Internet Comics

[MrHoatzin]

Thanks! Glad to hear it is enjoyed.

As far as visual lushness, Herzog was fairly difficult. I still think we failed all the way through—with occasional success. We actually went back and redrew/repainted a bunch of the bad pages, but then never uploaded them. Plus they didn't really fit since somewhere near where we stopped, I had started using those micron pens with brush-shaped nibs which looked a lot better than the regular microns, but somewhat different than the surrounding drawings.

We would spend all of every weekend working on it, long into the night. I always wanted it to be looser, more Dave McKeanish, collagey and Daniel wanted it more illustrative and uniform. Plus if I drew stuff with pencil instead of micron, the shading would get in the way of the painting, and I was trying not to muddy up the stage... but the pencils nearly always looked better than the finished microned linework.

The bottom line on Herzog's level of refinement: too much work, impossible to keep up for the whole epic story we had prepared. Everything was moving too slow and the workload was not getting lighter. We actually just wanted to take a week off when we stopped, but then the week turned into FOUR AND A HALF YEARS (and counting)...

So working on Hobo Lobo, I wanted it mostly monochromatic so that I wouldn't spend all night painting and I wanted to leave it in pencil because it looks better and we're in the future now and we don't have to accommodate ancient printing techniques that demanded sharp linework.

I threw out the notion of working for print right off the bat (Herzog was painted in pretty high res and down-sampled for web, the format was that of a standard print comic), though I am entertaining a Lobo pop-up book (like the card I sent to Toblix) or a series of framed pieces where I would photocopy the drawings onto transparencies, paint in the lighter opaque areas and make little light boxes.

Either way, why bother with physical media? Nice though it may be, web is where everything is, why not use it for all it's got? Pull the text out, have it be searchable, easily translatable and dynamic. That way you don't have to fight to fit it in bubbles that take up composition space. You can do crazy things with javascript because the medium allows it, mix it up with animation when needed, etc. You can always think about print later, if you have to. It is the MS Paint Adventures school of web comics. It is the most exciting thing in comics today as far as I am concerned.

Another thing that pencil does is allow me to fudge everything. Sometimes I don't feel like drawing a good hand, so I just scribble a a bit of noise or a gesture that fits the scene, without having to model it too much. It also hides the limitations of perspective and composition imposed by the parallax. I can't really show the floor and make it look good, so everything is flat and walls are perfectly vertical and facing the reader, and characters end up walking on the bottom margin of the screen. Lush surface texture makes it less boring-looking. And doing it with pencil as opposed to, say, in Photoshop, is a time-saving technique.

Another thing we did with Herzog was promote it crassly and whoreishly, so when it died, we abandoned a good 10k regular visitors. I am letting this one spread more naturally, word of mouth through people I know and people they know. So far I've only had about 10 unique visitors a day. Could be better, but I'm gonna let it unfold organically. So show it to your friends, if you feel it's ready for a wider audience.

[syntheticgerbil]

Yeah I definitely don't think I'd be able to sustain anything as rendered to the degree Herzog is for very long. I'd have to figure out how to do something a little bit above plain flat color and try for less varying color. I guess when I think about what I'd want to do, it sounds easy, but I know too well it's not going to end up easy, especially as it'd be a personal project where the perfectionism I have that makes appearances will go out of control.

Were you doing Herzog in pencil first and then cleaning the scans before moving on to the microns or the nibs? Honestly, I hate inking and feel I can get similar results or better with just scanning, cleaning, and playing with the levels of my original pencils. Pencils bring about a certain lushness I think. Ideally, I might want to move on drawing directly with the wacom tablet just because it saves so much time (in terms of frame by frame animating at least), but that's very hard for me to handle precision for detailed line art and I feel like it ends up looking too clinical.

I like how solid and well rounded everything comes out in Hobo Lobo with just great pencils. Even if you are getting away with fudging things like you say , it's hard to tell and doesn't seem to be detracting at all. I also really like what Sonny Liew used to do with the earlier comics I've seen. He was much more scratchy and rough and a lot of his earlier stories were released in pencil only and revised to have flat color with a small amount of shades or highlights on the top. Nowadays his lines are much more decisive and Photoshop color is more painterly.

[MrHoatzin]

Were you doing Herzog in pencil first and then cleaning the scans before moving on to the microns or the nibs?

