Comic 20060821

Suicide Watch II. The next couple of comics were going to be on one big page and they may be that way. Either way it might be a little time until it is all done up. I have all the line work for the following two pages scanned in and smoothed out. but it is coming up to the point I have to start working on the regular update comic for Sunday.

Comic 20060728

1/4 Fight I. This is about a quarter of the entire episode for this update. The actual fight will prolly take two more full pages, then two pages of aftermath then two pages to resolve the Garden .. cause I updated myself into a corner a little. I needed to get something up and this is what I had ready enough to finish. The whole picture was a little too big to work on at once on my machine so I split it into parts. The final layout for the page will be different too.

You see Q2 participating a bit in things, even if it is just a supporting (literally) role. By the end of this little series of things she will be in the thick of events and out of her shell a bit.

edit

Finally finished (sort of) the second half of this page. I almost have all of the next page done too. Again I had to just stop fiddling and post. It is good enough to tell what is happening to everybody.

Comic 20060827

School Tomorrow. The bulk of my children are going to school tomorrow So this very special cutethulhu goes out to all the kids who are getting out of the house. Once I get back to backfilling the summer we will see more of Sarah's home life, such as it is.

Comic 20060820

Suicide Watch. This entry is a sort of preview to todays comic. The things you have time to think about when waiting for tech support.

Used the Staedtler pigment liners on this for inking and drew an entirely seperate background. It is also in black and white. they will all be that way until I can get the line art better. I didn't have much of a chance to fool around with this one. I had some things come up during the week and had to rush through from thumbnail to posting. I was also going to save it a little smaller, but I couldn't read the buttons on the phone jack it the last part, where she keeps dropping the calls cause they bore her.

I really have a depressing and horrific one planed for a midweek update. But, I don't know if I will be able to go through with it or not. Things have been fairly light, but I've been feeling around trying to find a good tone for things and I think it will start getting a little more gritty and serious.

note: Seems I forgot to upload the actual comic last night. It is still Sunday, right ?

Black and White

I'm going to be doing the comic in monochrome for a while. I want to work on the lines and the shading and work with negative space. Which is not, as I thought previously, space with an evil goatee. It is difficult to focus on one part of a style, such as it is, at a time. In the long run coloring over bad lines is much harder than coloring over good lines, so I want to get those good lines consistant then in athe future I can go back and color stuff.

I think if I have time today I'll tweak the site layout to black and white also. Even the dull greens of the layout will put a bad light on colorless or one color episodes.

Suicide Hotline

I have sort of scripted a few panals focusing on Shub and a suicide hotline. This got thrown together while I was thinking that through. I'm not going to consider this as an official strip just because I will reuse some of it in a real official strip.

I do think I've heard this joke before. The concept is definately not original with me but it does mirror closely my recent calls to my DSL service. I cut a large portion of the text out. My call included recordings of how I may be able to solve my own connection problems.

I submitted this to Webcomic Battle. Go me.

Webcomic Battle 06

Couldn't resist adding another comic to Webcomic Battle This one is Deadline is the august 13 update. It is getting trounced heavily.

A little bored and poking around .. I usually like to visit around the comics chance puts my comics against. It turns out mine is "pretty damn awful". The tear of shame hangs from my nose.

Comic 20060813

Deadly Deadline. Dip pen lineart to inkscape for smoothing. Then to the GIMP to color and text and general mayhem.

I was really looking for a stand alone gag, and this is fairly close to one, but it still fits in with the ongoing Garden of Serenity arc. Er, ongoing in that I'm still working on it. As of a week or so 'comic time' it has resolved. In real time I still have half of it to finish and retro-post. You can see here that Cutethulhu and Roland make it out of that arc .. and it seems they are working on a pool. Could swimwear be close behind?

This is all part of my poor attempt to keep 'comic time' and 'real time' as close together as I can. It would help if I remembered to do holiday themed strips. It is artificial and in many ways stupid, but since the image files and comic pages operate on the update date it compells me to keep events bracketed by that. So when my kids go back to school, the Cutethulhu group will go back to school.

