Plural of Anecdotes

Latest page up on Stone Above:

At this point, I'm not sure if I should be putting up some sort of "hide your children" rating. On the one hand, I've got violence and *gasp* nudity! On the other hand, well, "Beware! This comic has full frontal nudity and people being ripped apart like a bucket of fried chicken!" is kind of misguiding. "Animals dying like animals" is somehow not the same thing, even if the beasties are people themselves.

I'm still fighting with how the birds look. I know I want them to contrast as very alien, in this story, but for various reasons I want that to be somewhat stylistic and open to modification. It's easier in the flashback, where I can use effect I won't apply in standard mode, but still...they should look almost like paper cutouts here, I think, but I've put in way too many details. If/when I redo these pages, I think I may just *make* paper cutouts, and skip the details. This is supposed to be a very subjective story. I don't think I realized that when I started, certainly not soon enough to change my art. But hey! That's what practice is for.

In other news, this page took for-frickin-ever to do in Photoshop. So yeah, the birds gotta change.

New comic up over at Anecdata (www.anecdata.smackjeeves.com).

The moose is, as noted, filling in for a deer head.

The deer head was a souvenir of my husband's, from a hunting trip that occurred before I knew him (he still hunts, but we haven't kept any more mementos. Just snausage.). It hung on the living room wall, gazing at the world with taxidermied and somewhat crooked eyes. Eyes hidden as behind a pall, because they were covered with spider webs, because I am the person who fights entropy in this household, and I wasn't touching that creepy thing. I don't mind trophies, but this head was malevolently stupid.

My husband , of course, did not see my point. The deer was dead, and so was definitionally harmless. Nothing I could say would sway him.

Until the night when, all unprovoked, the thing fell on me, all ten points of it, as part of a chain reaction that required emergency redecorating and bandages.

Deer Head lives in the storage shed now, and I am a happier bug. But this Van Gogh's been lookin' at me....

Top panel: These three pages have made me very happy. So sad I have to start making an actual story happen. Oh, well, the wordless pages and layout fun were nice while they lasted.

Also: Hi, Mehrn! I need to start putting names to my characters actually in the story. It's just that it feels incredibly forced, and takes up room, and argh. Names will be revealed eventually! I swear!

I am working on it.

Note that she grabs the bag with the food in it. These are ravenous little creatures, and leaving food behind Does Not Happen.

Last panel: Yes, Chren was the runt.Osea have those. It hasn't affected his current size, and none of the younger ones see him as having any problems. But Mehrn's from,essentially, the same litter, so she'll always think of him as the runt, the same way an older sibling might think of their little sister as "the baby" even though she's six feet tall and 35 years old. Family.

Also: New Old way of doing the text here. Opinions?

Another story started. This time, I'm adding in annotations as I go. Because I like annotations.

Yes, this story is pretty much about a couple groups of Osea, and the things that live with them. I thought about making the whole thing a wordless short.It would have been easy and worked well, I think, and I may use them for it later. But I tend to like stories that just muck about in the dirt and tangle of a world, so this happened, instead.

Page 1:

I toyed with putting a title in that long top panel, but decided against it. I like the look of it as a skyscape. Maybe I'll post up a page with a title-treatment later. What do you think?

That's supposed to be a net bag, by the way. Osea don't wear much in the way of clothes, because: fur, but they do use belts and bags and such to carry things. It's always good for little climbing creatures to have their hands free.

The climber in these two pages is Chren. It's said on a sharp exhalation, all one sound. Their language has a lot of sounds that happen at the front of the mouth. I am overthinking this.

Page 2:
Aaah! Bird attack!

It may interest some to know that this entire story did *not* occur solely because I hate seagulls. Still, I do hate and loathe the nasty flying rats, and would like to take this time to thank them for providing inspiration for this scene.

And height looks bigger when you're falling it. It's worth noting that Chren had probably climbed halfway down the cliff before getting mobbed. It didn't occur to him that he would get mobbed; Chren's bright, but not thoughtful.

Not happy about the splash. Needs something. Advice?

ETA: The ad bar in the comments page has focused on the word "nest", it seems. So I am advertising a bird's nest soup supplier.

I cannot state enough that I DO NOT endorse this product, or any other spit-based cuisine. Indeed, any cuising based on glandular secretions is to be approached with caution, and yes I include dairy in this, given how many people are lactose intolerant.

But especially bird spit nests.

