Waffle

I'm about halfway through the process of adapting "The Green Knight's Belt" from 1991-92 for the Web. It's a lot more work, proportionally, than re-adapting " The Stone of Contention" especially because I relied on puns more at the time. Puns, especially my old groaners from a decade and a half ago, are the bane of my existence right now.

Nevertheless, I am getting further ahead. I now have material on file to make a continuous buffer extending well into November. This is good, because it means that I can take another look at this cover image, tentatively scheduled for October 13. I think this one is OK, but OK isn't good enough. This one will eventually move to the very beginning of the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archives and will therefore be one of the first bits in the series that many people will see.

I don't know what's making me dissatisfied about it, but I think it lacks an edge. Therefore, just this once, I'm inviting all my readers to critique it, either in my local gallery or on DeviantArt. Help me improve! Even if you can't draw yourself, you'll probably know what you like and what might make this illustration better.

Between now and October, I will find the time to improve on this even if it means drawing and coloring it all over again. This is a good thing. Too often in the past few years, I've only had time to post a piece and then move on to the next. It's one of the things I've grown to dislike about webcartooning. All the good advice I got from my studio mates that I didn't have the time or the mental wossname to take. For the next few months, I won't have that problem.

This new colour drawing is a frontispiece for the next Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan storyline. Like with the current one, I'll start it off with a cover drawing, then an introduction with some background info and a dedication, then the real story, plunging ahead at breakneck speed. The title of the story? The Green Knight's Belt. The titles of the stories after that? Alchemists, The Death Warrant, The New Sheriff, King's Drama. Why do I know all these titles in advance? Easy: they've all been in my files and in small-press print for a decade or more. Yes, I'll follow up the archival storyline I've been running since June with another bunch of archival storylines.

If you're an ROCR reader as opposed to someone who just drops by every once in a while to read ramblings about Doctor Who and all the other stuff my co-bloggers and I go on about, I suspect that this might not be the sort of announcement you'd be waiting for. To be honest, I have mixed feelings myself.

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"I wouldn't trust JKR to write Harmony [a Harry/Hermione pairing]. No thanks. There are many more talented fanfiction writers out there who understand the characters' relationships from the first five books so much better."

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is, on the whole a very good book. There are a few things that could, perhaps, have been done even better, but it's probably the best book in the series so far, save maybe Prisoner of Azkhaban.

...However, there's a certain group of people who are so upset about Harry and Hermione not getting together that...

...But perhaps I should start by quoting the Watley Review, my favourite parodic news source. In July, they wrote a hilarious bit of satire:

A disgruntled Harry Potter fan has released a "corrected" version of J.K Rowling's latest installment in the series, The Half-Blood Prince, prompting a storm of curiosity and support from many fans who disliked the direction of the story in the book. It has also, not surprisingly, prompted a storm of legal activity from Rowling's publishers.

"Rowling seems to think the relationships she's described in Half-Blood Prince were clearly telegraphed in previous books," sniffed Pembroke. "All I can say is, if that's what she thinks, she clearly doesn't understand Harry Potter like I do."

...Unfortunately, of late satire seems to have an unfortunate habit of turning true. - This is, by the way, the second version - the first version was even closer to the original, directly quoting large parts of the book, with only very slight changes to make Hermione Harry's love interest, and to make her, well, perfection itself.

...I begin to grow depressed. I shall merely leave off with a few links.

Angua9's analysis of this faction

Fandom_Wank's report on the first great rewrite of HBP

I've opened comments for the moment. I'll close them in a few days.

Edit by Reinder: Unfortunately, comments are still unavailable, and will be until I've done either a Movable Type upgrade and a bit of coordinatin' with Xepher, who is in charge of hosting this blog. Use my forum instead, if you want to comment.

Over on The Double, there's a new MP3 up, "A Walk in the Park" featuring singer Alex Gache as the ever-popular Baron von Fieffelfalsfaffel. As I wrote in the blurb:

What better way to present the Baron von Fieffelfalsfaffel than through some strutting, prancing, preening rock'n'roll? Singer Alex Gache's French accent adds to the mix, as does Daniel's guitar tone, his best on the entire album. Alex sings it in a way that's halfway between Mick Jagger and Lou Reed - with a slightly different mix, this track would sound like the Dandy Warhols and be a huge hit.

