Obsession Du Jour

The Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comics for October 3 and October 31, 2010 have been digitally inked and coloured by myself and Aggie Janicot. All the newsposts following those two comics have been moved out of the main comics archive, so it's looking tidier than it has in years.

More to follow; mostly more digital inks of comics from the pencil era of ROCR, but new work should start showing in the next few weeks as well.

The book is unlikely to show up in the near future. After three years of no new updates, there aren't enough people to sell it to, so I want to focus on getting new updates out this year, so I can rebuild and reconnect with ROCR's audience. There will be a book eventually; there may even be several at a time. Just not in the next few months; certainly not before Christmas.

It has come to my attention that I'm different from David Bowie in two significant respects:

1. I'm not as cool, stylish or photogenic as David Bowie. Obviously.
2. Unlike David Bowie, I can't just drop a bunch of new product on people all of a sudden and expect it to sell or get airtime. I just can't.

To be able to drop a bunch of new product like a book, I have to first rebuild my audience. To do that, I have to create new work. To do that, I first have to fix the issues that make returning to Feral seem so daunting. All that is coming, but it's still going to be slow.

Starting in March, I will start posting works in progress for Feral as Vote incentives for Topwebcomics. These are inked and/or coloured versions of existing Feral pages in varying stages of completion. Some of these may also show up on DeviantArt, but the focus will be on posting them as vote incentives. This will help with rebuilding that audience and will also give me an incentive to work on the pages and immerse myself in Feral again. There's other remaster-related work that also needs doing, but I think I'll be able to carve out time for this now.

The book? I'm still delaying work on that, because of the above. It'll get worked on when I'm good and ready and when there are people around to buy it again.

I have digitally redrawn the final three updates of the The Stone of Contention storyline. The first one is now available on the website where I am showing reruns of ROCR and if you're reading this after December 30, 2012, you can just read on from there.

I created these three digital redraws partly out of curiosity about how long it would take me to do draw multiple digital pages and what the results would be like, and partly because I was unsatisfied with the originals beyond my usual attitude of "man, I sucked in [insert year here]". I thought that even for 1996, the year they were created, these pages were done in an exceptionally sloppy and careless way, as if I was tired of working on the comic.

A little while before I started working on the redraws, I had noticed that the Brewery storyline with art by Remco Polman, when it was showcased on that rerun site, caused the pageviews there to shoot up, and took it as evidence that the audience that sees these reruns cares a lot about art quality; the better the art is, the more likely that they'll want to read more. So what could be better than replacing some unusually bad artwork with above-average artwork? And it gave me the opportunity to practice digital inking and time myself doing so.

I think all three redrawn pages are much improved. But don't take my word for it; please see for yourself. And please comment on the site itself!

Thanks to all the people who contributed transcriptions to the Oh No Robot search database for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, and apologies for the delays in getting them processed and approved. For some reason, Oh No Robot has stopped sending me notices when a new transcription is added, so I never noticed that these new transcriptions were there. I'm now caught up, though. Thank you so much! Those 70-odd extra transcriptions will improve searchability for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan and bring new readers to the site at a time when I need them.

The Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan storyline Sauna Opera has been remastered. Read it starting with this episode: Finnish and Clwydian bathing cultures meet.

I expected this remaster to be very straightforward: 20 pages that were already in the can from my first attempt at revising it in 2006. All I needed to do was flatten the pages, export at a size where the width was 648 pixels and the height was whatever it came out as, run the pages through pngout and upload.

Of course it turned out to be anything but straightforward. Some master files were missing and I had to dig into some very old back-up CDs to find them. Then some were in different file formats, and different master image sizes, and there were a lot of issues with ragged boundaries and sloppy inking that were pretty much invisible in the original publication, but which had to be fixed before the images could be shown at the much larger size they are now. And this was actually one of the better-organized of the older stories. The others from the same year are a lot messier.

Back in 2001, I decided to write Sauna Opera as a tightly-scripted story of exactly 20 pages, draw them at a larger size than before and scan and process them with the possibility of print in mind. The black and white line art was scanned, as best as I could, at 600 DPI. However, I did not have the computer capacity at the time to colour and letter images at that size with multiple layers. I used GIMP and Paint Shop Pro at the time, and both were big memory hogs that couldn't handle larger images well. So the colour versions and the lettering were done in GIMP at an intermediate size, roughly 1100 x 1600 pixels. What's more, I only coloured some of the pages. Colour at the time was a bit of an extra for me. I took the time if I thought the art was worth it and would be reused for promotional purposes. Finally, I replaced the hand-drawn borders with straighter borders done in GIMP before final export.