Comic 20060727

Uncle Joe is moving kind of slow .. at the junction. So it isn't actually Q2's Uncle Joe, if there really is one. Action begins with poor backgrounds and wild shading. The three headshots are shaded in very much the same way I remember my mother coloring in coloring books when I was small. She'd outline the area with the color then color inside much more lightly. it is heritage coloring.

I had to stab a little bit of a funny in there, cause everything else that goes on for the next 18+ frames is deadly serious action stuff.

Not much more to say other than the next one in this series might take a longer than the last couple to get out. It won't be because I'm spending special time crafting and above average piece of art. It will be because I have to make money by picking things up and carrying them around and maybe a little of stringing dangerous electrical wiring through crawlspaces.

Comic 20060808

Inspiration strikes Three different ways. I had a fair idea for a little gag and was aching to try the new dip pens some more so I drew it up real quick. While doing the lettering I got three different variants and each was equaly mediocre so I used them all to make one extra average strip.

I may tighten this up and color it in the future. I may not. It is getting late so I'll thumbnail this and link up all the way from the main page tomorrow.

Comic 20060726

The shortest distance. I've decided I just need to hammer these out. Honestly working on one for 3 hours vs working on one for 5 hours doesn't produce much noticable inprovement to my eye.

I did use a different techinique for this one. I printed out the line work and colored it with pencils and scanned that in and layered it under the original lines, then put a semi-transparent layer of quick digital coloring between the two. It looks alright and was relatively quick. The only problem was synching up the size and tilt between the two scans. I don't think I ever did get it spot on, but I know more what I need to do to do better next time.

I also bought a set of 'cartooning' dip pens. They are pretty fun so far and really do produce a different set of lines. I'm very keen on getting to use them some more. It might be the thing to get me to start working on character sketches for the characters page

Comic 20060806

Pinatas are full of tasty treats. Drawn by Alex Whitington. This is one of the more interesting comics for me for several reasons. The first, chronologically, is the fact that me and my wife have a running gag about roadkill. There are lots of dead things laying along the roads in my rural county; deer, groundhogs, racoons, rabbits, skunks, opossum, cats, dogs, squirrels . If it is a critter of some kind than it has found its way under a wheel. Then they start to swell with gas and maggots until they pop. The bigger they get the more 'filled with confetti' they become, until they explode smelly fun all around themselves. Then it isn't long until just bone and hair are left. It is just like science. Anyway, one of these running roadkill conversations got turned into the Pinata gag. Art does follow life.

The other very cool(er) thing is that I didn't draw this comic at all. I was sort of planning on doing it sometime as a non-big-plot comic and had it roughed out fairly well when I was contacted by Alex with a sample illustration that got me very excited. So I gave him my beloved dead animal script and he sent me back this great comic.

Comic 20060725

We are going to need a bigger map. This one isn't as finished as I would have liked, I really ran out of time in the midst of a big heat wave. Sweltering in sweat is not good for concentration. I've been reminded for the past week of a Blue Oyster cult song "Hot Rails to Hell"

Riding the underground
Swimming in sweat
A rumble above and below
Hey cop dont you know?
The heats on alright
The hot summer day didnt quit for the night

1277 express to heaven
Speeding along like dynamite
1277 express to heaven
Rumbles the steel like a dogfight
You caught me in its spell
Trying to leave but you know darn well
The heat from below can burn your eyes out

Blackened out eyes
Scratched on the wall
Stoned out looks from the crowd
The king will not know
On the wall it was said
The flash of his cards was sprayed with red

1277 express to heaven
Speeding along like dynamite
1277 express to heaven
Rumbles the steel like a dogfight
You caught me in its spell
Trying to leave but you know darn well
The heat from below can burn your eyes out

I don't pretend to know what the deeper meaning of the song, if any, may be. I just know that it invokes hot. When I'm really broiling it is the first semi-random thing to pop into my head.

This and the following two comics drawn by me will be postdated for the last week in July fitting in before the naughty Jack Hammer comic. Then there will be one more week of something similar postdated for the first week of August. I don't know how much time it will take me to put them all together or if they will fit like I want.