BAR!

Here're some pics of the bar...



Frame work:

More bar skeleton:

Finished top and sides:

Thanks to Ben, Steveo, Sam, Tom, Scott, JQ and Veronica for your help. And to my dad for letting me use his power tools, without which this would have sucked a whole lot more than it did. More pics to come.

Yeah...But Is It Marketable?

Ugh...somehow this post just got deleted. Let's try again, shall we?

So, I just purchased something pretty cool. Eilean Buntata by Will Ellwood is a short story that Will is selling on his blog site. He's posted the first 400 words on the site and you can get the other ~3500 by making a donation of $5 or more (that's approx. 3 pounds sterling, which is how you have to enter it, yeah, he's a Brit, don't hold it against him). The story itself is great, kind of a mix between Robinson Crusoe and Lost and X-Files and...uh, something with potatoes. Yeah, that oughta wet your appetites. The writing has an old feel to it....using context clues, Wikipedia tells me it takes place sometime between 1837 and 1901, which really comes through. Check it out, and toss the guy some money, it's tough being a writer.

This has also gotten me thinking about the ways to market my own writing. I think a system like this could be good for serialized stories and other such projects. I've got my own on the backburner right now and maybe I can get something like Will's approach working for me. I've had worse ideas.

In other news I've got a bar almost complete...I should post pictures...just as soon as I figure out how.

Conventional Knowledge

Hey all,

Here's where I want to go in 2010:

PAX East - Penny Arcade's Game Expo...I've watched from afar every year as this thing kicked ass over there on the west coast. Well now it's coming to Boston at the end of March. Be there biotches.

C2E2 - Chicago, the Windy City. This thing is in mid-April and looks like a lot of fun. It's comics and entertainment and stuffs. Good hold over until...

NYCC 2010 - We have to wait until friggin October for this thing. Hopefully it'll be worth it. I had a great time last year and hope to again in Oct. Those crazy Romitas are on Guest of Honor duty.

We'll see if I actually make it to all/any of these, but that's what I'm shooting for in 2010. If you're interested in going to any of them/meeting up there, let me know.

Online Comix Classes

Hey, it's my daily, bore-you-with-stuff-that-I-want-to-put-reminders-to-myself-in-as-many-places-as-possible-capade. Because the suffix -capade makes that ridiculous sentence ok.

A couple things from Bleeding Cool (where they really need a better system for finding articles that are part of a series):

Michigan State University’s History Of The Modern Comic Book By Professor Ethan Watrell - This link is for the first post and you can look up any others by searching 'Michigan' on the site. This is just a trimmed down version of the class that Prof. Watrell is actually teaching at MSU. It's fallen behind a bit because he's been sick of late, but more should be coming in the future. Good history lesson on comics. You can also visit the official class site where he posts podcasts of the class, PDFs of his class slides and the kids blog about the single floppies that they have to pick up and read on a weekly basis. Such a cool class.

How To Write Comics And Graphic Novels by Dennis O’Neil - Again, this is a link to the first in a series and you have to do a little searching to find the rest, but these are chock full of good tips on how to write comics from someone who's been in the industry a while.

I've been following both of these since they started and they've sparked some really interesting ideas for me, which I should be able to do a little fleshing out on in the near future.

Kbye.

News Blast: Top News of the Day...For Me Anyway

Learned about the existence of Them Crooked Vultures. Dave Grohl, Josh Homme and John Paul Jones, nuff said.

These fucking robots are going to kill us. Thanks a lot Switzerland, now we know why you were neutral during the human wars.

Geocities is shutting down today. XKCD has a tribute.

Yanks made it back to the World Series, but if you care at all you probably already know that.

Scott sent me this one today...Society made them that way. Killers and why they kill. It's your fault, and your fault, and especially YOUR fault.

More Comics Theoretical Stuff That YOU Don't Care About

Warren Ellis posted about this today and I think it's fucking rad: http://www.flickr.com/photos/warrenellis/4043479776/sizes/o/.

Basically its a cheat sheet that came out something like forever ago on the 22 panel formats that always work when illustrating a comic. It's fascinating to look at these and say to yourself, "Yep...they sure do." Good to know as someone who wants to write. I'm sure they are even more helpful for artists and editors.

Hey, does anyone want to do a magazine with me? Could really be about anything, but I think it would be cool to try MagCloud out. Basically you send this company PDFs that you want in a mag and they do all the distribution for you....You just set your own markup per issue and sell away. I think we'd need an artist, a photographer and someone to handle the PR at the very least. I've got some people in mind, but I don't know what their schedules are like. I'd love to be able to put something out in the next year or so. As always, anyone interested, give me a shout.

EDIT TO ADD (Because I think this should be part of this discussion as well): InPrint is another one of these DIY publishing companies. Basically the artists send in digital copies of their art and people can purchase them on a single print basis. No more doing expensive ass print runs only to not sell them all and end up in debt. Take a little bit of the starving out of the artist.

B+W v. Color: The Malice over Palettes

My take on why B+W comics are not more popular, basically boils down to, I think B+W is often used as a financial, rather than artistic decision, and that causes a whole bunch of other stuff. Original thread at http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=7057

Here's what I think. People will buy anything that is of high enough quality and has good enough advertisement and has little enough competition that it isn't drowned out.

There has been very good B+W work, but it is often drowned out in the market by so-so comics that are only in B+W because a big publisher wouldn't pick them up and self publishing is much cheaper in B+W. The color in comics often signals quality because it was worth shelling out the extra cash to print in color. Color basically means someone thought these comics would sell and B+W comics seem often a financial decision rather than an artistic one.

Really if a big comics writer, such as our curator here, wrote in B+W, I doubt sales on that book would be low. That is because Warren Ellis has no competition in his niche, he's fucking Warren Ellis. You see a book by him, you will buy it. You see a B+W book by Joe Shmoe 1 vs. a color book by Joe Shmoe 2 you're probably more inclined to buy color because hey, more production value often means better product. Don't get me wrong...a lot of times it doesn't, we all know there's a lot of crap with high production costs, but c'mon, there's a lot more crap with low production costs.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying this goes for everyone, just that it seems to me to be the general consensus.

Hey You, Get Off of McCloud

I've been doing a little reading about Scott McCloud's ideas re: the future of comics and have come to the conclusion that he's a pretty smart guy. His take on the medium as a whole has made me think a lot about the differences between print and digital and the myriad of new directions that the medium can take...

I've thought for some time that the possibilities in traditional comics themselves have barely been touched, let alone the artistic freedom you get from a completely digital canvas.

Check out McCloud's infinite canvas ideas here: http://scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/canvas/index.html, and this example he lists in the article is pretty eye opening.

I found some other great examples of tricks that digital comickery can pull where print wouldn't get away with it: here and here. The first one being a bit mind blowing (I originally got it off of a Pia Guerra post at Whitechapel, the Warren Ellis run message board) the second just good use of disestablishing the norms when it comes to comics (though a bunch of these conventions have been used in comic-TV or comic-movie conversion, Watchmen did one just before the movie came out).

Anyway, I wish I could draw because I have a couple of ideas swirling, but alas, I think I'm going to need to find an art-eest. All interested parties make yourselves known.