Suddenly, I feel so old.
Not really.
We went to the coolest restaurant last night in downtown Phoenix, where a bunch of us gathered for a b'day dinner and a few bottles of wine. Larry suggested the restaurant, and it was a good call.
We'll definitely be going back.
In other news, Barry got me an effects pedal. It won't make me a better guitar player, but man it is so cool. We'll be practicing today, can't wait to bust this thing out.
Challenge of the Supergeek
Okay... it's my birthday today, and what am I doing with this fine day? Pimping out Hold My Life online, anywhere I can find to do so, while watching the Challenge of the Superfriends DVD's that Greg got me.
That is the best cartoon show ever, featuring character designs by artist Alex Toth who also designed many of Hanna-Barbera's original superhero characters such as Birdman and Space Ghost. He's also my favorite comic artist ever.
I poked around a bit, and found that WB decided not to release the first season of Superfriends in this set. This guy says that the first season was the crappy one, but if I could do any comic book in the world, I swear it would be a Marvin and Wendy comic.
Lists...
Just listed Hold My Life on
OnlineComics.net,which looks to be a pretty extensive listing of available webcomics.
I just have to remember to add a links page to karmic calamity, so I can provide a proper return link for them.
Bad Day...okay, not so bad after all
I got absolutely slammed with work today. I'd come in with a certain expectation of what my day was going to be like, and from the moment I set foot in the door, all those expectations were blown right outta the water. I hate it when that happens.Anyway, I'm not gonna dwell on it, because, well, there's no point in it, and I'm sure that anybody that comes to read this blog doesn't come here to listen to me bitch about my job, or the minutiae of said job. And, well, it really doesn't matter because Scott McCloud saw fit to link to Hold My Life on his blog. Plain decent of the guy to do so, after all, who am I?If you've come here as a result of that link, thanks so much for stopping by, and I hope you liked what you saw well enough to come back. The new episode will be premiering July 30. I'll be here blogging every day, and I'm continuously adding to the content on Penny's Blog, so there's something new to see every day.Plus, for crying out loud, there's Ninja Ducks. I just watched Greg produce one of those things in three minutes-- I can't even draw one ninja duck in that time, and mine always look like crap when I try to do so.Okay, I only tried to draw one, but it did turn out badly. Then we proceeded to draw anything off the top of our heads... ah, the things we do to amuse ourselves.I'm gonna try to work a half-day tomorrow, and then come home to get some HML stuff done. Hopefully everything'll work out the way it should...
Ground Floor Marketing
I must've posted links to Hold My Life on a billion webcomics-related message boards today, in an effort to get people to check out the webcomic. I know I didn't hit everything out there, but the webcomic community seems pretty fragmented and all over the place.If anyone has any suggestions on getting the word out, I'm all ears. I wish there'd been more of a point to that 'building an audience' panel last week at Comicon, but it really didn't provide me with much information other than post on message boards or try to get one of the established webcomic creators to link to you. Scott Kurtz suggested taking a shot at a webcomic you like. Perhaps I should start talking smack about him.There's another thing that could happen, but it's an extremely long shot of actually happening, so I prefer to not even think about it, or talk about it. Outside of that, perhaps I could send a press release to some of the comics newssites...
This pretty much covers everything...
Ran across this article from Animation World Magazine today as I was goofing off at work. It covers just about everything I've been rambling about over the past couple of days.
The things I do to call myself a Warren Ellis fan
Oh, for crying out loud, already...
I go to
warrenellis.com today, and realize, as I'm looking at the pics that people have forwarded him from comicon 2005 (he calls it nerd-prom), that not only have I seen some of these people, but I have pics of them. Even worse, I feel that I have insights into some of them that perhaps may have slipped by.
