Waffle

The year 2000 was the year in which I started publishing Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan online in English, after an aborted attempt at publishing it as a webcomic in Dutch between 1994 and 1996. It was also a year in which I did a lot of planning and scripting ahead: my sketchbooks from 2000 contain ideas that I wouldn't use until a year later, some that I wouldn't use until three years later and some that, while I've been hinting at them in the comic, are still in the future of the ROCR timeline and will need to be heavily revised if I'm to use them at all.

The art below was for a White House in Orbit storyline that I finally finished and published online in the second half of 2001: Marauders of Mars (link goes to a revised edition). The sketches show characters from ROCR as Barsoomian pirates in the White House in Orbit universe, plus the pirate captain.

Tomorrow: Sketches for Mana Tracers plus sketches for a lost ROCR storyline!

I ran 49:27 in the 10 x 10 K relay event of the Run Winschoten as a member of the second Loopgroep Astrea team. For some reason, that team got listed as a woman's team, even though none of the members would pass the sex test, as far as I know.

This was actually my first 10K; I'd run an 11K and a 9K event before, but never a 10. The result seems in line with those other events. I do feel like it's getting easier now; the prospect of running at a good clip for that many kilometers and over 45 minutes no longer seems so daunting. That's why I joined the team at the last minute after someone dropped out without having to think about it much.

I've got two more events lined up; another 11K and a 4M, which will probably be my last running competition in the Netherlands. I feel I'm on track to beat my personal best at that distance (28:34).

Spending was limited to the cost of a train ticket to Winschoten. Another runner and I could get a ride back after the event, and as I ran last in my team's schedule, there was no time for me to buy junk food and beer. I'm kinda happy with that too, though I would have liked a beer right after the run. Beer after a run is one of the best things in the world.

The images below are all from a single sketchbook from 1999, and are all that remains of that sketchbook. First, two self-portraits for a solo magazine called IK (me) that I put out in the late 1990s. It consisted mostly of autobiographical stories, some of which made it online.

That year, I was also considering creating a graphic novel about the life of the poet Ezra Pound, of whom I'd been reading a biography for some reason. I'd got fascinated by the complexity of his life and his obsessive, larger than life and ultimately very unpleasant personality. In my head, it morphed into an online graphic novel that would fully use the formal advantages that Internet as a medium has to offer, and so we can all agree that we dodged a bullet when I decided to abandon the project. Aaaanyway... while working on it, I tried a number of approaches to drawing the main character:

Before scanning these images, they go through a second round of selection. Sometimes there are images that I think are interesting the first time around (at least in the context of when they were drawn and why) but that don't look so interesting on a day's reflection. In this batch, there was an image that I felt I'd be really better off without: yet another attempt at redrawing the cover art for The Green Knight's Belt from 1992. Every few years, I get a wild hair to redraw that cover (the current version is from 2005)... I'll do it again sometime, but the last thing I need when I do that is a lackluster version from ten years ago to refer back to. So that one is gone, and good riddance.

Total grocery bill at the supermarket: € 14.70.

Changes in behaviour: the third week into my scheme to keep the groceries budget ultra-low, I found myself keeping a running tally of the prices of the items I picked out in my head. Cool; I've never been able to do that. I also gave myself some extra exercise by getting down on my knees and picking the super-cheap items from the bottom shelves. And I am betting better at making choices: I needed cheese, so I couldn't have chips or nuts. Snacking will consist entirely of fruit this week. I managed to make this choice even though I went to the supermarket slightly peckish. I also forewent organic veggies this week as I couldn't afford the premium on the ones I wanted. Still kinda miffed about the supermarket not stocking any kale yet - I'd have had to go to the farmer's market for that. I got andyves instead. Yum.

The budget experiment only applies to groceries, just like in 30 bucks a week. It does not apply to eating or drinking out, which I'll do a lot of this week. There's Sunday's contribute-two-Euros-and-eat-with-me group dinner at Sidsel's, a restaurant dinner at Mechoui on Tuesday (pricey for me but worth every penny) and today I'll be going for a 10 K run out of town as part of a relay team, which means I'll probably eat fast food and drink beer afterwards, sitting downwind of the other eaters. That together should wipe out the rest of the money I made selling my drawing board this week.

Speaking of which, I love having the extra space in my bedroom, and I love having the extra € 100 in my pocket, but I do kinda regret selling it. I hadn't used it in years (there was another drawing board in the last studio I was in, which I had already given away) but I did have a sentimental attachment to it. But sentimental attachments don't pay the bills and there was no way I was going to ship such a large unwieldy thing to the US, so it had to go, and at least it's going to a good home.

I've gone through my sketchbooks over the past week to pick what all I was going to keep and what was going to get thrown out. Pickings from the year 1998 have been slim: unless I find another sketchbook from that year that I haven't torn up yet, the images below are all that I want to keep at all. All are early sketches for White House in Orbit and what's noticeable is how little character art I did. It was pretty much one or two drawings per character, no turnarounds, no height charts, not even many repeat drawings to hone and stylize the characters. Just one or two, and then I got on with drawing the actual comic. Things have changed a lot since then.

Trust me, it will get better as I zoom through the years.