Herzog was inked and the pencils erased before it was scanned. I just clicked through Herzog to see if there is anything that was done with pencil, and I am pleasantly surprised that it is not as bad as I remember it being.

Honestly, I hate inking and feel I can get similar results or better with just scanning, cleaning, and playing with the levels of my original pencils. Pencils bring about a certain lushness I think. Ideally, I might want to move on drawing directly with the wacom tablet just because it saves so much time (in terms of frame by frame animating at least), but that's very hard for me to handle precision for detailed line art and I feel like it ends up looking too clinical.

I tried Hobo Lobo with Wacom alone at first. It turned out I could get more interesting looking things faster with pencil. All the smudging and erasing and different graphite sticks with different graphite loads and erasers that do interesting things—working with happy little accidents—it's so much more intuitive by hand than in Photoshop, even after years of using Pshop for hours every day. I do some cleanup with the Wacom after the fact, very little, tho. And all of the lighter areas are painted in behind the line work with a tablet. All of the painting in Herzog was done with a mouse.

I like how solid and well rounded everything comes out in Hobo Lobo with just great pencils. Even if you are getting away with fudging things like you say , it's hard to tell and doesn't seem to be detracting at all.

I know, it's really great! I must confess, it is so much more relaxing to draw this than Herzog. Stacking things in three dimensions with no borders somehow ends up being less onerous and more gleeful-looking than trying to fit a whole little action arc into a dozen random-sized panels on a page. The monochromatic+ method I stole wholesale from the covers of Mourning Star. If drawing in pencil weren't so much easier than photoshopping images, I would be plopping more found images into the composition. A lot of the decisions about the look and feel of Hobo Lobo have been made with raw, unadulterated laziness in mind. And it is totally gratifying. Doing things that you enjoy doing (crazy javascript, drawing, limited color) really trumps self-defeatingly ambitious, unsustainable things.

[Orv]

This basically describes any trip to the doctor for me, as I only go when shit surpasses my (incredibly low) pain threshold. (Earaches, for example, destroy me. I am a baby.) And by the time someone says this to me, I'm a wreck.

[Thompson]

Via Snooglebum

Click the comic to read all of them, they are amazing.

[castorp]

Sorry for the 'back-from-the-dead' - didn't want to open a new thread and just in case you didn't blablabla...

The recent XKCD-comic is very incredible in a mind-blowing way: http://xkcd.com/1110/

[MrHoatzin]

Shit like that infuriates me. I dunno why! Maybe because the interface is gloriously unfriendly. Must I get carpal tunnel for your self-indulgent widget which may or may not be rewarding but I didn't care enough to find out? Why can't I middle click scroll or something? Ugh. And people occasionally bitch about Hobo Lobo's interface being obtuse or too weird for mainstream or whatever...

:(

[Roderick]

Well, Scott McCloud is having a boner right now.

[castorp]

So XKCD is nowhere near as good as my comic but myriads more popular. I'm jealous. And people are stupid. And mean.

XKCD is awesome! This comic is awesome! (Better navigation would be nice though, but I guess it's part of the experience.)

!

(Hobo Lobo is cool.)

[MrHoatzin]

Booo. Your face is jealous. It is only a matter of time I make a comic on a lark as a parody of what the internet lurves and it takes off and I kill myself.

[MrHoatzin]

Notwithstanding any (alleged ) qualities of XKCD and the stench of petty jealousy emanating out of my knee-jerky response, I was really only angry at the interface. I would've spent an hour with that thing if it didn't require me to crank the screen around forever to no conceivable end. I'm all about bending the format in fun ways, just wish they did it in a more user-friendly way.

I guess there is no way for me to comment negatively about anything comics related ever—because obviously I must be whining about my unrecognized genius.

I should also never gripe about stupid things people complain about because people will complain about anything.

Present company excepted, of course, because we're all righteous and wise and shit.

[MrHoatzin]

Cough.

[castorp]

Cough.

For one thing, boy, I was a bit nervous you'd be angry or something. (Yeah, I don't do forums a lot, I still get nervous.) Good stuff!

Oh, and comment negatively, being critical and all is good, and I'm sure you can manage to do that without it sounding like you're whining.

The alternative version, you did that, no? You can move around with the arrow keys, very cool. BUT: zooming is cheating I'd say, and goes against the spirit and intention of the comic.

[brkl]

I wonder where Thomson disappeared to.

[MrHoatzin]

For one thing, boy, I was a bit nervous you'd be angry or something. (Yeah, I don't do forums a lot, I still get nervous.) Good stuff!