Case in point, this thing:
http://www.warrenellis.com/index.php?p=993#commentsRhonda and I saw this thing and took a picture of it. I saw the pic on warren's site and wanted to remark that he may have missed out on the fact that not only was this thing disturbing as shown in the picture, but even more so because we were subjected to it's bare butt as it walked away. Yes, that's right, this thing was not only some sort of flesh colored face with a hotdog permafixed in it's mouth, but that whoever had designed this costume of misery had seen fit to give it a bare ass that would greet any and every person who had the misfortune of following behind it, or watching it pass.
Anyway, couldn't do that, comments are closed, yet for some reason I felt the need to expand on that. Naked muppet-ass should never be ignored.
Also. Rhonda got her picture taken with this guy:
http://www.warrenellis.com/index.php?p=984On some level, I have a tremendous amount of respect for this guy, He had a dream: to be the crappiest fake robot ever. And that dream was realized this year. Who are we to question his decisions? After all, he's probably a lawyer or an investment banker or any number of different professions that make a better living than I do.
But I Digress. Your mileage may vary.
So...tired...
Penny's first Comicon...
Realizing that we were going to be going to Comicon, I had a bunch of these 2.5" x 5" cards printed to pass out while we were there, it's kind of like a teeny-tiny movie poster for Hold My Life. Remains to be seen whether or not it was worthwhile, but if you got one of these, and it drew you to karmiccalamity.com, I'd like to hear from you. It'd be nice to know whether or not the cards would be a worthwhile tool for building an audience, but really the only way to gauge that is by response from people who actually got one of them. So, if you're out there...
Comicon 2005 was boatloads of fun, it seemed to me (I may be wrong, though) that there were more webcomic-related panels this year than last. The webcomics panels were, far and away, the focus of the con for me this year. I did enjoy every single panel that I attended that related to that subject, even though some were more substantive than others.
However, there was a series of Webcomics 101 panels this year that were new. Like I said before, some were more substantive than others. The one on "Getting Started" was interesting. I heard a few people in the audience mentioning things like interactivity and asking why there weren't more long-form webcomics, which I found encouraging because, well, Hold My Life is a long-form webcomic that features interactivity. I also got some ideas for a couple of new features that I can add to the main page (an FAQ and character pages specifically) that I'll be adding to karmic calamity tomorrow. I'll also be changing the "About" page (yet again), as I realize now that I really need to differentiate Hold My Life from the plethora of daily gag strips that are out there.
From what I can gather, we've got an abundance of daily gag strips, and very few long form webcomics. If you ask the daily gag strip people, they seem to think that, if you aren't updating the comic every day, then the readers will forget about you. Myself, I don't agree with that. Television shows come out once a week, print comics come out once a month, and I don't think I've ever forgotten about a television show that I liked or a comic that I liked. It's all about devising and sticking to a realistic schedule, whatever schedule you can actually stick to, and then becoming a habit for the reader.
Unfortunately, I didn't get much from the "Building an Audience" panel. The speakers seemed to veer off-topic too often, and when they were on-topic, there wasn't a lot of useful information. It was a little disheartening, because that was the panel that I'd actually had the highest hopes for. My friend Kevin works for azcentral.com, which is the website for the newspaper I work for. He can tell me (and has) exactly how many hits a certain feature on that site gets. For example: last month, they got 1,032,083 comics page views. It'd be great to get Hold My Life on, perhaps, on the newspaper's entertainment site.
Just a thought: how can you speak about building an audience if you don't know whether you really have one? Again, I'm reminded that I really need to toss myself into the webcomics community and not be the eternal outsider, always looking in.
In contrast to the Bulding an Audience panel, the Adventures into Digital Comics panel on Thursday afternoon was terrific, by the way. The writer/producer/director, Sebastien Dumesnil and moderator Leonard Cachola ran a very informative discussion about where digital comics are now, and where they could go in the future, and how all that tied in with the comics market bust of the 90s. The whole thing was inspired by the documentary they'd recently finished, of the same name. I'll be on the lookout for this, as it seems very interesting.
A Geekfest of Monumental Proportions
That's right, it's 12:39 AM on a Friday night, and where am I? About twenty feet away from the bar, writing a blog entry about the first two days of San Diego Comicon.
