Waffle

I'm fed up with the fact that the current Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan website archives do not reflect the work done on the remaster project. After five years, only a handful of improved pages had been posted - until today! Starting with the storyline that is currently being remastered, The Rite of Serfdom, remastered pages will be uploaded to the archives as soon as possible once they're done. There are ten remade pages up right now: you can tell them apart from the original versions at a glance because they're a lot bigger. The old versions are 560 pixels wide, the new ones 648. At first, they appear shockingly large, but proportionally, they are only as large as the old versions would have looked on a 1024 x 768 monitor such as was common back in 2002. In a few years, they will look small again.

There are other differences, though. Many small areas of flat colour that I forgot to fill in back in 2002 have finally been filled; the panel borders are more natural-looking, even though a lot of them needed to be fixed with computer-based straight lines. A few areas here and there have been recoloured or have had light gradients or smart blurs applied to them; nothing that you would notice if you weren't looking for it, but the changes make the images 'pop' a little more.

Photoshop's scaling algorithm also includes some sharpening, which the software I used in 2002, Paint Shop Pro, did not apply. This is the one change that I'm not so sure about. The final images undeniably look sharper, but they also show some artifacts from the sharpening effect, especially in high-contrast areas. I may decide to turn that feature off if at all possible, but that will depend on the response I get from readers.

I have just shut down my Comicspace account and deleted all the links to it on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan pages that I could find. Please let me know if you find any that have been left behind.

Next step: shutting down the web presence on Modern Tales. I guess it would be nice to notify readers there that this step is imminent, so I will update there one more time.

The step after that is figuring out if I'm owed anything at all by the Open Ad Network or whatever it is called. Then cancel those ad spaces sitewide too.

Next year, it will be twenty years since I started work on the first Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan page. I started some time in May, 1991, self-publishing the first collection in 1992. That means that the period between May 2011 and May 2012 is the comic's twentieth anniversary year. My priorities for that year are:

1. Keeping the remasters going on a daily basis, or as close as I can manage without going nuts, through The Rite of Serfdom (350-ish pages plus 20 pages of 'nitpicks', comics in which I answered questions from readers and papered over inconsistencies) and into Feral (well over 100 pages and counting). In addition, making sure that some of those remasters finally show up on the main site - the remasters are actually in their fifth year already. I started doing the first ones early in 2006, and only the redrawn items have made it to the main site.

2. Creating a new story especially commemorating the 20th Anniversary. This will be a series of vignettes taking the fictional world up to the year 1012. That's about all I'm willing to say about it, except that the frequency and launch date are yet to be determined. All I have right now is notes.

3. Finish Feral in time it to get caught up with the remasters. This will probably include redrawing some of it, as I'm already looking at work from 2008 and thinking "I can do better now" - in spite of my infrequent drawing since then.

4. Launch some other comics in addition to ROCR. These may be related, or they may not.

5. Prepare Invasion for remastering. This will probably include redrawing some of it, and adding pages so the crossover aspect can be downplayed.

This is ambitious, but after three years, I'm finally coming to a point in my life where I have more art time again. And I'm itching to work on the comics again, in any way that I can.

Not on the list of priorities for the 20th anniversary year, because I am already working it, is ridding the website of its connections to the Modern Tales/Comicspace family of websites. This is not out of any ill will towards said group of websites, but just to simplify my online presence a bit and have fewer sites to work on. The archives on Modern Tales are now in noticeably worse shape than on either the main website or the Drunk Duck mirror where the remasters are currently running. meanwhile Comicspace has moved from being a marginally useful site for me to sell my original art on to a marginally bothersome annoyance. It is now run on a platform (WordPress) that is not, in my opinion, suited to the site's purpose, and as a result it has become a way for me to get spammed through channels that weren't available to spammers when it was on its original platform. It is not going to get any better either: while I am not privy to inside information at Comicspace, and no longer even keep up with what, if anything, it publically announced, it's clear from reading Comicspace co-founder Joey Manley's writing online that his focus is now elsewhere: specifically, with helping webcomics that already have a large readership but no business model to become financially succesful. This is in contrast with the original conception of Comicspace, which was to be a high-quality social network/site hosting toolkit for all webcomics. This is a wise decision, one that Aggie and I think is the best someone in Joey's position can make; but as I do not have a high readership, I'm not in his target group - so, time for me to move on. The links to Modern Tales and Comicspace on the main page have already gone; soon, ROCR on Modern Tales will be shut down and the advertising slots hosted through Comicspace's advertising branch reclaimed for something else.

This leaves me with Chronicles of the Witch Queen. I haven't discussed this with my COTW partners Geir and Daniel, but I expect that I will remove most of the updates from the past year (essentially: an unmaintained mirror of the remasters of the Corby Tribe storyline, plus a spin-off comic that has also stalled), create a front page for the site that clearly indicates the site's archived status, and hand over the keys to Geir and Daniel. They are working on a new story, but when that is ready to go, my schedule will be so full that for me to offer to do publishing work for them won't actually be doing them any favours. Better that that be clear from the get-go so they can take care of their own interests more effectively. They're both on my Christmas list, but as far as comics are concerned, it is time for me to move on. There may be cameos in the 20th anniversary storyline but that will be that.

The latest missing comic to be added to the archives was the one for September 3, 2002, missing for eight years. This was one that I did not like the look of at all when I found it, so I took some time to redraw it. This new version is a big improvement on the original.

