Waffle

Peter Venables' 22 panels challenge. Peter has re-worked Wallace Wood's famous 22 pictures that always work in his own style. I'll take this challenge some day, but not now.

Wellington Grey explains how science and faith work in nifty flow charts. His website and journal are also great, except that for some reason he wants to stop people posting cat pictures on the internet, which tells me there's something not quite right about him. He'll be calling for a ban on internet porn next (via Boing Boing).

Wellington Grey's going to hate this: 1700+ pictures of cats found on the internet (via Pete Ashton, who asks "what more do you need? " Er, another 1700 pictures of cats?)

Gorgeous Princess Creamy Beamy is a fast, hyper-energetic comedy manga about a school girl who turns out to be an alien princess. That may not sound like a glowing recommendation, and there are one or two other aspects to the comic that will make many readers run for the hills (for example: feederism, while not as sad as some other fetishes I've been confronted with over the years, is usually my cue to STOP. READING. RIGHT. NOW), but GPCB is really, really funny and full of quotable lines. This thing's ontogeny is recapitulating the fuck out of its philogeny! is my favourite, so far.

Dangerous and Fluffy, the Sheep of Doom, by Adam Cuerden, Jeroen Jager and Timmerryn "Rahball" Brand, has returned to the web after a long absense. This strange rustic comedy about a farm boy with superpowers never got the readership it deserved while it was still posted as a subscription comic on Graphic Smash; I hope it fares better on this second outing as a free comic on Webcomicsnation.

I'd like to note in passing that Planet Karen is pretty cute. Actually, saying that it's cute doesn't do it justice, but she's advertising on ROCR.net right now, and I want to avoid a conflict of interest, or even the appearance thereof, so "Cute"; is all artist and main character Karen is going to get right now. Doing it justice will have to wait.

Creatures that saw open a guy's head and mess with his brain = comedy gold. Best line: Mit oder ohne Hirn - er guckt immer gleich blöd aus der Wäsche. Reminds me of Gotlib a bit.

Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic is much more fun than the title promises, and rather well-drawn. I wish it wasn't done in un-inked pencils, and I wish I'd find more fantasy comics that took their influence from fantasy literature (or better yet, the legends that form the source material for other forms of fantasy, or better yet, entirely from the artists' own fevered imaginations, though in the case of a parody comic like this, that wouldn't have worked anyway) rather than roleplaying games, but given these niggling objections, I found this one funny, easy on the eyes and a good way to procrastinate for an hour or so. If you like the manic energy of early Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan or the low-brow sillyness of Pawn, then spend some time in the world of Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic.

Jeroen's 24-hour comic from October 7;
Jelena's 24-hour comic.
I haven't seen much of Erik Wielaert's 24-hour comic, which he's now shopping around to print publishers. I'll probably buy it when it comes out.

My old pal Sven van der Hart and his brother are opening a new Apple Store in Tilburg on Saturday, October 21. They didn't want to sponsor me, the bastards, but maybe if those of you living in or around Tilburg drop by on opening day and tell them Reinder sent you, they might change their minds. The brothers have a cute photo comic about themselves, by the way.

I have just finished Friday's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan update, which means that I'm somewhat buffered again, and will have lasted six weeks in the Lazy Grind. I'm not sure how I'm going to get through week 7 - if I finish the next Gang of Four page by Friday, I should be able to get some more updates out, but that's a big if, considering how slowly work on the past few pages went. I don't quite know why they take me so long, but I have been eliminating distractions from my work space lately, which should help.
Next week's work is going to be complicated, involving a lot of new character design and environment design. The Rogues' homestead should be expanded and brought up to date so it fits the style in which the costumes are drawn. I was unhappy with the look of buildings in the scenes set in and around the Sheriff's office; buildings and interiors are a weak spot that I still need to work on.

I do believe I'm taking progressively more difficult hurdles while keeping ROCR on track. Initially, I had a bit of a lull in my workload, with nothing else demanding my attention other than Gang of Four. This month, work for the Comics Museum was added to my load; in November, it will be many hours of teaching in Drenthe, much of which will be for teenagers with special needs. That's going to take a lot of time in preparation and travel.

In December? Well, I hope I'll have another lull, but it's equally likely that the teaching engagements continue to trickle in. I'm already pre-booked for a series of introductory workshops at schools in Groningen in January as well, so keeping up the level of work to create three updates a week of a similar quality to the most recent ones will continue to be difficult.

Today's 24-hour comic day and a group of cartoonists in Groningen will spend the day pounding away at their desks at the Stripmuseum Groningen. I'm not taking part, but studio-mates Jeroen and Jelena are. I'll be dropping by periodically to distract themlend moral support. They'll be posting their work hourly (roughly) at the Groningen 24-hour comic blog. Event starts at 11 AM, CET.

Interestingly, a bit of a rivalry has sprung up between the Groningen group and the 24-hour cartoonists at comic shop Lambiek in Amsterdam. It seems those stuck-up westerners don't like having their thunder stolen by the museum's parent company Libéma's mighty press machinery. Ha! We'll do better comics too! And have better-tasting pizza and stronger coffee! And if that's a problem to you we'll cut off your gas supply, so there!

