Waffle

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!

Fesworks has reviewed Chronicles of the Witch Queen in his regular mini-webcasts of reviews, and given it a very favourable rating. I can't cut and paste from an MP3 here, but the review itself is only sixty seconds long so there isn't anything stopping you from listening to it.

I'm sort of amused that he avoided trying to pronounce our names though...

I'm also very pleased by the readership Invasion is getting on the COTWQ site. It's a modest number compared to what the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan main site pulls, but considering that the COTWQ version is merely a mirror, it's doing very well and is likely to hit the Webcomicsnation network's daily top 25 pretty soon. Evidently some people prefer to read it within Webcomicsnation, because it's a system they already know, it has lots of reminders to people telling them the comic has updated, and doesn't have the intimidatingly large archives that ROCR.net has. I may have to rethink my strategy for the COTWQ site in response to that, and mirror more of my work there.

Now that all stories are complete, it's time for me to repost this:

The correct chronological running order for the Chronicles of the Witch Queen stories is as follows:

1. The Double
2. Christmas at Blocksberg
3. The Eye of the Underworld
4. Thousandstab
5. Staff Cutbacks
6. Alcydia / Guðrún
7. Courtly Manners
8. Courtly Manners 2: The Unicorn Race

Webcomicsnation doesn't offer any means of changing the order in which stories are shown on the front page - they're shown in the order their database entries were added to the site. This may change in the future, I hope. I like being able to move blocks around like I can do in WillowCMS.

The remastered edition of Guðrún ends over on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen site today.

As far as I know, it's still very rare for any webcomic to be remastered, though reruns with commentary have occurred in a few places. Guðrún was the story with which I finally got serious about publishing Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan online six years ago. But that doesn't mean I immediately got it all right;the digital cleaning, lettering and resizing were done very clumsily and no high-res masters were kept from which I could re-do the work. So I eventually bit the bullet and re-scanned the whole thing from the original art. The new version looks a lot better, even though, in many ways, it's "rawer" - there is less tinkering with the analog art than there was the first time around, simply because it's no longer needed to make tiny scans presentable or preserve bandwidth.

I'll still need to replace the image files on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan site. To do that, I'll go back to the master files, cut the pages in half and upload those half-pages at a width of 800 pixels instead of the 600(-ish; getting a consistent width was one thing I did wrong at the time) pixels wide images the site has now, so that the originally-intended presentation is left intact and any pages containing comments can be preserved. That's a bit of a chore, but I'll get around to it eventually.

Potentially the best thing about the project: I now have lettered master files that are suitable for print, if anyone's interested...