to them too.

Quite honestly, I suck pretty badly at cover art, or at least I really did when I started to do them. The way I see it, a comic book cover has to encapsulate the story contained within, up the ante, draw the reader in and not give anything away all at the same time. This chapter is titled 'Bad Karma' - a reference to Karma Joffe, a key character, fairly secondary up until now but pretty much centre-stage for this story. I thought I had a good idea for the cover, but once I sketched it up it wasn't all that good, neither was the second one I scratched out. Anyway, long story short, inspiration combined with desperation and I came up with something that was a total blast to draw and (IMHO) looks pretty excellent (at any rate, I'm very happy with it).

Black and white art, followed by colour art...

Recreational activities...

2006-01-11T09:20:00.000+11:00

Part of a guest-art page that I drew for Al Schroeder's webcomic - Mindmistress.

Recreational Activities of the Smart & Brainy is a fairly light-hearted piece featuring Rochelle Kwan (a super-intelligent cadet at the Magellan Justice Academy) and the super-super intelligent superheroine known as Mindmistress. In it they get to relax and play a few games - brainy style!

Al had originally teamed the two up ages ago in this fantastic fan-art and I've been meaning to return the favour for ages.

The punch-line wasn't immediately evident when I first started to sketch this out... I wanted them to end up playing something that was "more fun than brainy" but I couldn't help but put a "brainy" twist on it. It was quick and easy to draw and lots o' fun.

BTW - Mindmistress is seen winning in 2 of 3 activities, I had to let Rochelle be seen to be winning in at least one thing!

Just Think

2006-01-10T10:00:00.000+11:00

The guest story for Shaenon Garrity's webcomic Narbonic is now online - Just Think. It was written by T. Campbell with art by myself and 3D art by Joe Zabel. Here's the first panel - a close up of Dave...

For some reason, it's one of my favorite pieces from the material I contributed. It's a bit daunting doing guest art at the best of times, but when it's for a webcomic with the degree of popularity and acclaim as Narbonic it sort of raises the stakes somewhat. I feel happy with what I contributed to the effort, although in retrospect maybe would have changed some of it. But then, don't I always feel that way about pretty much everything I do!? At any rate, I had fun drawing it and it is a bit of a superhero romp in the Narbonic universe.

From the outset the intention was to do a simple B&W art-style and that really helps to heighten the difference between the real world action which I drew and the surreal sensory deprived experience Helen Narbon has in the 'White Room' courtesy of Joe Zabel's sublime 3D art.

Reader response via the Narbonic forums seems generally positive - some people found Helen's crazier moments a little dark for their tastes although other seem to think T nailed her psychological state quite well.

Nothing like a deadline...

2006-01-09T06:26:00.000+11:00

I work best with a deadline. Sure I can plan ahead and pace myself and work to a schedule but I find I really am deadline driven, even if it is self-imposed. Without a deadline I tend to think that I can do something else instead (and frequently, that's what I do!). Deadlines can be especially useful when I really feel like I don't want to do what I have to do.

Case in point - a project which has been on hiatus since November. It reached a point last year where I just couldn't bring myself to do another page - largely in part cos I was overloaded with too many other things but also in part cos I had lost the spark for it. That's nothing new for me, happens all the time and long time readers will know that too as I've pulled the plug on it on several occasions in the past. This time I decided on an actual advertised hiatus as opposed to total abandonment. Yet as the self-imposed date for resumption approached I found myself prevaricating bigtime.

I've had the last two and half weeks free from work and done pretty much nothing towards getting that show back on the road. Certainly there has been other things needing my attention and there have been other reasons that I couldn't - but there was a whole heap of time when I could, but didn't, do work on it. But the deadline approacheth and the closer it got the more I looked for something else to work on... until it was so close I couldn't ignore it any further.

Largely I was putting it off because I had felt so 'ack' about it when I went on hiatus, that feeling was still in my brain... it's an easily conditioned thing my brain. But yesterday I sat down, drafted 4 pages and then drew, lettered and coloured 2 whole pages. Not only did I draw some of my best stuff ever it was fun to do as well.

So, although I might have hoped to have the whole story finished by now, I've at least cracked my 'ack-ness' about it and it seems like a smoother sail as the story and series heads towards the finish line.

Little Hero and guest art galore

2006-01-07T07:35:00.000+11:00

The concept of the 'Magellan ++' project is that I can hopefully find some other talented cartoonists who aren't too busy doing their own work to help me produce some extra Magellan stories - and there are a lot of extra stories in the Magellan universe! I do hope to pay them too - although since I'm not rolling in $$ it won't be very much. Anyway, I'll sort that out once I have something for someone to start work on - oh wait, I do! At least, half of something. Half of a Gifford Foss story in fact. Gifford is the little green goblin guy who is a cadet at the Magellan Academy - we saw him briefly as Nadine's partner in Chapter 2, but this story - Little Hero - is set in his home world.

The last day or so has been spent banging the story and script into shape and I'm very very happy with how it's turned out. I drew some character guides which I have passed on to the artist and I'm eager to post them here but I don't want to steal the artist's thunder. I imagine having a writer who is also a cartoon artist might be akin to having a patient who is also a doctor - they always want to interfere in the process, so I must resist the urge to get too ahead of myself. In fact I'm not going to say anything more on it for a while, besides I still have to write the other half of the script! Suffice to say, I'm excited and the artist is excited. To my surprise, I've actually managed to get a start on the Magellan ++ project!

