Waffle

I didn’t get to work on Feral again this weekend, and it’s time I stopped kidding myself: I can’t keep up with a schedule, so I’m going to take another break and putting up some filler in the mean time, until I’ve built a buffer.

The filler I’ve picked is the two Courtly Manners stories from 2002 and 2005, respectively. The second one used to be on the old site when ROCR was primarily available as a subscription comic, but didn’t survive the transition to free and to WillowCMS. It’s been posted on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen site, though, but it never got the audiences there that Invasion and Feral did get. Courtly Manners 1 has been languishing there as well.

The comics will be posted at a frequency of 1 a day, every day. I’ve always thought that’d be the perfect schedule, and so it annoys me that right now, I can’t even swing one a week. A buffer will help.

Feral will be back at the beginning of November.

Invasion has updated again, with Messenger Witch Agni getting back to work immediately, and Elspeth putting her plan into action.

This will be the last Invasion update in a while - I haven’t been able to produce any new pages. Heck, I’m struggling just to do one penciled page of Feral each week, and may end up having to skip a few weeks for that too, if I have to draw anything particularly complex.

Invasion will update again on Friday, August 8.

In fact, weekly updates will be pretty much assured for the next month or so. It will also update on the ROCR archives, though it won’t be shown on the front page there.

There’s a lot being added to the archives. Stealth updates are underway for The Lives of X!Gloop and once that’s done, for The Eye of the Underworld. I’ll unveil those as complete archives when they’re done. They’ve been milked more than enough over the past few years for me not to feel like I should run them on the front page, but I do want them under the WillowCMS umbrella now.

Now running on Odds and Ends: Expecting to Fly, a surreal solo comic by Chronicles of the Witch Queen artist Daniel Østvold. Fans of Moebius’ Airtight Garage series and other improvised, stream-of-consciousness stories will love this comic Daniel made in the mid-1990s, featuring himself, the Mephistophelian figure of Ray Tel Soccio and the floating heads of the Baron von Fieffelfalsfaffel and the Homunculus from the Chronicles of the Witch Queen comics.

As an artist working in several disciplines, Daniel has always been keen to connect all the various art forms he has worked in, and this series connects seemlessly to his sculptural work, which over the years has been exhibited in Scandinavia, the Baltic countries and elsewhere in Europe, his fantasy comics, his autobiographical comics and his musical projects, all of which were referred to or otherwise incorporated into the free-flowing plot, set simultaniously in Izmir, Turkey, and the 26th level of consciousness.

Expecting to Fly will update daily through February, completing its 28-page run on March 5.

Odds and Ends is the section of the Chronicles of the Witch Queen site where the contributing artists let their hair down and show off some of the things they’ve done that are tangentially related to the main series, as well as sketches, character art, concept art and other fun stuff. Other chapters in Odds and Ends show work by Reinder Dijkhuis, Calvin Bexfield and guests. Tooncast available.

OK, I’m going to stop showing those line art scans for already-published comics on the front page. It’s not doing the popularity of the site much good for me to keep showing you pages you’ve already seen, albeit in a different form. So, time to move on. I am, however, going to keep pushing the art sales and keeping you informed about them.

First, I want to nip one misunderstanding in the bud: the sale of my original work is not another sign that I’m quitting the comics for good. This time around, I’ve studiously avoided saying things like "your purchase of the art will help me get back on track" because right now, I can’t make such promises. I honestly don’t know when I’ll be ready to get back to working on Feral or Invasion - only that I’m too busy having a life right now, and I’m not going to get back to having all my waking hours dominated by the need to keep those comics updated. So if you want to buy art, buy it because you like it, not because it subsidizes the comics.

Having said that…. it would be foolish of me not to mention that any money earned from the sales is money I won’t have to make some other way, and that raising, say, $2000 from the art sales overall would free me for a month. So if you’re swayed by that, do take a look and see if there’s an original you’d like to have framed on your wall or collected into a portfolio collection.

That brings me to the second point. Contrary to what I wrote the other day, registration at ComicSpace may be a bit of a hurdle after all. Calvin definitely thought so. I would like to reassure everyone that registration is easy and does not result in spam, and will also allow you to add me as a friend within the ComicSpace system and mark my galleries as your favourites, raising the profile for future sales. If only I’d known a year ago, during the ComicSpace hype, that I’d be using the site this way, I’d have pushed it harder at the time.

I chose ComicSpace for its efficient uploading process and sales automation. If you know a site that allows me to upload whole batches of images, price the items they refer to and handle the sales process automatically, and doesn’t hide images according to some arbitrary policy on so-called "mature" imagery, please let me know.I’ll investigate it and offer an alternative sales channel if I like it enough.

Meanwhile, on the front page… tomorrow I’ll start showing a solo Daniel Østvold comic, Expecting to Play as part of Odds and Ends. This comic has only a tangential relationship with the rest of Chronicles of the Witch Queen but is a lot of fun in a surreal, demented way.

So I just found out that for the few weeks I’ve been herding readers to a site whose archive pages are badly broken.