In 2006, I made my first attempt at remastering the story. I used Photoshop to colour all the pages that I had originally left in black and white, and did so at full resolution using a layering approach that I'd learned in the mean time. I intended to export at 550 pixels wide, because that was the image width for The Rite of Serfdom and Feral at the time, and in a change of preference, I decided to go with the original, hand-drawn panel borders because they looked more natural with the contents. However, for the pages that I'd coloured in 2001, I used the GIMP files to master directly from, without further conversion. I exported the files at 550 pixels wide and used those on the Drunk Duck mirror, but never got around to uploading them to the main site.

So here we are, almost seven years later again, and the time has come to fix up the 2001-era archives after working on remasters for The Corby Tribe, The Rite of Serfdom and Feral for four long, frustrating years. During those years, however, the archives for those stories that were in the same basic format (vertical pages, six-panel grid) have had yet another size upgrade, and now the target width is 648 pixels. Oh, and I have fully standardized on Photoshop and only use GIMP to convert files in GIMP's native format, XCF, to PSD. So I had to do that, and then fix all the mistakes that were mostly invisible at 418 pixels, but seriously distracting at 648. In the end, the remaster work took two days: one Sunday and the Saturday after that.

And while the final result is a lot more consistent and is pretty much a textbook example of what I do these remasters for—eventually, all comics made after 2001 should be in colour, and all of them should be in one of three formats: 648 pixels vertical, 800 pixels horizontal or 850 pixels vertical with text captions in HTML—I will still have to do more work on these if I ever do prepare these episodes for print.

Plus, in 2012, the type on these comics looks huge. Then again, that is probably an advantage on tablets.

...nor are these proper product photos of the Rite of Serfdom book. Instead, these are snapshots of the proof version of what will one day be the Rite of Serfdom book. We are pretty much learning how to do this as we go along, and there are many things that we still need to fix.

For example, the title font looked correctly aligned when we were looking at it on the screens. Turns out that when you cut off the margins, it doesn't always work out that way.

We're working with a printer in Egypt. They can give us excellent printing quality for the price. The downside is that we won't be anywhere near them when they print the book, and because this is their first comics project, they don't necessarily always know the expectations. Here you see the interior, with extremely large outer margins and very small inner margins. The reason is that they didn't count the pages as we intended: they started with a left-side page instead of a right-side one, and so all pages that were supposed to go on the left side of the book ended up on the right, and vice versa. Lesson learned: make it really clear where your first page of content is going to go. This is our responsibility, not theirs. On the plus side: the colour accuracy is pretty good—see the first of these two pages on the website for comparison.

The book is not very large, but it is very thick, making for an imposing physical object. We do need to double check with the printer that they're going to use a stronger binding than on this first proof, because we need to be sure it won't fall apart when the reader cracks it open.

The proof copy arrived with a larger shipment of printed goods from Egypt, which was held up at customs for a while. This is annoying but unavoidable as we do not have a huge budget for the book, though if we'd realized the extent of the delay in advance, we'd have ponied up to have it mailed to us instead. Another lesson learned.
This weekend, our original plan was to go through the book page by page to look for layout issues, typos, colour problems and other issues in greater detail. Unfortunately, Aggie was ill this weekend, which meant that we had to change our plans—she spent two days in bed while I did a modest amount of work on other ROCR-related things. At this point, I'm not convinced we'll have it ready for Christmas, especially if the final version gets delayed like that again (please note that the delays are unavoidable as we're doing this on a shoestring budget); however, when it does come out, we will probably be selling it at conventions and events for a year, so Christmas is just a blip in the schedule.

The last time I put out anything in print, it was black and white, photocopied and stapled, and only 48 pages. Even at this early stage, it amazes me that we can do a book like this now.

The Rite of Serfdom remasters are now done, at long last. All 342 existing episodes have been given a makeover, with new lettering, new more organic looking gutters, a size upgrade, a colour depth upgrade and more. "More" varies from little bits of touchup here and there to a complete redraw of a whole page or even a sequence of pages. One thing left to do is the addition of one page to a redrawn sequence, because upon rereading, the scene seemed to shift too quickly. That will get done in the next week or so.

