Waffle

I have one more bonus piece for the Keenquest/Even in Arcadia storyline. It's another comic originally made for the The Pantheon website. After that, I will run "Roadworks Goblins", a short story I made for an anthology book that's about to come out in September. It's not a Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story — it's more related to the Little Cottage in the Woods stories I made with Geir a few years ago.

After that, I hope to fill a few days with a short ROCR story while also buffering for the next proper ROCR storyline, "Feral". The art for the first few pages is very labour-intensive, so I need a little more time to create a nice buffer, even with the schedule moving back to Monday/Wednesday/Friday. "But wait," I hear you ask, "Didn't you say you weren't going to do the regular schedule thing anymore once you got back to doing new material?" I think I did, but I've changed my mind. Let me tell you what happened last week.

I was trying to write the next Gang of Four page for Hello You! magazine. I spent two days practically dozing in front of my iBook, then at 3 PM on Thursday, my editor asked me when she could expect the script, so she could send it to the language corrector before she went on holiday. So I took a deep breath, made tea, sat down on the studio balcony with my sketchbook, and wrote it in ten minutes.

I need deadlines. Without them, I go slack and become easily distracted. For a while, I was burned out on producing to a deadline, and it was a relief to just publish old material for a year and a half. But now it's time to jump back in the grind. "Feral" will be produced on a deadline, but it will have to be a realistic, reachable one. To make this possible, I'm delaying the story's start a little, but I am also joining the second edition of the Lazy Grind, a competition among webcartoonists to see who can update on a thrice-weekly schedule the longest without missing an update. That starts on September 11, leaving me with four days' worth of updates on the old schedule to fill between the end of "Roadworks Goblins" and the start of "Feral". The comic will update on those days.

That's the state of things for now. Do take care to read my guest storyline at The Bare-Pit, Geir and Daniel's Alcydia and Abúi's misadventures in the world of Chasing the Sunset.

Yesterday, I went to see Gogol Bordello at Noorderzon. Now, I could write a review, but why should I, if I can show you what they're like?

YouTube eliminates the need for reviews, or indeed basic literacy.

I think I mentioned last year that the free music stage at Noorderzon is at one end of a pond, so the bands play facing a body of water. Which in Gogol Bordello's case meant that they couldn't do this: but they did get a number of people fired up enough to jump into the pond. The strange setup does create some problems: if you want to be involved in the gig, the closest spots to the stage are to the sides of the pond, where the sound is too loud and pretty unbalanced, whereas the best sound can be enjoyed at other end of the pond, where you can't see the musicians all that well.

Most of the Gogol Bordello material available on YouTube has poor sound and video quality but this clip from British TV is all right. It's time they put out a professionally shot concert DVD though.

While we're still waiting for the MySQL server, and the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archives, to come back up, here's something that Branko linked to a few days ago: Robert Newman's History of Oil, a 45-minute comedy-tised documentary about the history of Western, ehrm, involvement in the Middle East and the desire among countries to control energy resources as a motivating factor in this, ehrm, involvement. You'll never take the phrase "bringing democracy to the Middle East" seriously again, and as for Tony Blair... well, I for one was already convinced the guy was a weasel, but Newman brings it home well. I never rated Newman and Baddiel all that highly, apart from the History Today skits, of course, but History of Oil is superb - funny, educational and interestingly structured. (45 minutes)

This is not safe for work, immature, puerile, tasteless and you've probably seen it before. It's also an earworm. Therefore, I am posting it here: Update: I found out that the video I linked to was no longer available for, ahem, some reason. However, I could find another version easily, and updated the link.

The SQL server at Xepher.net, which hosts my comics, appears to have just crashed. I'll inform the admin of the problem; there's not much else I can do about it. Meanwhile, this link will take you to Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan's static index page: http://www.rocr.net/index.html.

I'm doing a guest series at The Bare-Pit called "Incognito". It involves my character Abúi, getting lost in 21st-Century Australia and trying to blend in in a human environment. The story is a sort of sequel to Abúi's appearance in Chasing the Sunset, which still hasn't ended. That's webcomic crossovers for ya. The Bare-Pit is a comic about nudists, set at an Australian naturist resort, and is probably the only consistently good fiction with a nudist setting. It's been fun for me to borrow Noodtoonist Stephen's characters and setting for a while. The comic normally updates two or three times a week, but will update on weekdays for the duration of "Incognito", which will be ten installments in total.

I've been very busy both at trying out new concepts and at getting the next Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story going. In the next few days I'll be posting sneak previews of Feral on my DeviantArt, so be careful to watch that. There are some new character and costume drawings up there as well.

I found a referral in my usage statistics from Projectx13 a pagan website. While checking it out, I found out that the site's owner is in financial trouble due to disability, which is likely to get worse. So he's asking for donations to keep the website, and himself, afloat. I'm not pagan, so the site isn't really for me, but it looks like a pretty good news and community resource. If you are interested in paganism, take a look at Projectx13 and if you like what you see, drop a few bucks in the paypal box.

(Yes, I know, there are so many people on the net solliciting donations. I could do a dozen posts like this one each day. But I picked this one simply because one good turn deserves another.)

Some more recent additions to my gallery. All Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan-related artworks contain mild spoilers about the general direction of the next story, but no major ones just yet.

Feiht from Chasing the Sunset, drawn partly as gift art, partly for the cast page. Shireen, a minor character from the next ROCR story. The Feral, another character from the next ROCR story. Brother Bartlemew, A Monk. From the next ROCR story. Size comparison drawing for Kel and the Feral. Ragnarok with a new outfit and hair style.

Looking at these drawings I can't help but notice that I've been drawing very simple, basic poses lately. That's not a bad thing for art intended to demonstrate what a character looks like, and I find it encouraging that I can draw those simple standing poses, enjoy it, and not end up with something completely boring. For the sake of keeping myself interested in the longer run, I'll need to build on this, work in more complex poses and more elaborate backgrounds, but for now, this is not a bad way to get started on cranking out more output. When the comic starts in earnest, in two weeks, I'll need to be able to work fast again.

Pete Ashton mentioned last week that he had shaved his own head:

Shaved my head, which involved sitting in front of a mirror with my shirt off (not something I do very often), and discovered I have muscle tone, specifically around the upper torso and shoulders. Was somewhat taken aback by this. Combined with my working-man's-tan I believe I might possibly be "buff". Whodathunkit?

This inspired me to have a go at it myself; after all, being dependent on someone else — in my case, my mother, who has many years of experience trimming the fringe of hair at the back of my father's head — to do that sort of thing can be a drag, especially considering I use my razor daily anyway. . As it turns out, shaving my own head is perfectly doable. What Pete didn't mention though, presumably because he got distracted by his muscle tone and his tan and lost track of time, is how damned long it takes. What my mother does in five minutes with her hair trimmer took me over two hours with a full arsenal of electric-razor-with-trimmer-attachment, scissors, a handheld mirror to see the back of my head and the regular mirror in the shower, just to get to the point where I could say "Naaah, I think I'll just go over it again with a razorblade". That's not something I'll repeat again, even though I've got a rather good, shiny slaphead out of it. I've got better things to do with my time, like, er, posting in my blog or mopping the studio floor.

Some new stuff and some rediscovered old stuff on my DeviantArt gallery. Most of these will show up on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan website sooner rather than later, but if you can't wait, have an account and want to comment on some of the pieces before they go live, here's your chance: Guest art in progress for Head Doctor Comics. Cast portrait in progress for the Even in Arcadia story. Tentative coloured version of the same. Nymphs! drawn as a guest comic for The Pantheon in 2003. Nymphs!, a new sequel to the previous one.