Apologies, all. I’ll explain the problem and why it will take hours to fix when I have a few minutes, and I’ll fix it when I have a few hours. It’s not hard to figure out what all the broken pages have in common. In the mean time, you can read a non-broken archive of Invasion on the main site.

Update: The problem’s been fixed automatically, which I hadn’t expected to be honest. If you don’t mind, I won’t go into the background of the problem after all.

Invasion will resume on November 21, on my Chronicles of the Witch Queen site, after a four-month hiatus.

Feral will go on hiatus again for a while. The front page at rocr.net will run substitute content.

The reason for these changes is that I’m still trying to find my way around how to combine cartooning with a full-time day job. For the past two months, I’ve been drawing Invasion pages at home during the working week, while working on Feral in my studio over the weekend. That way, pages and projects wouldn’t get too badly mixed up or have to be transported too often, but the upshot of this is that I’ve done mostly digital work on Feral, with the buffer of pen-and-ink art running out, while a pile of pen-and-ink originals for Invasion slowly grew on my desk. I am now doing digital work on those, with help from Drooling Fan Girl who does the colour flats, and they will be finished just in time for a three-updates-a-week schedule starting on Wednesday, November 21 and continuing until that buffer also runs out.

Note how the links above all point to the Chronicles of the Witch Queen site? That’s also an adaptation to the new situation. While the CMS on rocr.net is a lot more flexible than that on Webcomicsnation in many ways, it doesn’t readily allow me to treat storylines as standalone graphic novels running more or less concurrently (it can, but I’d have to put in time to make new templates). So to keep the two storylines a little more separated for everyone, I’m focusing more on posting and promoting my comics over there. I have moved most of my Project Wonderful-based promotion over to the new storylines at COTWQ, which has the additional benefit of pushing Feral into the Webcomicsnation popularity charts (and occasionally some of the other stories as well). I’ll knock that Templar, Arizona off the number one spot yet!

I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that starting on Monday, I will be working full-time at Globaltextware, a software localisation company in Groningen. What this means is that I’ll be resolving my financial problems, and, even better, I will be resolving them doing intellectually stimulating work, within my degree, in a work environment that I’ve tested thoroughly over the past week, and with no commute whatsoever. It’s the best job offer I could possibly get.

The bad news is the same news. The job is full-time, so there will be very, very little time left for cartooning. If I want to go on running on a regular basis as well, and maybe seeing some of my friends some time - you know, this thing people call having a life - I will have a few weekday evenings when I’m not too tired, plus the weekends except when I’m taking part in a running event. I’ll be very lucky to produce one update a week.

I’m at peace with that, mostly, though it makes for a wrenching and scary change in my life. I’ve got some plans for dealing with that, though, which will allow me to keep my connection to the webcomics world, or at least those part of it that I still like, alive. Here’s what I think I’ll be doing.

White House in Orbit: I will extend the moratorium on posting new Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan material on my main site, rocr.net by another three weeks. During that time, I will post two more White House in Orbit stories: "In Space, No One Can Hear You Groan", and "Target: The Emperor", from 2001 and 2003, respectively. These will run daily, taking us into the end of September, which will be my trial period at the new job.

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan: The "Invasion" storyline will be moved to the crossovers section of the archives and left unfinished for the time being. Occasional updates may show up on the Webcomicsnation mirror, but don’t hold your breath. "Feral" will continue to be published on Modern Tales at a rate of one update a week - except this week and the next when there’ll be two updates. When I start posting ROCR updates on the main site again, what I post will be the new "Feral" pages, which will appear on the main site at a rate of three a week until caught up with the Modern Tales publication. Confused? Yeah, me too. I can just about keep up with the different schedules. Meanwhile, the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan re-run on the webcomics site Drunk Duck will continue at its old pace of one update a day, with material queued up until the end of May, 2008.

Lives of X!Gloop: Two years ago, I posted some of my earliest comics, a surreal series called The Lives of X!Gloop on my site. These are now being rerun on Drunk Duck as well, also at a pace of one update a day until I run out. I just might scan and process the unpublished pages from that series as well - that’s the sort of job I can do when I’m knackered out from a day’s work.

I’ll post a summary of the above as a front page announcement tomorrow, so don’t worry if you can’t keep track of everything.

The Double and Alcydia artist Daniel Østvold has updated his Kunst.no pages (in Norwegian) with some pictures of recent fine art projects and a preview of the sequel to Alcydia, Kidnapped Princesses.

Daniel works fast when he has the opportunity to, but he usually has several things on the boil at any time, so it’s nice to see that he has been working on a new comics project. As usual, the script is by Geir. I have no further details than what it says on the pages, which is basically that Countess Alcydia has been settling into a new line of business, kidnapping prinsesses for fun and profit. I hope we’ll be able to run it on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen web site late this year.

I’ve put up a batch of fan art for the crossover story Invasion over on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen site. Or at least, I call it fan art, but five of the six pieces are actually preliminaries made by other participants in the crossover: Caitlin Woods and Gothia, both of CameoComic. The sixth one is by co-blogger and Dangerous and Fluffy writer Adam.

Like basically every other cartoonist I have an ego the size of a planet, so if you can draw even a little bit, send me more!