This is about this journal comic:

http://www.webcomicsnation.com/carapace/anecdata/series.php

which may require a bit of explanation.

I make dolls, of various sorts. For a particular craft fair, I made sock dolls. Sock dolls, are, naturally, white, or other-sock-colored, but the cheapest socks to use are white.

And sock white is a boring color, and doesn't look good with any fabric I had for clothing, and also white is boring. And I was painting on the faces anyway. So I painted the rest of them, too. It looked pretty cool.

For the record, the colors I painted them were gold, copper, garnet brown, and sand. I've got another batch that're going to be in greens and blues. I will probably not do red, because red overwhelms other colors.

Anyway. Those were the colors I went with. Glittery, and on the brown/neutral side of things.

And while I was away, my Lovely Assistant had the conversation related in the comic.

The whole thing just boggles me, because: (a) how are non-white dolls racist? Are white people so insecure that seeing any other color on a doll frightens and confuses them, and I must be sensitive to that? Is it racist to acknowledge that other skin tones exist? Was it the metallic-colored paint combined with the stylized facial features (though, really, these are *sock dolls*. They have no fingers, thumbs, or ears. A person might expect they'll be a bit a cartoony.)? I don't get it...

Especially because, (b), how does my not being white make it all ok? Because non-whites can't be racist? Because non-whites are *allowed* to be racist? I...I'm so confused.

Also, (c) only a couple of white people had any such comment to make. The dolls were a big hit with the black and hispanic kids in town, and I am so making more, so I can sell them cheaper. I like seeing happy kids.

Accolades to any who can explain this weirdness for me.

Also! Anyone who can teach me to hyperlink, or point me towards a decent tutorial for such? Please do so in the comments. I think I'm the only person on the internet still linking with the actual URL.


*No, I'm not white. I'm what used to be known as a creole, before that came to be associated entirely with Louisiana, and is now commonly known as Heinz 57, or mongrel. Practically, it means I can spend a day in the sun without worrying over either sunblock or sunburn, and yet get seated at a Denny's without having to make a federal case.

Winding to the end of Staff. Next week will probably see either a little intermission tale, or the next story proper starting.

Either way, it'll be linked up at my main series page:

http://www.webcomicsnation.com/carapace/


And it should start right after the last page of this. So let me know if you can’t find it, hey?

It’s a common aphorism in any creative field that a person has to make X pages of dreck before they can start being any good. Hopefully, I’m now 12 pages closer to having some competent comics. Thanks to anyone who actually read it, and especial thanks to the people who actually commented. If I stink less next time, it is largely due to you.

For those who like commentary extras, or who’ve been waiting to comment until they know what the hell I was thinking,

Page 1:
I really love the little mini-panels of Kes figuring out how she’s going to get across. It was fun to make and is still fun to look at.

On paper, at any rate. It’s one of the things that suffers from online formatting.

Notice that I apparently had no idea what my pens were doing in the second talky panel.

Page 2:

Ooh, panel 3 got munged up.

“Ladder” is supposed to be an unsound effect, I thing I love in other comics. Not sure it worked, though.

Panel 8: This is probably going to be Kes’ character bio picture, when I get around to doing that stuff. Amused and slightly skeptical; that’s pretty much her.

Page 3:

Not much to say here, except that it turned out SO much better in the scan. Light shades of grey are loved by my computer, it seems.

Also, all the trees are the same kind, a sort of generic tree idea not found anywhere in this country. Only conscious manipulation results in these sort of monocultures, even without the instantaneous foresting.

Page 4:

This world exists in a debris belt. Very little starlight gets through, but there are a lot of satellite rocks reflecting sunlight at night (stone light?). In the day these rocks tend to look like…well, muck in the sky.

Also, I’m happy about the shadows on this page. Yay, something that came out vaguely like I wanted!

Page 5:

This page was massively modded on computer. The original had a very different final tier, which accomplished nothing. But I caught it before posting, and replaced it with what’s there now, which at least moves a little, So I think I’m learning something already, yay me.

I liked drawing rock veins way too much.

Page 6:

Even aside from the lack of any frelling dialogue, I’m happy about this page. I love drawing settings. And yet I get snappish about backgrounds. Eh.

Those are clay and wicker shelters around the base of the trees. They keep out a certain kind of burrowing pest that would otherwise have eaten all the dead trees years ago.


