Sobriety is such a problem

As you may know, I have promised the awesome Briana for Rune Master a piece of fan art for her coming hiatus. It's the least I could do after she, y'know, built my new PHP site!

I vowed to make an informed piece of fan art, so it was archive conquering time! She's another mad producer, which means I had 665 strips to get through to formulate and produce my art... by August 1. For those of you paying attention, August 1 is in two and a half hours. IT TOOK A WHILE TO GET THROUGH THE ARCHIVES, OK!

Going though, I thought I had a good idea of what to do for her. For the first 2/3 of the story the main character, Diyero, is a drunken fool. All my ideas went after the easy funny. (He casts magic with runes... is there a rune combo that makes a glass of booze keep refilling itself?) Then, today, I went in to finish the archives.

*insert record scratch here*

He quit drinking! It's a redemption arc! Hey, good for him, BAD FOR MY IDEAS! This is why I wanted to have read everything, though - because RM is such an epic that it could go in any direction.

Now I have to figure out a new direction. Typical character portrait? A more clever gag? What if I draw her characters in *my* style, such as the pic above? Too self-absorbed? I have until midnight to get this done. I joked with Briana that it might take me until midnight Hawaii time to get it done... and boy, that might be right.

More final fantasizing

Continuing the sketches of my kids as Final Fantasy VII characters, I up the ante with this jolly twofer. Cait Sith is a cat that rides atop a big, white, cuddly puppet beast. Well, hey, Bud has a big, white and cuddly father...

I'll confess: This sketch cracks me up something fierce. I keep giggling like a moron.

How not to kill a character

Or should that be how to not kill a character?

I was going to have fun with Tiffany's choking and subsequent passing out. She goes going to collapse with a *thud* and... nothing. Life would go on, and Tiffany just wouldn't be there. Is she OK? Is she DEAD? Oh no! She'd be gone for the rest of the story! I would have gotten such a kick out of it... if only I hadn't screwed it up.

Acting like a newspaper comic guy, I treat my dailies and Sundays as operate entities - just like they do in the biz! Of course, this can come back to bite me, as the Sunday strip following Tiff's "death" featured... Tiffany! Oops.

To make matters worse, Monday's strip featured Jacob getting benched for Quincy. Of course, as a smart commenter point out, Jacob couldn't be benched unless Tiffany was OK. D'oh! We all knew she'd be fine, but that was poor plotting on my part. I couldn't even toy with the readers correctly!

Making good on my threats.

I have been a vocal support of Alone in a Crowd's Hopetail agenda for a while. (Such as with this strip.) So last night, after wrecking a few trains in my interview, I hung around the chatroom with AIaC's Tom (and Joshua of Got the Point?) and grabbed for a bit. Somewhere along the line I made a joke about putting my hair up in Hopetails while looking as gross and ugly as possible. (Rum was involved.) Well, since I've been here struggling to come up with a blog topic for today, and since Tom happened to retweet his Hopetails strip at such a moment, I decided to go through it - dignity be damned!



You know what? It's a surprisingly difficult look to pull off. At least for a dude who is unpracticed in the ways of hair artistry. My Hopetails kept sliding down my head, so THIS IS THE BEST YOU GET, TOM! My hair is now full of tangles too. Conclusion: Hopetails are dangerous in the wrong hands.

Public speaking

For those interested, this is a far-too-late reminder that I have interview with Webcomic Reviews and Interviews tonight at 8pm EST. Stop by and listen to the disaster if you'd like. If you're lazy, a podcast download should be available in the future.

Old School Gaming

Despite writing a gamer into my comic, I'm not the gamer type. In fact, I am YEARS behind the curve. Gaming for tonight: PLAYSTATION ONE GLORY! We started off with Twisted Metal 2 and now we're making our first foray into the classic Final Fantasy VII - if Jacob as Cloud wasn't enough to clue you in. Yeah, we're just a bit behind the curve here.

Repaying a debt

In order to make my snazzy new site, I required a lot of assistance. The MVP of Chrispy-helping was Briana, the awesome co-creator of Rune Master: Tales of a Demon Slayer. Do check it out!

When she could have taken my first-born child in payment, she instead requested some fan art to cover her week off in August and a review on Choice Comics. I promised I would be good to her. Then LIFE hit. (Stupid life!) Now I scramble to repay my dept in time!

