Waffle

Another wordless comic: The Grim Barrowman from 1998. Script by Barbara Stok. I shared a studio with Barbara for a while, but apart from this one, we never got around to any serious collaboration. Same story as with my present studio, really.

Barrowman is a slightly creepy tale of Death stalking his victims with a glassy stare and a wheelbarrow. I think it was based on a dream Barbara had. More noir-ish than I usually do although that's not saying much.

Update: This one highlighted some problems using the new monitor at the studio. There's a grey spot on page 2 that I couldn't see at all on the studio monitor but is conspicuous at home. It's the reverse of a problem with the old CRT I replaced at home that showed even quite light greys as black. I'll fix it in the morning.

The Highway Star has published some rare video and audio from the ill-fated, bogus "Deep Purple" reunion from 1980. The recording quality isn't great but it's an opportunity for those of us who weren't around at the time to hear what the fuss was about. In 1980, 4 years after Deep Purple split up, a Deep Purple tour was announced, which turned out only to involve original Deep Purple singer Rod Evans, plus four unknown musicians. Evans had sung with Deep Purple on three albums, Shades of Deep Purple, The Book of Taliesyn and Deep Purple which were only moderately succesful at the time (although they are still on catalogue and are actually rather good). They had an American hit with the Joe South song "Hush" but were going nowhere commercially. Evans and bassist Nick Simper were fired from the group and Ian Gillan and Roger Glover brought in. That line-up went on to enjoy immediate Anglo-European and Japanese success, and re-conquered the US later. They wrote and recorded "Child in Time" "Smoke on the Water" and the other material that is now considered the classic Deep Purple repertoire. Rod Evans sang in a few bands in the US, then left the music business until coming back with a Deep Purple line-up that had no creative or personal continuity with the classic material. It was booed off the stage on a daily basis, and the group were sued by Deep Purple's original management, to the point where he was forced to quit music again and lost the rights to his royalties for the first three Deep Purple albums. Few recordings exist, indeed these are the first I've ever come across.

Evans' voice was pretty good as far as I can tell. The bassist sounded and moved a bit like Roger Glover. Otherwise, it's what you'd expect - a decent cover version of "Smoke on the Water". The audio file is a full-length recording of the song.

We're in the final few days for Christmas at Blocksberg, which will finish on Christmas day. So far, we've seen the disappearance of three different Santas and their imminent elimination by an infernal machine called the Nickswhiskersnipper.

I've taken out an ad for the comic on The Webcomic List in the hope of getting the comic into the Webcomicsnation Top 25 for the final few days. Originally, my plan was for the Tooncast on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan home page to take care of that, but it doesn't look like the pageviews from that are getting counted. It's still a good way to give a short-running story some more exposure though. As for the ad, the Webcomicsnation system doesn't allow me to track it, but a real change in the visitor numbers will be easily visible. If I decide the ad works well enough, I will have some more made for the future series.

Next up in January: Alcydia, the story of a kidnap and diplomatic incident in Iceland. Sound familiar? There may be some delays before we start running it as Geir and I are both still swamped and Daniel is spending December in France without internet access. I'll run some more Odds and Ends to fill in. When Alcydia finally starts running it'll keep us in regular updates until March, and one of the things Daniel is working on is a sequel that will see us through another month. And there are two other special projects coming up on the site...

Tree Test is another wordless comic. It's been lost for a while; it was made for the Bries anthology Wind from 1999 or thereabouts. A colour version exists, done by Gerard Stroomer of the now defunct online anthology Cartoozine. I remember having that on a website somewhere but I can't find it anymore. This is probably one more reason why consolidating everything in my new site is a good idea. If anyone has a copy, please email me.

Wind was a theme book about wind, and while it was tempting to do fart jokes, I went with a more serious story about trees bending in the wind. One tree isn't playing along, but there are consequences.

When We Had Tails is one of my most-reprinted comics. It was written by Geir Strøm in early 1998, drawn by me soon after that, and has been printed in fanzines from Canada to Italy and (I think) one of the former Yugoslav republics. It's been on my old website at Bart.nl for years, but I want to move all my comics off there into the new site. I've taken the opportunity to rescan and re-compress it, so you get larger images in the new version.

Rescanning the images took longer than expected, because I'm looking at the work through a new TFT monitor. The old one at the studio has finally given up the ghost and we had to rush out to replace it. This new screen should be the best our limited budget can buy, but right now, the greys are coming out a bit blue here. I've already fixed many of the hardware settings but I can't quite get rid of a blueish tint to the whole thing. We'll see in the morning. I'm glad I don't have any color work lined up until the end of the week, anyway.

Since people seemed to like Santa's Revenge, I've re-scanned the other episode in the Little Cottage in the Woods series, Nightmares. This was actually the first episode, written by Geir in 1999 or thereabouts and drawn by me in August of that year. It already existed on the old Comicgenesis site, but the version there was too small to be properly readable, and I no longer had the master files. The only way to create a larger version was to scan it again from the A3 papers.

There are some more scripts in this series awaiting art from me. If only I had more hours in the day...

