Waffle

Courtly Manners #2 has started. In this sequel to the story of Kel and Krakatoa's introduction at the Witch Queen's court, we find our young witches again invited to the court, to the chagrin of one and the excietment of another. But how can this be? After last year's mishaps, how could the Queen invite them again, and personally this time? As it turns out, someone has a nefarious!!! purpose!!! in inviting the two!!!
Courtly Manners # 2 was written by Geir Strøm of White House in Orbit, Belle and The Eye of the Underworld, among many other things. It's always a pleasure for me to work with Geir, and I wish I could spare more time to draw his scripts. He's completed another Courtly Manners story and several others.
Like the first series, Courtly Manners #2 comes with epic poetry by Timmerryn (coming soon - expect a slight lag between each published episode of the series and the arrival of the epic poetry).

My six-year-old CRT monitor has finally decided it doesn't want to switch on anymore. Right now, I'm using an even older monitor that still works, for a given definition of "work". It hurts my eyes to look at it, so I'll have to replace the monitor as soon as I can. I've been preparing for this for some time, so it's not a really major problem, and it certainly won't stop work on my comics.
Once again, though, I am turning to you to ask for advice. I've been looking into LCD monitors, but while I'd like to replace the space-hogging old monitor with something leaner, I'm not sure they're worth the price differential that still exists between LCD and even good CRT monitors. And I wonder if I won't run into a whole bunch of linux support problems (it seems SuSE 9.0 came with drivers for some flatscreens, but not many of them). So for someone who uses linux at home, doesn't care much about gaming, but does want to be able to create colour art on the machine should the mood strike him, what do you recommend? I have some money set aside for this, but not a huge amount.

I think monitors are more generic than most other pieces of computer hardware, and that an LCD monitor that isn't directly supported would probably work with a bit of tweaking, but I'm not so sure about that that I'm just going to plunk down Euro and (more importantly) spend time on the first monitor that catches my fancy. Information on the internets has been disappointingly rare (plus unfamiliar web sites are a pain to browse on the monitor I am using now).

By the way, that sound card I bought two months ago? It's still in the box. I haven't had a solid block of time to spare for it since then. I was hoping I'd be able to install it during those two weeks off, but they're already getting eaten at all ends.

Answers and recommendations to reinder@despammed.com or to the Forum.

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Let no one say I can't tell a good bandwagon to jump on when I see one.
Some of the cartoonists of the Modern Tales family of cartoonists are having great fun designing ads for their work to show on Talk About Comics (the blog and the forum). The gem shown on your right, an ad for the excellent serial Flick is the most succesful internet ad I've ever seen - its clickthrough is in the region of 10% and has been for two weeks. Readers are clicking on it like hyperactive monkeys. The lesson here isn't that skin sells, but that well-drawn skin in an interesting style sells if there aren't any other distracting elements in the graphic. There are other ads with nudity in there but none of them is getting people interested like this one.
As site owner Joey Manley predicted, the use of nude images in the advertising would eventually provoke a backlash, and people have indeed been complaining. Below are some ads made by the various cartoonists in response to the complaints (note large images below the cut):

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On perhaps a related note to my earlier question on the case for Blair, Andrew Rilstone has been pondering what it means to be Proud of Britain, or at least to like being English, which is not the same. The ponderings were inspired by a pamphlet he got from the UK Labour party, which he put in Jarvis–I mean scare quotes. There's a website for the theme as well.
In the end, Andrew lists a few reasons to be proud of Britain:

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I spent much of last year exploring opportunities for re-use of old drawings (and I'm doing it again now for the purpose of creating banner ads) But Stephen Crowley of the naturist comic Loxie and Zoot has just proven himself a master at this. Compare and contrast:

Loxie and Zoot, October 25, 2004
Loxie and Zoot, March 15, 2005

It's amazing how much difference you can make by taking an old page and just adding different colours and new word balloons! It's lazy, but lazy in an interesting, instructive way. I hope he gets to put a few more remixed, revamped pages in there.

There's an emerging tradition in the webcomics world, started by Websnark, to reward outstanding performances with baked goodies. I don't have any biscuits right now, but for taking the lessons of the remix era to heart, Stephen gets a waffle. A vegan one, for him.

Mmm, tasty, tasty waffle.

The Waffler channels the Bull Moose and talks about himself in the third person.
The Waffler casts his gaze across the channel and wonders who the people who still support the Rose are.

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Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary has always had a sensible approach to the workload that comes with publishing a comic strip online. On several occasions, he said something along the lines of "You need to be three weeks ahead; anything less and you're living hand to mouth". I don't remember if he used the three weeks as a benchmark before or after he quit his managerial job at Novell. I'm sure the number won't stay the same for him throughout his hopefully long cartooning career, and I'm sure that they won't be the same for everyone, everywhere, ever. I can now conclude that for me, it's two weeks. I am now two weeks ahead where just a short time ago I was working on the comic for the next day, and it's a big relief. The fact that I effectively cheated to get this far ahead does not diminish the relief in anyway. I am off the conveyor belt, and good riddance. It's a significant next step towards coming up from under the pile of stuff-to-do that's been overwhelming me.

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For a long time Keenspace, the company hosting ROCR.net was doing as well as could reasonably be expected from a free webhost. Lately they have been more troubled; there was another multi-hour crash on Sunday, and now the automatic updater is once again running very slowly.
At the time of writing, there has been a new update on both the mirror site and on Modern Tales for a few hours. Go there. Dig the oppressive, tomb-like silence. Bookmark it.

R*K*Milholland from Something Positive is reading all keenspace comics to prove there are indeed good ones among them. Apparently he has reached "C" and found Cap'n interesting:

Cap'n by Jeroen... just has to be seen to be believed. And there's almost four years of archives and it's still going.

As the image shows, Cap'n stats went through the roof
I'm not sure how many people will keep reading, but man, the influence of the Big Guns!

The Pantheon has a new index page! Now you can almost see the comic when you first enter the site.

Twill be a bit of a shock to all of ye who grew used to the old format over the years..

And speaking of old formats, the pencil colouring is back. Oh, at last! I hear you cry. At least, I think you do. The scanner didn't like it very much, though, it turned all the palest bits into white and did odd things to the sky.

And Jeroen finally got into my brain and made me see the Comic Sans Invasion Of The Universe and I decided I wouldn't use it any more. So my new font is One Stroke Script LET.
I dunno where fonts come from, I think every time you install a new program it brings its fonts with it, because every time I open Word it has a new font in it I would swear wasn't there yesterday..