The kappa-thing isn’t paying Kes in money; this part of the world still works on barters. But there are such things as trade agreements, and some groups have tokens that symbolize that. Kes has a long string of these IOUs. They’re an economic evolutionary step, and much easier to carry than chickens.

Page 7:

I was trying to make these next few pages darker, because it’s supposed to be coming down sunset. Not sure if that worked.

The little raccoon-things are called Osea, as a species. They’re native to this continent, and are great fun to draw. Next story is probably going to be about them, at least in part.

Page 8:

I could not get the gloopy shape shifting stuff as gloopy as I wanted. I would really like some tips for drawing tarry gloop.

Page 9 and 10:

I don’t know what you’re talking about. There are no pages 9 and 10. Now over on page 11...

Oh, fine.

I hate these pages with a passion. I accept that I brought it on myself, but still.

These two pages were, originally, sort of the point of the story; a way of explaining something that will be important again later, without just whipping out the Encyclopedia Fictitia. But by the time the whole story was done, they didn’t really fit. It had shifted focus to being something simpler, and I couldn’t figure out how to make the necessary information still fit in. So things got messy.

And then I picked a weird font, and things got really messy, and I’m not even sure if the info I left in is legible at all.

Damn.

Also, I tried to give myself an alternate layout, and thereby made my hated dialogue ballooning even more time consuming. So, I swear vengeance on myself in the form of not being allowed to have nonstandard layouts for at least another ten pages.

And then WCN caught my hate, and refused to accept the jpgs of these pages, so I barely updated them on time.

A couple of notes about them, nonetheless.

2nd to last panel, page 9: Most things people think to ask for, when they're talking off the top of their heads, are pretty tangible. "I'd kill for a plate of barbecue" kind of stuff. Monitor the average person's conversation for a week, and the number of times they pray to find their keys will far outnumber the times they pray for world peace. Hence, a sword and a doll.


I like the first part of page 9, actually. Drawing Kes getting her face eaten by goop may have been the most fun I had in these pages.

Flashback/exposition time. Yes, that's a more-or-less moon in the landscape. And the people below are ones who don't exist anymore. The goops have been around for a long, long time.

Final panel of page 9/first panel of page 10:
That guy with the marks on his eyes is dead. And moving. Yes, the goops can do a sort of reanimate dead, though they don't really understand the concept. The results tend to be a bit of a well-meaning monkey's paw, which is possibly more upsetting than the other kind.


Page 10, panel 2
And then people figure out they really can get what they want, and it all gets abstract.
Ever try to draw abstract? Without relying on anything way too culture-specific? Yeah. Pain in the guts.
Anyway: good weather, love, and what's supposed to be the infinity symbol but with the shape of the word balloon came out looking like a cutesy skull. Seriously. I could put a bow on that thing and sell it at Hot Topic.

Also on this page: Flying Ships! I love the flying ships.
Kes is from a long, long way away, and prone to getting homesick. She doesn't mean it, though.

If I ever tweak this story, these pages will be radically altered, in the form of being replaced entirely.
Meantime, I’d be very interested to hear what people think is happening in these two pages.



Page 11:

Back to things that work.

This may be the most successful page in the whole story, artwise. I base this on showing it word free to two people who hadn’t seen the rest of the story, and were still able to tell me what was happening. So yay again.

But again, I’m not sure if the lighting I was going for worked. It’s supposed to be full sunset, at this point, and while that’s the sort of thing that is certainly easier to convey in color, it’s not impossible to show in grey. I point to things like Otter Soldiers, which has managed to portray winter light, city twilight, bright garish mall lighting and even cold-night atmosphere all in grey.

I am not that good, and am totally open to advice on the subject.

Page 12:

I love that long panel.

The seal-headed thing is from a species closely related to Kes’, in a wolf/coyote sort of closeness. Or, since Kes is a hybrid offspring herself, a wolf/dog way, I guess. He’s foreign here too. Eventually we’ll see where they both come from.

Storyboarding backstory: One of the things that seems most appealing about visual fiction-verses is the permanency of props. If a character has a distinguishing weapon/coat/pair of boots, it will always be with them, through decades and disasters. Such props rarely even need repair. That is of course nonsense; even a really good sword is prone to getting lost, battered and broken, and things like boots and walking sticks are lucky to last ten years. So this whole thing basically started as a way of explaining why, in fact, one of my characters has such a perma-prop.


That’s all for this one! Thanks to everyone who sent me comments, and to those who didn’t… say something, would you? If only to tell me how to do a journal cut. You’re creeping me out.