Decluttering, decluttering, decluttering! I have thrown out my old term papers, and spent several hours going through 15 years' worth of old utility bills and other documents relating to living in the apartment I've lived in for the past 14 years. That was depressing stuff, seeing the years blend into one another as represented by the paperwork. Then I started work on the sketchbooks. I have abandoned the scan-and-destroy approach for now in favor of sorting the art and ideas I want to keep by year. That was less depressing: I'm already getting a good feel for how each of those years worked out for me creatively: in 1998, I had a lot of ideas and was good at getting them developed even if the art quality was often poor; this pretty much stopped in 1999, which was a lean year in which very little stuff worth bothering with came out of my brain and my hands. 2001 and 2005 were both years during which I did little that wasn't directly connected to my ongoing comic projects. 2006 was a very good year creatively and was also noteworthy because my sketchbooks became less scribbly and more developed. In fact there are many sketches from that year that make my hands itch to develop them into full artwork, and I may try some of that during the weekend. Decluttering any kind of paper archive is a slow process even if most of what I find can safely be trashed. I never know if there isn't some essential item tucked in with the crap. But it is progressing. Good; I won't be able to take all those sketchboks with me. Once I've got all the years sorted out and all the pages full of squiggly old crap are gone, I will scan-and-discard whatever is left.

I've been looking for a place that makes visa-compliant photographs (the requirements are different from those for regular passport photographs). No luck yet, but I need to put more effort into that.

Most of my time today got swallowed up by re-scanning old comics for the Drunk Duck mirror. Too bad, but that too needed to happen, and at least I got to throw out some photocopies that I made to use with the old A4 scanner back in the day.

Money-wise I kept the groceries budget down to below 15 Euro including some non-food items like toothpaste. Food was about 11 Euro. It'll take a lot of creativity to make that stretch across the whole week, but that's becoming a bit of a sport for me now. In the process, I will probably declutter the kitchen cabinets a lot too. A year ago I was enjoying filling that up with durable food and snacks for every occasion. Now I want all the canned stuff out of there and reclaim some cabinet space.

I'm going to stop counting the numbers for the Webcomicsnation and Modern Tales sections of my content empire for now. Together, they make up a very small percentage of my pageviews and counting them is just too much work as my only source for them is the Project Wonderful listing for the ads that appear on those sites. Project Wonderful only counts the past 30 days so if I'm late tallying up the statistics, they're gone. Bugger that.

Now that Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is on indefinite hiatus (and honestly, it may take a LONG time for it to come back. Preparing for emigration while holding down my job has absolute priority and I simply can't afford to commit to any kind of schedule or deadline), pageviews are predictably going down, except on the . Here are the numbers (compare with last month): ROCR.net: 78022 pageviews, 7939 uniques month-on-month. Down from 82343/8184 last month. Not so bad, all things considered. ROCR@Drunk Duck: 16640, down slightly from 16810. I guess July's result was a bit of a fluke, and indeed there is a lot of day to day variation on Drunk Duck. Number of uniques unknown.

Shout-out: Thank you to George of Amazoness! for linking me in your blog. It's bringing in half a dozen readers a day and is probably part of the reason why the drop in readership hasn't been larger.

Two character drawings for a comic I worked on in 1998, called Mana Tracers. It was supposed to be captioned strip like I the ROCR storyline The Corby Tribe that I would work on three years later. It floundered because I couldn't spare time from working on ROCR (which at that time was not a webcomic) and the other projects I had going, on top of a full-time job I got started on in September with a one-hour commute. Also, I had no confidence in my ability to write prose fiction in English at the time. I still managed to get 23 episodes drawn and every once in a while I tell myself I should do something with those episodes.... as I'm trying to get some sort of closure on the period in my life that will be ending soon, I just might. Maybe. Possibly.

I'm cleaning out my bookshelves full of old sketches, and I'm planning to be quite brutal. I've already thrown out two whole sketchbooks, pausing only to tear out the sketches below so I could scan and post them. The paper versions of these sketches will also be thrown out, but I do want to share these drawings.

The sketches are from 1996, my first visit to Norway. I stayed there for three weeks as a guest of Daniel Østvold, Geir Strøm and Anne-Kristin Mathisen, and his brother Trond and Trond's wife Tanja. Being around so many creative people and around so much good if expensive Norwegian beer meant that a number of ideas got spawned there: a beery conversation with Geir resulted in him writing The Eye of the Underworld for me a year later. But there was another idea from those conversations that we only touched upon and Geir only revisited a year later:

I doodled this 1920s-looking charater and the robot, briefly discussed retro-sci-fi with Geir, and evidently forgot about it until Geir came up with the script for the first White House in Orbit story, a lightweight, flimsy little piece that nonetheless introduced the principle characters and setting well.

I also drew these trolls: as preparation for a story called Hej, Kalle! for which Trond wrote the captions (but not the script). This story is not currently online, which is a bit of a pity as it's by far the daftest thing I've ever done.

Finally, there was this: Geir and I had already discussed what would happen if Kel from Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan met the Baron von Fieffelfalsfaffel from The Double. From that came the idea of a meeting between the general casts of both comics... but I already had other plans for Kel, so Daniel and Geir ended up creating a young witch as a prototype Kel. Krakatoa Hekludottir, of course, ended up in my comic instead... The above drawing was the first time I tried to draw her, and as you can see, she looks nothing like the present version.

More old art coming soon as I find, scan and destroy it!