The rest of my time the last day or so has been spent doing some guest art for a cartoonist in need (more on that next week), finalising the other guest art project I've been working on with writer T Campbell (more on that on Sunday), and also wrapping up the current Magellan storyline. I've been busy, but having fun fun FUN! The problem is that I have to return to my full-time day job next week so that's going to put a major spanner in the works. A shame, since I've been having a blast for the last two weeks, especially this last week with all the festivities out of the way. The good news though is that I'll be taking all of February 2006 off from work... and unlike most sensible people, won't be going on any long vacation but will probably be spending most of that time in front of my drawing board and computer. Can't wait!

BTW... a good read...

2006-01-05T10:25:00.000+11:00

While I'll mostly blab about stuff I'm doing, if I see something webcomicky (or otherwise) that I particularly like I might stick in a link to it...
Nothing Better by Tyler Page - the first two chapters plus current page are free, and then it shifts into subscription mode. Even if you're not the subscribing type (and sadly, it seems most aren't) at least check out the free chapters. Although at first it seemed like yet another American college comic it was still fresh and interesting. I liked the art and characterisation... yet more good stuff on Webcomicsnation.

Crap!

2006-01-05T10:05:00.000+11:00

Ha! No, I don't think the drawing is crap - it's just what Jo Millen is saying about her current predicament. Anyway, an excerpt from a page I've been working on. As you can see, the art is less detailed, larger areas of black and overall a little more simplified. That said, the whole page still took me several hours to complete. It was fun doing it too, something it wasn't back when I decided to put it on hiatus...

The heat is off!

2006-01-03T20:24:00.000+11:00

After melting thru a heatwave for the last few days (with a max of 44C/111F) the other day it's nice to have some cooler weather. It means I can actually sit at the drawing board and draw instead of sweating all over the page or use the computer without worrying that the circuits might fry. What I did find though was that I could sit in the bath, filled with cold water and still write... although I did drop my note book in the water! To give you an idea of how hot the day was, the pages of the pad dried in under 30 minutes.

Anyhoo, I've spent a much milder day working on a page of art and I'm happy with the style - it's B&W and much simpler. All that detailed art was straining my drawing hand, I think I was giving myself RSI in my thumb or something... another of the reasons why I decided to ease back on the production schedule and go on hiatus. I'll post an excerpt from the page tomorrow.

I was also working on the final details of a collaboration with my Graphic Smash editor - writer T Campbell. I can't recall if he's said anything about it in his blog, and since it's his baby I'm saying nothing more - except that I'm really excited about seeing this one online... more soon!

Thought my scanner had died today - turns out it was the transformer, so it only cost me $40 to replace instead of whatever scanners are going for these days... they're pretty cheap I know but I'd be loathe to throw out something that still works.

Finally... I neglected to mention a work related 'New Years Res' - and by work I mean my comics as much (if not more than) my day job - and that is: "To be excellent!" Should be interesting to see if I can stick to this one!

That was a big sleep! Feeling better now!

2006-01-02T08:38:00.000+11:00

So, a bit of time since my last entry! The move went well and for a brief moment the xmung caboose was running along nicely, until a wheel or two fell off and I realised how over the top busy I was. Hiatuses (hiatii?) were had all around, the stress factor has abated and I feel reasonably normal again.

I do want to continue with this blog (I got it, might as well use it!). What's more I want it to be a record (in brief not in detail) of anything particular that I might be working on at any given time, and updated at least once a week (haha!).

Currently:
Magellan

working to finish of the current chapter (#3 - Daze). Looks like it will go to 42 pages in total, a few more than I anticipated - but required to ensure I don't rush the ending. It's gonna be a shocker - maybe, not quite what everyone thinks either...
working on the next chapter (#4 - Fractures) - the story is plotted and the first 12 pages written... you'd think I'd have more of it done at this stage given that it's going to kick off in a few weeks!
"Magellan ++" is the new working title for my side-project in Magellan with short stories (up to 30 pages) spotlighting the various characters and history of this vast universe. Currently have numerous plot outlines but no scripts, which I'm really going to need soon if I want other people to be drawing them.
Site update - I've been totally slack in updating things like the Cast and Magellan History section of the site. Am slowly trying to rectify this. I have more accomplished offline awaiting an upload.

The old switcheroo

2005-08-31T15:33:00.000+10:00

So after what I said yesterday about trying to keep things on track vis a vis the various webcartoon projects, I got home and did an hour or so of packing and cleaning and then didn't really have it in me to do any artwork.

However this morning it was straight into colouring the next update of Magellan. The art was completed last Sunday... should be able to finish the colour this evening after work... however, the cupboards in the kitchen and bathroom, now divested of their contents, demand some cleaning out first! I so want to be moved already! Only 9 sleeps to go...

Only 10 more sleeps!

2005-08-30T14:09:00.000+10:00

There's a lot going on at the moment, so a rather silly time to attempt a blog - but, hey, what's life without a few extra challenges?

Currently, I'm in the process of moving - packing, cleaning, packing, cleaning - with the big move scheduled for Friday week. It's been 8 years since my last move and I've accumulated a whole heap of stuff in the intervening years, so it's going to be a BIG move. Hopefully it will be the last move I make for the next 10 or so years - some people seem to move every 18 months or so but I need to be a lot more settled than that.

There are a number of webcartooning projects which I have on the boil - primarily Magellan my super-hero comic) - however production on all is about to grind to a halt whilst I deal with the move. It shouldn't cause more than a two week hiatus.

At the moment, I'm just going to use this blog to blather on about that and other cartooning projects, and maybe anything else that happens to intersect with my daily plod through life... although I don't expect to post daily. Essentially this is a test post but I wanted to say a bit more than 'Test 123'!