Why? Well, because drinks here at the Hilton Gaslamp are prohibitively expensive, and I've had quite a few. So, I'd might as well leave there, and come in here to the comfort of this lovely computer that's kicked me out of aol every single time I've tried to email my friend Barry (I think it has something to do with the f-bombs, I'll try again) and write in my blog about what's happened so far.
I'm amazed at the level of webcomic-related programming at this year's con. There have been two panels each day so far, with at least two on the way tomorrow, and another Sunday. This is exponentially more webcomic stuff compared to last year, as I seem to recall there being, well... none.
Some fun panels, and some incredibly interesting people who are out there doing this thing on their own, on the frontier of webcomics. I hear some discussion out there about the need to see some longer form stuff, perhaps something that could appeal to a mainstream audience, and the occasional mention that, perhaps some interactivity might be nice to see out there.
I really think that I'm on to something with Hold My Life now. I think it has a lot of mainstream appeal, and the blog thing adds a certain level of interactivity. Who knows what anyone else will think of it. For all I know, I just passed out a bunch of promo cards to people who will take one look at this thing, decide it's incoherent drek and move on.
I hope that doesn't turn out to be the case, though. I do think I need to find a way into the webcomics community, though. Sure seems like a lot of really interesting people that I'd like to get to know. I'm sitting on my hands, barely able to contain myself through the panels at this point. I haven't had that sort of reaction to comicon in, well... ever. It's fun to be excited about something.
Of course, we've had to balance our time at the con with more touristy, Rhonda-friendly pursuits, and I think we've done a better job of it this year than in year's previous. We did the trolley-thing today, which in retrospect, kind'a seems like something Penny Heartbreaker would do "to get the lay of the land" so to speak. We had breakfast at the Cheese Shop, then headed over to the light rail stop next to our hotel to jump on and have a little trolley adventure.
We didn't meet a kid named Dex, but we did briefly speak with some chick who was every bit as confused about how San Diego's light rail system worked. A bit on the arcane side, the process of getting a ticket... which seemed kind'a pointless, as nobody ever asked us for, or directed us to actually use the ticket we purchased for anything. I ended up putting my gum in mine and tossing it.
Since it's such a Penny-esque adventure, I'll save it for another post. Maybe tomorrow morning...
She Did Her Best Work After Five
We were looking online for old movie posters yesterday, and ran across a site that had a bunch of these old trashy book covers.
Countdown to Calamity
And so, three months after the last reported sighting of him on the blogosphere or internet, the Quark Monkey returns...triumphant?
You bet!
I just uploaded the newly re-tweaked version of Hold My Life. The webcomic itself doesn't look much different than it had before I went offline, but it is very, very different than it had been. The biggest change, and the one that took the most time, is the addition of Penny Heartbreaker's actual blog. (Yes, I know her blog looks exactly like mine, cut me some slack--!) It cross links with the webcomic, so whenever she's talking about something that happened in the past, you can click on the text and it'll take you to her actual blog entry from that date.
I love this feature. I feel like it adds whole other level of story to the webcomic, and it's allowed me to figure out so much about the character. I found that, along the way, Penny has had numerous little adventures, many of which are now hinted at in the blog. One day, I'll go back and expand on those blog entries with actual webcomics that cover those adventures, but in the meanwhile, readers can check in on the blog if they wish, and get a tease of where this girl's been.
I also fixed the button for Ninja Ducks!
Hopefully, I'll be able to get a few billion postcards printed this week before we leave, and place them on the freebie table at the entrance to the San Diego Convention center. There are tens of thousands of people who pass through those doors each day. I'm hopeful that at least some of them will pick up the postcard, see the lovely Penny Heartbreaker and the web address, and decide to give the website a shot when they return home.
If that works, then it should be a smooth ride after that. I've got enough of a backlog of work done on the strip that I haven't posted yet, that I can begin posting new episodes August 1, and not have to worry about falling behind for quite awhile.
Yeah, right... we'll see about that, huh?
