Comic 20060802

In we go!. QT is getting a little testy and Mable is getting a little flakey. This is only half of the page that is to be posted here. I had a dreadful illness with a non-creative recovery time. I've only been able to get back into things the last couple of days. When I get the other half of the page done I'll thumbnail and change the archive page.

Comic 20060527

Grandmother's House One run later to Granny Jenkin's house. I left this oe a little rough. I was going to shade it a bit, but I was really concentrating on how much dialog I could squeeze into the thing without it being prose.

A little bit of forshadowing. We will meet Dr. Pef eventually and that will be when we do a little background on Marla. For a somebody starting as a second tier character she has a pretty interesing arc . I think the next one out of the batch of scans is a big Secret Garden page.

Comic 20060526

Not Free. Moving right along. Now Marla is trapped by LLXL. I'd like to mention again that Marla started out only as a gag-a-day foil for Roland in Biology. but the more I set up or tried to write gags for them the more I though about what I could do with her in the story. She has a more solo comics over the stretch of the summer. Then one plotted with Mary. I may put some of those at Comic Space depending on how much room I have for things.

The next couple of comics I'm planning on are a continuation in Marla's plot and the Secret Garden story. Time will tell.

Comic 20060801

Bad Bellies are Baaaad!. Fianlly another page that has been hanging over me for a while is done. QT is pciking up a little, Mabel is a little flakey and Roland looks like a tasty treat. It took a while to piece this together. There are a couple spans from frame to frame which are weaker than usual. I had to rewrite some bad dialog and what I ended up with in the space I had wasn't much better. I think the next page, at least the prescan stuff, is pretty cool.

As a side note. My linux distribution does not have drivers for my offbrand scanner So I have to reboot to windows to scan stuff, Shitty Windows is shitty.

ComicSpace 20060423

Top Hat Is someplace a little different. With trying to keep the archive calendar in time with the comic calendar I'm always trying to squeeze things in. I've had a account at Comic Space fo a little bit and decided to use the gallery feature there to place little side stories. This episode is one of those and so far I like the idea. I still need to work out a few linking things back and forth to the Comic Space comic, but overall this is how in will be. THe www.cutethulhu site will hold the base structure of the comic while the Comic Space gallery will hold extra stuff. javascript:void(0)

Comic 20060418

Mabel Training DId this in sort of another way, I like the look of the artifact black when I processed the line art. More of a old (40 years) printed comic book style. I didn't care for the filled background .. but I was running out of time, as always.

This comic marks a transition from using WindowsXP to Ubuntu. Honestly, all the software I used is Windows builds of open source that were mostly developed by the Linux community anyways, Verb tense me Things will be going a little more slowly, I can't use my scanner in Linux .. and I have to do some complicated things to get my tablet installled completely. SO I have to jump back and forth from WindowsXP to scan.

Comic 20060525

Free. The introduction of another recurring character. At least for this Marla story line. Another colored pencil with a digital color background. Put to the computer by camera, so the quality wasn't great to start with.

Comic 20060917

Wet Spot. This was one of my ideas for Keenlace .. site to be announced .., but obviously it was a little too .. naughty for that. So I got a free comic out of it.

So here is Shub in her day to habits. The alternate title for this was 'If you meet a strange woman and she has a iron bar bolted to her headboard you are in for a very good time or a very bad time'

Comic 20060524

Long Walk Home. A pretty crappy looking comic today and again i'm not happy with the dialog. I have a good bit more with this story line. Only a couple pages more and I'm freed up with Marla for the coming school year. There are more in this story line, but only a few more that /have/ to be posted so more current comics make some sort of sense.

What Goes on?

Seeing that I haven't posted a comic in chronological order in months I should explain how things work around here. Two factors determine what I work on and when I work on it. The first is the simple fact that I do not have much time to devote to the comic. More accurately, I do not have much time to devote to polishing the final product. I've plenty of script written and tons of thumbnail drafts put together. Mostly because I work them all out in a composition book or a sketch book. These I can take with me wherever I go. Peaceful, alert time at the computer is the main limitation.

Secondly, I am trying to keep the story within the confines of the dating system at comic genesis. Keeping the comic 'dates' the same as the dates /in/ the comic. This had me doing a lot of jumping around trying to a get a fresh comic up. Right now I've 4 story lines rolling around at different times that I'm back posting. While I'm doing that I'm trying to get the stories that are supposed to happening /now/ completed.

Anyway I'm having fun trying to piece things together from different directions. Hopefully it is an interesting read for anybody trying to figure out what is going on.

Comic 20060823

Suicide Watch Iv It is dramatic coloring. sort of. I have one more sort of sketch for this and the Suicide Watch is done. That will leave then 3 subplots to resolve and a few more to start. I do like the read in this. I finally figured out the simple way to get that sort of texture. I will be overusing it a good bit now. If I was doing this over I would show more of the blade coming down. Maybe re-arranging the whole page. It is weak in some areas.

Comic 20060822

Suicide Watch III. Things are looking different for our young couple. With all the different things I fiddle around with making pages I think this particular technique works best. It looks as good as anything and is fairly quick to get done. There is one more Suicide Watch and a epilouge. I'm trying to wrap up some of these half stories before moving on with more things.

Comic 20060523

Last bus ride. Another Marla Comic. I set myself up so I have to finish a great many of these and a few from another story arc before I can post many 'current' pages.

Comic 20060522

Final Grades. Yes, Cutethulhu has rocketed to the top of the Biology class. This comic and several others are ink and colored pencil with digital color added underneath. This particular one did come out very well. It was done in a hardbound sketch book and I couldn't get it on the scanner. So, I took a digital picture instead. This would have worked out fine if I had taken the time in the initial processing to correct a few simple things. It is readable and the art isn't so horrible that there is confusion, er no more confusion than usual.

There are three of four more pages in this particular story line done this way. I will do a better job getting the others posted.

Comic 20060511

Marla Makes a grab. Really, She is shy and retiring with everybody except for Roland. I wonder why that is?

Comic 20060311

Marla Jenkins on a bus. So this is a character make-up .. In her introduction she did something a little out of character for what I developed for her later. But, teenagers do lots of OOC and stupid things. So here she is a little mortified at what went on that day.