Waffle

Pete Ashton has a long overview of Andy Konky Kru's massive body of creative and scholarly work. Read it if you want to feel inspired to accomplish something, even if it's something that seems a bit eccentric to many.

There's a small but vocal contingent of people who absolutely hate the new Doctor Who. I am not talking about those who write that "Aliens of Londen" was a bit naff or that last Saturday's "Father's Day" was a bit too close to soap opera for them. Those are legitimate complaints to have even if I don't agree with them. I am talking about a group of fans of the old series who condemn the new series as a whole for Russell T. David's writing, Christopher Eccleston's interpretation of the title character or for the show's efforts to appeal to eight-year-old children. If you're, say, a Doctor Who fan living in, say the US or some other benighted hellhole where nobody can be bothered to broadcast the series, and you want to know if it's worth the effort in getting to see it by legit or illicit means, do not listen to these people. They are comparing the new series with something that exists only in their minds, and as a result, nothing they say makes any sense.

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This list of British slang phrases is so extensive that it managed to put me right on a few things (see "Bomb", II, for example, which I thought meant the same in Britspeak as in American parlance). There are a few items where I think the writer is explaining terms that are actually in use in some parts of the US though.

I'm very likely to be at the Stripfestijn Dordrecht on June 5. Not as a table-holder though, but as a gate-crasher. The provisional plan is that six of us (Aimee of the Verhip een Strip organisation, me, and four others) will load into Aimee's van and check out the event. But I'm sure I'll take some merchandise and hopefully a laptop to show Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan on. I didn't quite get that done at the Small Press convention because the laptop I had borrowed off my friend Kim turned out not to be able to run the software, but we'll try again between now and June 5.

Interesting: visitor numbers for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan dipped deeply over the weekend. Really deeply. Slashed in half, or thereabouts. I originally attributed the dip to the Pentecost/Whitsun holiday, but it's too deep for that.

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I'm a bit jealous of Jeroen right now. At the Small-Press Convention in Groningen on Saturday, he sold out of his new mini De Ballade van Kittepoes in just a few hours. Visitors, most of them female, were falling over one another to buy the book, which was priced at € 3 for a stapled A5 minicomic with a color cover and six pages of black and white art inside. Amazing.
Mind you, it is all very pretty, cute and stylized. Jeroen has created a cat character who works as a silhouette, creating an impression of cuddlyness while preserving a sense of a feline in motion. The design is very strong throughout, and the book as a whole is simply desirable to a lot of people. I need to create something as desirable as that, sometime.

Smash successes aside, I had a good time at the convention, hosted at Vera. I sold some books myself, but kept a better balance between holding down the fort and getting in touch with other cartoonists and comics people: journalist Joost Pollman, Stripster main man Henk Schouten, Tommy A, the Saiso girls, Liz Groenveld (who possesses blackmail material), Maaike Hartjes and many others. Mostly I reconnected with people I knew from the last time I did the convention thing with any regularity.
Had an interesting conversation with reader Michiel Prior who asked if I was feeling better now. That puzzled me a bit - while I've definitely had problems getting back into gear with comic production recently, they're basically the sort of thing one gets after completing a long and draining project. Now that I've given myself some time off, I'm actually feeling fine (apart from maybe feeling another cold coming up - we'll see in the morning) even if I'm still in a bit of a dry spell and finding it hard to get the work done. Professional satisfaction and personal happiness are different things after all.

What I didn't do was talk to the unfamiliar artists there. There were a couple of people there doing interesting stuff and in retrospect I should have taken the opportunity to get to know them better. Ah well, there's always a next time.

What else was there? The Lamelos crew had all dressed up as pirates, but they were upstaged by Hank and Lily from Canada who wandered the room in their stage costumes. Hank was a cowboy with a metal mask; Lily a deer-creature with antlers, carrying (somewhat disturbingly) a rucksack with a saw in it. They're multimedial, putting out comics and CDs, as well as performing live, which they would do in the evening.

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I'm trying to download Lamppix with a view to maybe using it on Saturday to host my comics archive on a laptop at Saturday's Small-Press festival. I'm sure there'll be many hurdles before I get it to work, but the biggest hurdle is that at the present rate, the download would take until some time in June. If any of my techie readers happen to have a copy on file, could they stick it on a server that actually serves the file? Or maybe on Bittorrent - that would help other people out as well. Thanks!
Update: Got it now, thanks again to reader Squiddharta, and with special mention of Martin Diehl who went through the ordeal of downloading a copy from the official location. I managed to create a functional Lamppix CD, but unfortunately it didn't work on the ancient laptop I had at my disposal. As soon as I've got some money coming in, I should get me a laptop of my own to use at conventions.
That's life: I've now got a bit of experience with LiveCD-based distributions, and it's always a matter of luck whether they will work on the machines you'll want to use them on. They can only exist at all through educated guesses on the part of the distribution-makers as to what machines they'll be run on, and an eight-year-old Toshiba laptop clearly wasn't considered in the making of those guesses.

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...You know, now that Neal Horsley has admitted on the Alan Colmes Radio Show that he committed bestiality and tried to get his girlfriends to have abortions before he became an anti-abortionist campaigner, satire is dead. The real world has gone beyond it.

(via Digby's Blog)

Now that the Penciled Filler series is over (Start of this Doctor-cameoing, scuttling crab-mocking, timeline-fiddling story), Courtly Manners will resume on Friday after a break that lasted almost a month! Sorry about that. To recapitulate on the story, go back to the beginning.
I originally intended to run Courtly Manners itself as a filler series for the main Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic, which I needed a break from. I figured that with 9 episodes in the can, it would be easy to maintain a buffer. Clearly, I was wrong, and even now, I'm finding the story very difficult to draw. I don't really know why, but I do.
From Friday on, Courtly Manners will run on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule instead of the weekday schedule I thought I would be able to run the story on. Even after that change, I may find it hard to keep up. We'll see.

The Filler comics were a lot of fun to do by the way. In the end, by giving myself a license to draw like crap, I ended up drawing rather well, in a rough and lively way. Having the Doctor and Rose in the storyline was also fun, even though most of the time I didn't quite get the faces right.
There is of course, only a short window of opportunity for parodying the New Doctor. Next season, he'll be replaced - he'll be the Old Doctor, and any parody of Chris Ecclestone's Doctor will be old hat. Better to get a rough and crude version out early. It worked for Viz as well!

For Odin!

This is one of the most hilarious takes on the subject I've seen.