I don't trust music journalists. At all. I believe they ask lazy questions in interviews, don't understand music much at all, prefer quote-mining press releases for things they can spin according to their prejudices instead of actually listening to music or indeed reading up on their subjects properly, and would much rather write about themselves than about those stinky musicians they are paid to write about (by the way: I freaking hate Gonzo journalism except possibly in the hands of an expert practitioner. Genius always gets a free pass; the rest of us have to Do Things Properly). I especially don't trust professional music reviewers to listen to records, go to concerts or know what they're talking about, and every once in a while I get confirmation of this distrust. There's the story of the Uriah Heep concert that got canceled way back in the 1970s and that still got a bad review from some drunkard who couldn't be arsed to give the venue a phone call to see if it was on. More recently, but long enough ago for me not to remember the particulars, there was a letter in the Nieuwsblad van het Noorden from a hardcore band who had played in a venue in Groningen. They didn't complain about getting panned, but they did complain about the reviewer failing to notice that their entire set had consisted of Cliff Richard covers. The reason should be obvious: the reviewer wasn't at the gig at all. And today, the Homeground forum gives us another one. A Professional Music Critic, a Mr. Daniel Paquette from Fab Magazine in Toronto, dismissed the new Kate Bush album Aerial as "beyond hideous" saying

After a 12 year wait from this legendary heavy pot smoker, we get Kate singing the words 'washing machine' for three minutes non-stop.

Of course, we get nothing of the kind. What we get is one song in which the words 'washing machine' occur as part of a chorus. If Mr. Paquette had listened to the album, or read the lyric book, he'd have known that. Instead, he just copied the scribblings of other Professional Music Journalists, distorting them further in the process. The rumours that Kate would have 'A song about a washing machine' on the record (it isn't, to anyone with ears), had been circulating before release and were ideal fodder for someone whose idea of journalistic professionalism is to copy rumour uncritically. Such a low standard of workmanship is beyond hideous.

I've been meaning to do a series on this issue, by they way. It's nearly impossible to open a music magazine without finding similar cluelessness (regardless of whether the review is positive or not or whether I like the artist or not) and it always irritates the hell out of me. However, unlike Professional Music Journalists, I don't get paid to write these things, so don't hold your breath.

There is now an English-language website for the popular Dutch cartoon Fokke & Sukke: Duck and Birdie. I wonder why they didn't go with the original names for the characters - they're every bit as suggestive in Dutch as in English. (On the page explaining the name change, whoever wrote that copy is being unduly coy about both the names and the "little feathered tails". Come on! We've seen what happens to those "tails" when the birds get excited.)

I'm not sure if the comic will work as well in English as it does in Dutch. When I saw the English-language Fokke & Sukke book, I didn't think it did, to be honest. But then I'm familiar with the gags already and they have long lost the element of surprise. What I do like is the clean, uncluttered website, especially in comparison to the original Dutch version, which, by the way, is one of the longest-running webcomics. The authors started putting comics online in the late 1990s when one of them was traveling and needed a way to stay in touch with the comics as published. Over time, the site went through the normal life cycle, accumulating clutter as it evolved. I'm sure that the new site will also have ads on it eventually, but it starts out looking prettier than the old site ever did.

Mithandir's a great guy. Not only has he told me I don't have to pay for his work on WillowCMS because it's taken him so long (it's been worth the wait, and well worth what we had agreed as payment, even with the delays), he also bought me an ad on The Webcomic List for Christmas. I'm not good at the gift-exchanging thing; I fret and worry about the gifts and generally avoid it even if it means I don't get gifts myself. This, though, was a spontaneous and unexpected gift without strings attached, simply because he thought I "needed a boost". That's more meaningful than just doing it as an obligation. So this is where I thank him for everything and invite all you reading this to check out his work (writing and colouring) on Chasing the Sunset, a humorous fantasy comic primarily aimed at young readers but fun enough for adults. It's been on my favourites list for a long time.

For the ad, Mithandir used one of the ads I'd made for Joey Manley's Open Ad Network, which has now taken a back seat to other parts of his Webcomics Nation project. He scaled it up to fit the ad space on The Webcomic List, and had the ad link not to my front page but to the beginning of The Rite of Serfdom. That way, readers got their first taste of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan with work in colour.

People sometimes ask me about colour. I like colour, I like colouring and I have some ideas of how I could make a coloured ROCR story look better than the last one. What's stopping me from colouring the next new work is time - my own and that of people who might want to colour it. If I want the next story to run on time and have good line art, I can't colour it and I can't send it to my regular volunteers on a short deadline. So it's black and white for the time being, probably through 2006. Sorry! But in the longer run, I will want to return to coloured work, and I agree with Mithandir that it's smart to give my coloured comics more exposure.

I have started adding sidecomics to the new website and CMS. The first to appear is a collaboration between me and Geir from 2000 called Santa's Revenge. Yes, we're staying with a Christmas theme. Don't worry, it'll all be over in a week.

Santa's Revenge looks at the darker side of Santa Claus. Traditionally, Santa doesn't just reward nice children; he gives naughty ones their comeuppance too.

The second sidecomic I've added is Herman, from 1996, which was previously published on my Keenprime acount. That finally disappeared when I moved the Reinderdijkhuis.com domain over to Xepher.net, and I'm glad I've now been able to bring it back using the magic of WillowCMS. It's my first autobiographical story showing a hair-raising event I was a witness to.

Both comics are set up as series in the CMS database and presented using a chapter template. For short stories such as these, that's probably more appropriate. However, should I feel the need, I can also set up templates to present them as single-episode webpages, and manipulate their presentation through the CMS. We'll see.