In order to craft proper fan art, I must first PRACTICE the drawing of her fun characters. Enjoy the sampling of sketches today, and do check the Rune Master site soon for my finished piece.

What's cookin'?

Absolutely nothing by me! Every day I promise to cook dinner. Ever day something else comes up. Way to go, me! That's how to help out with the grandparents. Fail. Maybe tomorrow will be different! Maybe I'll make my spaghetti or stir fry! Maybe.

Also, it would help if I remember to POST my blog entry. Just saving the image to my hard drive isn't enough!

Is this guy important?

Mystery kid makes his second appearance on this blog. Is he somehow significant? No, not really. He remains merely a point of interest. HOW am I going to use him? Oh, you'll see... eventually.

So much for painting

This trip was supposed to be all about painting. Well, screw that. Let's do everything else!

My comic buffer only went until Saturday, which was fine for my initial plans of coming home, uh, tonight. Obviously, that's not happening. Instead, I'll be heading home on Sunday, which means I have to do strips here in DC. Unfortunately, DC is not the best place to make strips, so they take a bit longer to produce. Thus, painting time goes bye bye.

This was a productive evening, though! (You know it's a productive day when I have no extra sketches to show you in the daily blog.) Aside from sketching out enough strips to justify a mass inking, I also had a breakthrough with the scripting of the next storyline!

This current arc isn't getting much love, so plans to extend it have been scrapped. (I think it'll read a lot better in the archive, when you can burn through them all at once.) Baseball fun ends on the 10th, and then we launch into a special story I whipped up FOR YOU FANS! You guys reminded me that I've been neglectful about some stuff, so this is me coming back to remind you why you read Precocious in the first place.

This next story will run for four weeks, and I'm quite proud of what I have so far. 21 of the 24 scrips are done, and I know what I need to cover with the last three. Yay inspiration!

While I'm talking about the future, I'm hoping to get a bit more varied in presentation after this, going gag-a-day for a week or two between stories. I have some loose plans for the next few months, but there's lots of open space for me to drop the storytelling and go wild!

And somewhere along the line I'm doing some painting. I have commissions, darn it!

What also might have been

We're closing in on the end of the Precocious summer spectacular and I'm going through the requisite jitters about the ending. Along the way, I cut out what would amount to two weeks of stuff - and now I'm wondering it it means the ending is a bit abrupt.

So I set out to see if I could stretch it out another week. Well, not STRETCH - more like ENHANCE. I debated extending an interaction between Dionne and Suzette, and I even thought of throwing in a Vincent cameo for good measure.

Yeah, it didn't work. Or at least it's not working yet. The jokes aren't punchy and I'll need to plot a bit more if I want to use Vincent appropriately. As it stands, his official introduction is too oversimplified and pre-Flanderized. (It *is* pretty funny, though!)

One thing I worry about is putting too much out there and just dropping it. I'd be setting the table with Vincent when I *know* I probably won't be able to give him some solid attention until next year. The only way I can get away with a cast as large as the one I have is because I give them all enough attention to keep 'em around. Granted, the current joke with Vincent is that he's doomed to obscurity - so dropping him plays into that - but I'm not sure I'm ready to go meta with this gag just yet.

In the end, this will likely have been another creative exercise and nothing more. That's artistese for FAIL.

What might have been

Here's a sketch of the strip that *almost* ran today. You can decide which one is better. Click the image to see the comic in full-sized goodness.

Attention whoring is a go!

Much to my surprise, I was asked to do an interview for the Webcomic Reviews and Interviews podcast. (Someone must be desperate!) My interview will happen next Monday, the 27th, at 8pm. Tune in? Can you tune in? I have never gotten into this whole podcast thing, so this will be new and delightfully awkward!

(I hope I can swear!)

The staging area

As I wait to switch over the Precocious domain to SpiderForest tonight, I kill time by sketching! One of my goals for this DC trip is to knock out a few Precocious paintings. What you see here are sketches for said paintings.

Since everyone loves Tiffany, let's get her quirk on! First up is the stories villain Chaotic Butterfly, who needs some more love in the comics. (Maybe soon!) Next is Tiffany in her alternate state: napping!