Oh, and comment negatively, being critical and all is good, and I'm sure you can manage to do that without it sounding like you're whining.

The alternative version, you did that, no? You can move around with the arrow keys, very cool. BUT: zooming is cheating I'd say, and goes against the spirit and intention of the comic.

Nah, not angry, just backpedally.

And no, I didn't make that thing, I just shared it.

[Twig]

what the fuck

Anyway that was neat. I spent a half-hour scrolling around that shit this morning before someone linked me the map.

I would love to see a very similar Huge-Ass World by David Troupes* of Buttercup Festival. He does the black-and-white landscape thing a lot better. (Which is fair, since xkcd was never really about the art. For the most part.)

*Can't believe I got his name right on the first try! Goes to show how much I fucking love Buttercup Festival. U: U: U:

EDIT: Linking BF here, even though I linked it in the Just Plain Ol' Comics thread a month or so back. http://www.buttercupfestival.com/

I read literally over a hundred webcomics. It is a great shame of mine. I keep meaning to cut many of them (on account of they're awful). For some reason I have this idea in my head that I want to write a semi-review of all of them, and so I won't stop reading any until I get around to writing those reviews. But the problem is, I keep adding more?! I'm adding Hobo Lobo, now. U:

I'm a very bad influence on myself.

[Nachimir]

I was really only angry at the interface.

I wouldn't say I was angry, but interfaces like that can make me feel incredibly anxious and frustrated. It's caused by a mixture of shit-ass awkwardness/slowness coupled with some addictive element, like wanting to find out what's next. There have been games I had to evaluate that did this to me too, like you hit what should be the win criteria for a level and find you just have to keep clicking pointlessly, uniformly, for a few more minutes to get there.

[chickenontheceiling]

i can't get enough of threewordphrase

[Berzee]

Minus!

(This comic arc is completed, though the author is still making lots of other, even weirder stuff. If you imagine Calvin as a mostly-mute girl whose imagination can affect actual reality, that will give you some initial idea about what this internet comic is like. It's all lovely watercolors, which I like so much that I bought the coffee table book).

An example of one of the best ones (this one only features Minus the character in the background though...she's the one holding onto the balloon in panel 3)

[Luftmensch]

I don't know where it's going, but I'm enjoying the characters, style, and setting in Nimona so far. I feel like a lot of people are doing quirky pseudo-medieval fantasy comics lately, such as the completely unresolved Witch and Knight. Then again that's all I can think of so maybe I'm totally wrong.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I've been enjoying the Adventures of Mrs Jesus:

More: http://www.oshannonl...ng-and-pasting/

[subbes]

B^U

I used to follow Noelle but stopped for some reason. Dito Vera Brosgol; I need to get back into those.

[Alunnite]

Someone posted this on reddit yesterday. It's called Pokecenter, but it's more Pokemon Noir.

[Dogface]

There's all the other webcomics, and then there's Homestuck.

I'm not sure where I'd even begin to explain it, so maybe the best thing to do is just watch the video on the Kickstarter page. (Yeah, he got $2.5 mills to make a video game of it).

There's also his previous thing (finished), Problem Sleuth, which is also crazy ambitious yet only adds up to a fraction of Homestuck.

The whole thing started as a 'fake adventure game' project where everyone suggested the commands, but it became... something special. I genuinely think HS is one of the most interesting and impressive pieces of fiction I've ever read.

It also has a fanbase that is both insane and insanely dedicated. I shudder to even try and estimate how many words have been written in the ongoing 'update discussion thread' alone, but it's easily millions and millions. They also release insane amounts of music, some of which is used in the comic. Homestuck itself is up to something like 700,000 words and 7,000 images, plus some extremely complex animations and even small video games.

[MrHoatzin]

I second the MS Paint Adventures vote. MSPA = Homestuck + Problem Sleuth. Andrew Hussie's really on to something special.

Homestuck is an extremely humongous thing that requires some dedication and a leap of faith and I don't feel comfortable just thrusting people into that.

I would suggest starting with Problem Sleuth which defines the fake video game storytelling medium a lot more crisply—since large amount of the story was effectively community-navigated, dungeon-mastered by Hussie. Homestuck is a wonder of structure. It is kinda hard to describe off the cuff. Its weird hybrid presentation was a direct inspiration for Hobo Lobo's own experimental format, with the images above and narration below.