Mid-event update (11 PM): The event is now halfway through. Jelena has posted two large updates, enough to see the shape the story is taking. Others have posted smaller updates. Some have posted none, but that doesn't mean they are necessarily catastrophically behind. I noticed during my visit to the museum that Erik Wielaert was mapping out his entire project for the day in rough sketches - a risky strategy but what with him being the demon draughtsman that he is, he just might pull it off. Sigrid de Jong is drawing on A3 originals which don't fit under the scanner.
As far as the others are concerned, I don't know.

Martin Wisse reads between the lines of my original post and guesses that the Groningen crowd is desperate to start a rivalry with the Amsterdam group. Well, not really - it was just me sensing an opportunity to trash-talk. Both groups get along just fine, and G. Wasco arguably belongs to both. However, I had heard that some of the Lambiek people were genuinely a bit miffed at the way the Stripmuseum's corporate propaganda machine got the Groningen event into the national media. Of course, that had nothing to do with the artists involved on either side.

Late night update (2:30 AM on Sunday): My official reason for not taking part in the 24-hour comic day is that I was planning to run the 4 Mijl van Groningen today. That is very much the lesser challenge, though, and to be honest it's quite clear to me that right now, I'm not up to the bigger one. Case in point: I left the studio at 1:30 AM today having finished the line art on exactly one not particularly complicated Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan page. I spent 8 hours on that, so I guess if I had stuck it out for 24 hours I could have got 3 pages scanner-ready. Maybe 4; the page I worked on today had a few things in it that I didn't really know how to draw, so that slowed me down. But that's about it. I really respect anyone who can work at the pace of a 24-hour comic and come up with anything above the level of scribbles.

After work, I paid the Groningen crew another visit and I'm pleased to report they're doing quite well. Erik Wielaert had started inking (and the work I saw didn't disappoint! I hope some of it shows up on the event's blog before next morning); Jeroen had 17 pages done and was ahead a bit; Jelena was keeping up; and as far as I could see, so were all the others. I took some pictures with Jelena's camera, which I'm sure will be showing up somewhere soon enough.

One good thing they're doing is giving themselves time for little breaks. There's a temptation to just keep on pushing on, but the occasional opportunity to relax is essential. Jeroen, who has a part-time day job at the museum, gave the others a ride on the animatronic carrousel that essentially shows a 3-dimensional 8-minute commercial for the museum itself. They'll all claim to have enjoyed it ironically, I'm sure. Eight minutes is probably just the right length.

I plan to pay one more visit in the morning. They're getting a call from a radio show at six-ish, because there's nothing that late-night, early-morning radio show producers like better than to have someone at the other end of a phone line babbling incoherently. Also, by the end of the event, the RTL 4 camera crew that was there on Saturday morning will be back in the hope of shooting some credible zombie footage for their secret horror project. I don't know if I'll make it to the museum before 11 AM, but I'll try.

"...Oof! And that was just the good cop!"

Just so Americans know how the world will perceive them from now on. From Fokke & Sukke.

It's very late, and I've spent the evening working on Gang of Four way past the point where I hate every line of the art, but I wanted to mention that The Lazy Grind now definitely has claimed its first victim. We bid goodbye to Peacekeepers, which by the way really looks very good. I hope Ewan Baird won't be too discouraged from picking up the comic soon enough.
Ah well. That's me saved from ignominy. And now that the first one's out, there's likely to be a wave of people exhaling slowly and dropping out at the next update or the one after that.

Martin Wisse points to an overview of "edits" to The Essential Tomb of Dracula, a collection of Marvel schlock-horror comics, as well as some original Italian schlock-horror pocket comics. Interesting stuff, and kudos to The Groovy Age of Horror for providing us with large scans to set the record straight with.

Martin writes:

Now I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, I dislike reprints that tamper with the original, especially when it's not done by the original creators. On the other hand, this is not like covering up Lady Justice bare breasts: it wasn't great art, just cheap titillation and little is lost by the alterations. On the gripping hand, it is indictive of the current climate in the US, that things that could be sold with no trouble at newsstands in 1979 now need to be censored to sell in bookstores!

I'm not in two minds. This is vandalism. Compare and contrast:

Viktor, who I presume is the good guy, judging from the captions, is taking some sensible precautions in case his plan for separating the vampire from her host body fails. He straps her to his table so he doesn't get a face full of vampire if his technique doesn't work.

Now Viktor is tying the vampire by her breasts, the perv. This makes him look like a complete amateur - surely that strap is going to snap loose unless those titties are made of reinforced concrete. Did the change degrade the comic? You bet it did!

Scans_daily-type snark aside, I really don't think it matters whether the censored art is cheap titillation or the expensive kinda monument for the ages. For one thing, that's for the ages to decide; for another, the people on whose behalf Marvel photoshopped away the exposed mammaries are famous for not taking "yes" for an answer: you give them an inch, they'll take a mile and then complain about being unfairly denied another mile. I can sympathise with the editors for feeling that they had the choice between bowdlerising the art or canceling the book. Perhaps I would have made the same choice in their place. But it's time for a pushback. And that begins with, among many, many other things, the people who buy classic comics knowing that they're not being offered the classic comics in their original state and refusing to stand for it.