Will I get any actual painting done tonight? Unlikely, but at least I'm thinking about working! Yay token effort!

Hey, there's a cat here!

So my 5-day venture in DC has already turned into a 10-day stay thanks to little bro forgetting to announce he was going on vacation. WAY TO ABANDON YOUR CAT, LITTLE BRO! I was warned that the place was a mess, but I could not be prepared for the level of destruction I see. There's barely enough room set up a workspace!

Work today has to be laptop-associated. I finished coding the archive page for the new website, and I may even upload it later! Work involving art stuff will have to wait until I have the energy to clear some of this junk. I'm thinking a controlled fire is needed.

Moving day

This will be a weekend of transition. First of all, I'm heading back to DC for a while, which means I must get the comic prepped and uploaded so I don't have to worry about it while I'm there. (The goal is painting!) I have the strips inked up to next Friday, so all that's left is scanning and lettering.

More importantly, I'm transitioning Precocious over to the SpiderForest on Sunday. If you want to help me out, head over to http://precocious.spiderforest.com/ and look for broken links. The only links I KNOW are wrong are the 2009 strips on the archive page. I haven't gotten to fixing those yet. (Soon!) Everything else should work and look like the normal site. I still have a long way to go in making Precocious a PHP paradise, but enough is done for me to make the teansition.

I can haz iPhone?

Oh lawds, what have I done? I now have a phone that is smarter that me! It's so shiny and new and INTIMIDATING! (Doesn't stop me from taking the token smug photo, though!)

Now I've gotta figure out how to USE this darn thing. As I type, I am syncing the phone with iTunes. My speaker station will now have its desired compliment - and it SHOULD charge this one! If that works, then it's on to playing with other features. Hey, I might even look into the phone part of this iPhone sometime too!

Anyone with an iPhone who has ap recommendations or general tutorial stuff, please share in the comments area. I am a complete n00b, so guidance would be appreciated.

Guess it wasn't out of my system.

Look what I did instead of inking today!

A fine art interlude

While waiting for the ink to dry on some strips, I whipped out my sketchbook to try and draw today's blog entry. I intended to do Precocious stuff, but nothing was flowing. I felt like painting! But painting has a lot of prep and clean up! Forget it!

So I turned to colored pencil. I had been reminded of their existence because I spilled them earlier. It was kinda fun to just scribble away in the sketchbook, with no consequences. There was also something therapeutic about it. (I keep my pencils in a used up spiced pumpkin Yankee candle jar, so they smell great!)

The scan cut out all the lights (it's a preset that works great for comics and not so great for the rest) but you can still see what went on there. I had a fun time improvising, and I needed to get it out of my system.

Now, can I FINISH the inking I started?

Damn you, Quincy!

I've been working on next week's strips, and it's been a fight! I love the scripts, but trying to cram in complex conversation into a teeny tiny three inch panel is very difficult. I've had to cut a few corners, move figures around and shuffle dialog like a madman.

So far I have two strips done. The first was a last-minute decision to scrap a strip and replace it with the strip I scrapped for that. Even if the strip is a flop, this new/old one gives me a potential book title! (I might run the alternate strip here after it runs.) The second strip featured such glorious things as five characters speaking in one panel, and I think I managed to pull it off reasonably well. It doesn't get any easier for the next strips. The dialog is too good to change, so I must improve my art-making!

A loving family

What, did you think that was an ironic title?

I'm working on some sketches for an upcoming commission. (My first commission!) This is my first drawing of the Linkletter family in their younger days, as they welcome young Jacob to the world. Next step: Use photo references for motherly poses!

Old, familiar faces

I mentioned in my comments section that the main four kids had begun as humans, and someone asked what they looked like. Well, here you go! I did my best to recreate them as they looked then. I've long since lost the original sketches, sadly. (I think I made the right choice in final character designs.)

Way back in 1991, I started drawing a set of characters that would eventually become the Precocious cast. (Then it had a simplistic, obvious and stupid name: Brats.) The main character was a crude avatar of my 11-year-old self, and the rest of the cast was set up to give him something to do. Most important was his meek and bumbling sidekick, a spiky-haired kid named Jacob.