Also, dig that distorted electric piano in the second verse.

I like Paul Krugman's op-eds because they're well-written, understandable and very close to my own worldview while being better informed than me. But if I want to read his old op-eds online, like, say, this one, I have to send money to something called the New York Times. What's that all about?

Websnark has more. Update: Ping Teo attempts to insert some rationality into the debate over the NY Times article.

Pete linked to this convoluted website, and I took a look at it, as one does. Holy crap, it's got Szukalski art on it!

One of my studio mates once brought a book of Szukalski's art to the studio, and I was immediately fascinated by it. His sculpture looked like something from an undiscovered culture, but executed by the hand of a pre-modern master. A lot of it was destroyed or stolen in the upheavals in his native Poland during and after World War II. His drawings were an extention of that sculpture work: meticulous, skillful and strange.

Whether it was the loss of the work of the first half of his life, or some genetic disposition, or both, I can't tell, but one other thing was clear from reading the book: Szukalski was also absolutely insane. I know some of my readers hate terms like "fucking nuts" or "batshit insane", but he was both, and more. Szukalski devoted the second half of his long life, and his considerable artistic skills, to documenting a racial theory he had invented, called Zermatism, in which he argued that mankind had been polluted through contact with subhuman ape-men, yetis, or ahumans. His illustrations included many portraits of historical figures, purporting to demonstrate that history's worst villains, the Stalins and Hitlers (as well as anyone else Szukalski didn't like), were all ape-men, a contamination of the pure and good human race. The text of the book my studio-mate showed me was full of invective against anyone suspected of being an ape-man, the offspring of human beings raped by ape-men, or contaminated by the ideologies of ape-men. From reading it, those categories eventually came to include anyone who wasn't Szukalski.

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Sketch for a new cover page for The Green Man's Belt.
When I looked at the old art for The Green Man's Belt, I noticed something that had bugged me before but was noticably more clear in this very old storyline than it is in my present material or even in such venerable works as The Stone of Contention: The line art lacked curves.
Considering the nature of the comic, then as now a humorous series with big-footed, big-nosed characters and a fair amount of shapely women showing cleavage, it's really astounding. I was drawing in a curvy style without using more than the faintest curves!
It's not so bad now but I still think a lot of my art could become stronger if I paid more attention to actually making curves bendy, so for this piece I am doing my best to exaggerate curves even in places where this could cause problems such as line tangents and anatomical faults. When used with discipline, it will help prevent such problems, but for now, I'm just trying to ram the importance of curves into my own thick skull.

Another artist I liked on Deviantart has a Sketch Blog. I should gather my art blog links up some time and blogroll them, soon.

On the recommendation of reader Boreger in IRC (and the recommendation service at OnlineComics.net, which seems to recommend this popular comic to everyone), I've been reading Inverloch. Perhaps surprisingly considering the sort of comic I make, I don't read a lot of comics involving typical fantasy tropes and quests these days, and the ones I do read are old, old favorites. If it has elves in, I'm usually not interested, and if it has anthropomorphics, I'm going to be aggressively disinterested unless it's brilliant.

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Like just about everyone else, I love Art Lad's web place. The six-year-old artist isn't just very talented, he thinks like artist, looking at his work and saying "It looked better in my head". His dad helps him with the reading and the writing, but the insight is all his. And he looks like he's having fun working on his art. (Via Drawn. BTW at the time of writing, the site appears to be broken. I don't know what's going on with that. Let's hope Dad will keep us posted.)
Also seen on Drawn, Funny Cute has lots of caricatures in development, including many of women. Many artists find female caricature very difficult, and I hope to find inspiration in this site in the near future.
Lauren Bergholm is an artist whose work I spotted on DeviantArt where she posted mostly penciled Harry Potter fan art. If that doesn't sound too appetising, I should add that her interpretations of the characters were all original, not based on the book jackets or the movies, and really fun to look at although few of them stood out individually. She does cute character portraits.