And then it'll be time for the next stage of this big project! I will have 343 high-res, full-colour master files with lettering, plus one cover illustration done years ago that was never included in the archives. What am I going to do with them? Why, I'm going to make a book! With the help of Rona, who is now interning at a graphic design shop to bring her expertise on digital publishing and printing up to date, I plan to release The Rite of Serfdom in multiple formats, including both ebooks and print. We still need to figure out a lot, including such burning questions as "What's possible?" and "How can we make it work without breaking the bank?", and we still have a lot of work ahead of us, but we are pushing ahead with this, one way or another. If you want to read more as we work on this, and if you want to find out more about our other work in progress, join the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan Facebook page or follow RoguesClwydRhan on Twitter; both channels are updated very frequently with the latest news.

People have been asking for it since the switch to WillowCMS, and now it's finally there: an RSS feed for the comic. This feed is a little unusual in that it picks up the last modified comic, so people can follow the remasters as they are posted, as well as any new pages.

This is the feed URL: http://www.rocr.net/?p=rssmod. For use in an RSS reader app or an aggregation site like Google Reader. Not to be used for unauthorized reproduction of site content.

Remasters on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan continue at a slow but mostly steady pace. We have now reached the update for May 14, 2004, which had backgrounds by Yonaka Yamako. If we were to do that now, we'd probably have sent digital files back and forth, and worked entirely digitally, but back then, neither of us was comfortable doing that. Here's what I wrote about the process at the time:

In an effort to catch up with Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan's schedule without compromising the art quality, I asked Yonaka to do some backgrounds for me. She'd done this once before, and that was very satisfactory indeed. Working over the Internet meant I could get the page to and from Georgia (the U.S. state, not the former Soviet Republic), but at a price.

This is a scaled version of the scanned page that I sent to Yonaka. I put it on a web server and emailed her the URL plus instructions. I told her I wanted a realistic rendition of the space the scene was set in in all panels except the third and fourth, which should feature a historical narrative rendered in wood carving style, ca. 1000 AD. Yonaka knows from carving, and she knows her history, but I sent her a reference from a Norwegian stave church portal anyway.

Black and white line art without background. Click to enlarge

Yonaka simply prints the scanned page out on an inexpensive inkjet printer. The line quality suffers somewhat in this process, but because the scans are high-res to begin with, it doesn't really show in the final result, at least not on the Web. I may run into trouble if I try to make a print version, though.

Yonaka then simply drew the background in pencil, on the print-out. It's really low-budget.
Because the third panel was so much work, she posted the an intermediate version of the page on her website for me to check out, before continuing with panel 4. The third panel is in pencil, with pencil shading. The other panels, however, are in ink.

Line art with Yonaka's backgrounds. Click to enlarge.

Once I'd approved panel 3, which I did quite enthusiastically, Yonaka drew the background for panel 4. It's looking quite crowded now...

Final backgrounds including the fourth panel. Click to enlarge.

The final colored artwork, without the lettering. I didn't have to do much on panels 3 and 4. Even a flat color over the entire area brought out the relief in Yonaka's drawings.

Digital colours by me, as done in 2004. Click to enlarge.

After that, the page got its lettering, and with that done, the page was flattened (i.e. all the layers were reduced to a single layer), scaled to web size and posted. Eight years later, I revisited it as part of the remaster project, and this gives me an opportunity to show what sort of changes I've made. This is what the artwork looks like now, when its at the same stage as in the previous image, coloured but not lettered:

As you can see, in this case, changes are slight. Maghreid' hair is recoloured, a number of small lines are removed, some small areas of colour that had been skipped over have been filled in, and most significantly, Maghreid's eyes now have pupils where they were originally blank areas of green. I think it's the last bit that made the most difference.
This is what it's like with most of the pages. Very little is redrawn - all the time goes into cleanup an restoration.

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan now has a social media bar for easy sharing through Twitter, Facebook etc. My criteria for a social media bar were that it needed to be visually discrete - i.e. no filling the entire width of a screen and no sticking to the bottom as you scroll - customisable and not too free with users' personal data. So far, Add to Any's bar seems to fit the bill. It's easy to install and customise, can be made compact and does not appear to draw its image files directly from Facebook etc's servers.

However, it pays to be vigilant, and I just found this, which I shall fix in an instance. But with that out of the way, the benefits should outweigh the disadvantages. Please let me know if there are other aspects that I need to look into, or if you think there are better alternatives available that fit my criteria better.