Next to be added was Tiffany, based upon a bespectacled blond named, uh, Tiffany. (I WAS 11, OK!) Within the next year, cartoon Tiff gained a loopy personality and moved away from her inspiration. (Same as how the character who would later be Bud - I've forgotten his original name - eventually stopped being an idealized portrait and became a unique personality.)

The next year, I expanded the cast again. As I had struck out with everyone in middle school, I decided to add a romantic interest for my character. Enter Autumn, a fiery redhead who immediately became more of an equal/rival than a girlfriend. Autumn worked so well, she replaced the other female lead, who has long since been forgotten. (The other character introduced with Autumn gave me pains in finalizing him design - so much that I scrapped him - but he would eventually become the basis for Roddy.)

After getting my group to a solid four, with a few others waiting in the wings, I quit. I was a crap cartoonist and no one seemed to care about the characters. (Well, the original Tiffany had some questions.) I moved my cartooning to INTENTIONALLY drawing my classmates, which also proved vastly unpopular. Maybe cartooning wasn't for me...

The Zazzle Experiment

Or: How to lose a customer!

So after playing with t-shirt ideas, I took the simplest one to execute and create a shirt for it on Zazzle. To make sure the quality was up to par, I ordered it for myself. It came in, and it SUCKED. The graphic was not placed in the regular t-shirt spot, but instead was about four inches higher - in the half-necklace, half boob-top position. Zazzle managed to find the most unflattering position possible for this screw-up, and I wasn't going to accept it.

So I used their report form to explain how they screwed up, after first hiding the item in my store just in case some fool would buy it. I requested a refund, as my first experience didn't leave me flush with confidence. They say I'll get a reply from them within 24 hours.

Two days later, I get the lovely "we hope this solution was to your satisfaction" template. The solution? "We need to see a photo of this mistake and then we'll talk." Fine, I prepped an image showing my shirt verses how it appears on the douchebag model from the website, again requesting a refund:



This time they were fast in getting back to me, with an email titled, "reprint initiated!" I was politely informed that my order will be reprinted and re-sent to me. A few inches below that, is my quote, "As previously stated, I have requested a refund." A few inches below THAT is my original refund request. Really, Zazzle?

You know what, FINE! Let's see what crap they send me now. Until then, I must hold onto my misprints, because I have to return those with the new shirts should the new shirts also be misprinted. Of course, they say that, but I half suspect this will just keep going in an infinite loop of stupid.

So much for setting up a store on Zazzle. Anyone have another print on demand site to recommend?

UPDATE: The customer rep finally caught the mistake and issued the refund. Hooray!

Finally, some progress!

I promised I'd draw these strips about two weeks ago. Then I got distracted! Well, as long as they're done by Monday, I'm all good. I'm cursing myself for scripting more and more complex scenes, but I hope the payoff is worth it! (Goddamn you, Quincy! You couldn't just fit in when you arrived, could you?)

I hope I can keep up this momentum and start knocking out the rest of this story at rapid pace. I need to get a big buffer if I'm going to have time to get to merchandising, web design and school stuff. I've got the scripts for another month - with an optional two-week storyline after - and I have lots of fun ideas percolating in my head.

Aren't we forgetting something?

I've been chipping away at a lot of Precocious extra stuff. I'm working on the new site, dabbling in merchandising, looking ahead to attending cons, painting cute pictures and whatnot. What am I missing? Oh right, THE STRIP ITSELF! I'm down to the last week in my buffer and that means I need to find some time to do the MOST IMPORTANT THING! Curse you, distractions!

Oh, and Sunday's comic will be a repeat. This isn't a sign of desperate, but rather another step in my elaborate site upgrading. I renumbered and had one Sunday left over, so I chose to run it in the next free spot. I assure you the next month and a half is already scripted (even Sundays!) - I'm just being lazy on the execution.

Cartoon Wardrobe Logic

Autumn is a strange one when it comes to cartoon wardrobe logic. While she has her default "schoolgirl" outfit, she is far less loyal to it than your typical comic character. Part of it is my laziness. Her current tank top and slacks look is her casual garb, and perfect for a casual artist! I do fine the look to be a bit boring, however. There's no flashy vest, no strips on the shirt and no adorable button. It's flat white!

With the current storyline, the kids will be slipping on their baseball uniforms shortly. That gets everyone out of the norm and allows me to reset clothing after it's over, should I wish to do so. If I run with what I have scripted now for after the baseball arc, Autumn would likely be back in her schoolgirl look. If I go with another story I've been mulling, her look is already determined. What this means is I don't have to ACT upon this idea for MONTHS!

*slacks off*

I put on my robe and wizard hat

Edit: Hey, disappointed Googlers! Check out my comic strip, Precocious! It's far more entertaining than this post!

Rather than be internet social, which I must do if I have to beg for PHP assistance in getting the new website ready, I decided to go the other way. I started watching Battlestar Galactica again and sketched some outsider characters. Quincy is the strip's designated uber-nerd, so he seemed an appropriate subject. On that note, Quincy outgeeks me and it's rare that I can make a reference of which he would approve. This is why he's on the OTHER side of the classroom.

The scientific method

I'm sketching out more Bud poses for the upcoming SCIENCE! shirt. You know, you can draw a character a dozen times every day - but that doesn't mean any of those drawings are perfect. Each drawing has an imperfection that is ignored because together they all average out - but this is not the case with a shirt design. It has to be RIGHT! More sketching is needed.

Evolution

With my acceptance to SpiderForest, work now begins on massively upgrading the Precocious website. This is going to be a SLOG people. Thanks to Briana of the awesome Rune Master (go check it out!), I have the base for new PHP supremacy! Once it's set up, updating Precocious will be easy and AUTOMATED! That's right, drunken rich kids in white mustangs who drive into the power lines at 11:50pm, you no longer can delay my updating! Everything will be much more streamlined and efficient on the code end - but the site will look exactly the same! Win! Of course, that's once it's set up, and setup means renumbering 250 strips, copy/pasting the titles and alt text of 250 strips into and making sure every link is no longer pointing to the emeybee domain. It's gonna take a while. I love you emeybee, and it's been fun, but it's about time for me to grow up and leave the nest.

Tackling the strips is going to lead some reorganizing. Potentially starting this Sunday (depends on how fast I work) the strips will be listed by their ACTUAL number, not their 2009 number - which is going to be +100 all around. To get such a nice round upgrade, I had to play with the wretched Bonus strips that throw off the numbering. Meet the kids will now be #99, placed after the intro arcs. The first Sunday will be moved up to become the first non-intro strip, at #100. The Gary Larson toon will be stricken from the record and moved to the extras section. The final Sunday is going to be re-run on the 12th, taking that number in the archive permanently.

Wby am I doing this? Because I have to save my sanity. By moving the strips as I have, I can just add 100 to all 2009 strips. Keeping the bonus Sundays in order would mean remembering where they were placed and not overlooking them as I renumbered everything - because if I get just one off, I have to do it all again. This is WAY easier, and all it costs is one Sunday of new material. And this is just STEP ONE! I don't even know how the archives will work...

The Tiffany image is unrelated to this post. I *was* going to draw Sydney trying to capture Bud in a pokeball and make an evolution gag that way, but I snapped my mechanical pencil in two. I figured that was a sign to get my blog on and go back to inking Sunday's strip.

The bad, the ugly and the good

How NOT to take a negative review: A Chrispy Story.

I woke up today to find out WebcomicZ had posted a scathing guest review of my strip. It attacked pretty much everything, from the writing to the characters to the whole concept, and often did so in rather impolite ways. Now, I can take some negative - as a person who is generally unfiltered, I'd be a hypocrite if I had thin skin - but some of that review really threw me off. Dude said my naming sucked because I didn't give my fox character a fox-ish last name! A pingo is a mound of dirt and ice in the polar regions. Autumn was formerly a genius in public school who rose above the others and took a cold view towards the flatness around her. So, yeah, totally not apt at all. I think I like that name a bit more than Foxett McFoxfox. He also said giving my main character the last name of Oven was stupid because he wasn't even a chef. One of Bud Oven's characteristics is that, yes, he's an excellent chef. There was an entire intro arc written around how he got his name!

So, bleary-eyed, I went and did something stupid. I knew WebcomicZ had been looking to run a negative review - and that this was the first review to go up since then - and I expressed that I was shocked to be the one targeted. (I know, I know. Not thinking.) I followed it up by saying I reacted in shock and that the dude was entitled to his opinion - but I did this all publicly on Twitter. In stepped some defenders - whose points were all entirely valid, by the way - and suddenly I've caused an incident by complaining. It was a terrible way to react, and the regret level rose when WebcomicZ CHANGED THE REVIEW to something much shorter. The short review cut out all the pettiness and was more direct in why he didn't like it. I'm perfectly fine with it, since the points are fairly justifiable, but the way that review came about left a bad taste in my mouth. WebcomicZ claims he changed it because the author requested it, not knowing of the twitter debacle. Either way, the original is still up there if you check out Precocious' page on WebcomicZ, so I don't feel AS BAD that it was bumped. So now I've been slammed AND I feel horribly guilty about it. Way to go, me!

Some of the things leftover in the review are apt criticisms of Precocious. Having so many characters does break the rules, and I have to be careful in balancing them. Basing my humor on story and character requires the reader to play along and catch up. (This reviewer explicitly said he had no interest in doing that, which would explain the derision. He wasn't playing by my rules and I wasn't writing to his preconceptions.) My love of complexity can be isolating, and I still haven't learn the lessons of keeping it short term. This, however, is something I can control. It's my bad for no doing so.

Other quibbles are standard rookie fare. Precocious is only 6 months old, and sometimes that shows. I was too verbose in the beginning (and certainly still can be) and my writing isn't always crisp. Unfortunately, this is something I've learned only comes with time. You have to train yourself to *think* in comic form, and it's a slow process. He did hit upon a contradiction between my style and format. Story telling is normally reserved for eternal-punchline Mary Worth and not for humor strips, but I go against the grain. Depending on who you are, it's good or bad. I do it because in the webcomic format I can point readers to the start of a story - and the full archive is right there for you. In a newspaper format, storytelling like that would not be wise. I can understand the conflict of people getting to this strip with wrong expectations.

The same goes with the visual style. My characters do share the same general form. This is no different than the first six months of any other strip of this type. As time goes by, the characters will slowly become more distinguished. It's an organic process and I won't lose any sleep over it. Besides, I think it takes some willful ignorance to not be able to tell the characters apart. They may have similar forms, but each has their distinguishing features. I understand new readers getting a bit confused, but to claim the cast page doesn't help distinguish my kids seems to be more a reviewer problem than mine. (I do need to be better about having the kids call each other by name.)

What I don't regret at all is having the kids fail at evil. The reviewer was upset that the kids bogged themselves down with semantics during the water balloon fight, which it exactly what SHOULD HAPPEN with them. The first arc was about these brats playing evil, but not being able to cut it. I think failed evil offers far more storytelling opportunities than having every punchline be "these kids, oh, they're so bad!" What would be the dream, having every panel four just be an explosion? Granted, that *would* be funny - for about a week. After that, it gets stale. Dragging the characters back to earth gives me far more to work with and allows for a far richer strip.

The same rant goes for the "why is this not a comic about geniuses dealing with a normal world?" Because that's not the point! Ozy and Millie did it well enough, and I wish not to tred any more in DC Simpson's footsteps than I already am. The strip is about the foolishness of elitism, be it monetary or intellectual. These kids have twisted the definition of "interesting" to fit only themelves (and those convinient to them), rendering the rest of the world inconsequential. Also, to say the parents have no commentary on the kids' actions is baffling. There was, again, an entire INTRODUCTION arc written that shows the parents are just as cracked as the children.

I'm going to cut the ranting short now before I get out of hand. Also, it's because there's silver lining GOOD NEWS, EVERYONE! My application for SpiderForest was accepted! This means I have a LOT of work ahead of me to clean up my website's code, but when I do - behold the power of a fully armed and operational webcomic! (If they don't kill me for being a techie moron first.) I'm really excited to be a part of Spider Forest and I think it's the next big step in making my comic a little more awesome.

Kicking and Screaming

Oh, for the sake of momentum! The barely-any-sleep-in-a-week side of me just wants to lay down and play pokemon. The not-a-loser side wants to finish next week's strips. Epic battle ensues!

I *will* get some work done tonight or die trying! It's time for the dreaded tech pens to make their appearances, and such detail work is always a pain. Also, they're getting a little low on ink, so I have, like, concentrate and stuff. Booooo!