I spend a lot of time on the Corby Tribe remasters, which are currently running over on the Drunk Duck ROCR rerun/mirror site, off the main ROCR website. I do post the rediscovered comics on the main site as soon as they're ready to go, but the ones that are merely remastered are all posted on the Drunk Duck site only, for now. In this case, remastering means the coloured files are reassembled, mistakes and blemishes are fixed, they are re-texted inside the word balloons if needed, and in the case of The Corby Tribe, I edit and format the captions, combine them with the images in a page layout program, post-process the finished work some more in Photoshop and post the final image on the Drunk Duck mirror. Eventually, the remasters will also be posted on the main site, but that may take a while. Not until they're done.

It takes a lot of time that I could spend, say, working on Feral. In fact, 15 months ago, spending all that time on the project drove me up the wall and I had to quit. Then in January, my fleet of redundant production computers crashed redundantly, a lot of the new master files were lost, and that seemed to be that. One more long-term commitment that I had to bail out of. But I could never really put it to bed entirely, and now I am more motivated to do this than I am to work on Feral. I am putting off working on Feral to work on a storyline I finished eight years ago, and feeling very strongly that that is the best way to spend my very limited art time.

The reasons for this are two-fold: reason one is that if I spend two hours on Feral, I have a partly finished page that I will then have to work on for two or three more two-hour sessions, if I'm lucky enough to have time for two-hour drawing sessions (the art time situation has improved somewhat, but I rarely get more than two hours, after a working day at my day job, a commute and my currently less-than equal share of the household chores). On the other hand, if I spend two hours on the old stuff, I end up with half a dozen remastered comics, plus possibly the rediscovery of a lost comic, which I may or may not redraw. If I redraw, the production slows down to the same rate as if I was working on Feral but overall, I end up having a lot more output per hour spent. The second reason is that while Feral is merely unfinished, The Corby Tribe is broken. The format is inconsistent, episodes are missing, some images that it seemed like a good idea to host off-site in 2002, are now gone, and the quality of the art is very uneven. I can't fix all of these problems completely, but I can't leave the work as it is. What is being posted on Drunk Duck, and will eventually be brought back to the main site, is the best shot I've got at making the story look decent again. Actually, there is a third reason. Working on this feels right. I can focus on it without any effort, I can motivate myself to go up to my new studio space and actually do it, and I have a sense of artistic purpose when working on the remasters that I don't have when I work on anything else. And because I occasionally redraw a comic, I can see that I have in fact improved a bit in those eight years. This is a huge confidence-booster.

I do have plans to finish Feral, work on the backlog of earlier commissions and even do a completely new story next year for the 20th anniversary of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. But this comes first. First, I fix what is broken.

While trawling through the archived mater files for the now definitely resumed Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan remasters, I found yet another episode that was not in the archives on the main site: the episode originally scheduled for August 16 or 17, 2002 is now back in the archives after eight years. It was restored to the archives as soon as possible, with new captions as the old captions had vanished from those locations where I was able to find earlier missing entries.

Looking at the snapshot on the site for August 16 on theThe Web Archive, that day was the day I pre-empted the daily installment to announce that I was moving to Modern Tales, which was then being launched as a subscription site. This may have something to do with the episode's more-thorough-than-usual disappearance: possibly I never got around to posting the scheduled comic, or I posted it the next day and never copied it over to the Modern Tales archive, picking up the giant archive move with the comic for the Monday afterwards. I don't remember. At least it is now back after eight years.

There are two redrawn items in the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archives: the comic for July 10, 2002 and the one for August 8, 2002. The former was redrawn for no other reason than that the original version was hastily drawn and coloured and looked rather hideous. The latter has also been missing entirely from the archives since the comic's move to Modern Tales back in 2003.

Here's what happened: the move of my archives to Modern Tales in 2003 was a manual process involving about 800 individual episodes. There was no automation for this available at all. Towards the end of the process, a number of episodes got skipped, and many of those were not caught until much later. All server moves since then have had at least some automation, but they were based on the faulty archives at Modern Tales.

Fast forward to the years between 2007 and 2009, when I was rerunning the old comics in remastered, partly recoloured form on a mirror site, located on Drunk Duck. This was another manual process but it was a lot slower and involved going back to the working files and paper originals, and checking every image individually. So over time, I discovered many lost episodes. What this process had in common with the move to Modern Tales, though, was that I started to get discouraged towards the end, and when I hit the 146th episode of the storyline The Corby Tribe and realised just how poorly made and ugly it was, I gave up. But that still left me with a hideous looking episode in the archives, so in May 2010, I took some time out to redraw that one, and looked into resuming the reruns later that year while I was at it. I then found that a second episode that had visual continuity with the one I had just redrawn, was also very ugly and was only redeemed by the fact that it was not in my archives at all. So I redrew that, but it took until now to colour them fully and get them ready for display on the website.

There is now a third episode that, while not actually bad, has visual continuity with the redrawn ones, so next up, I will redraw that as well. Should be easy and fun.

We're in the final stages of buying a house - we being me and my fiancee, who is coming over from the US in a month with the kids, dog and cat - and I'm finding, among other things, that the energy for drawing new art, any new art, simply isn't there. I now expect Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan to be on hiatus until October, as well as any and all side projects that I've been working on. But I am also getting fed up with having Kel dropping that F-bomb on the front page, so I'm calling for guest art! Anyone want to draw something to put on the front page instead? As long as it's reasonably related to Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, I will run it as a front page comic, link to whatever you want it to link to, and move it to the guest art archives later. Your drawing, photograph, or whatever will be seen by hundreds of people and if you're really lucky, your artwork will be the last in line and stay on the front page until October.

Only condition: No more swearing (I'm really, really sick of that) or anything else that I find personally distasteful. My limits are fairly wide, but I do have them and I will know if they've been passed when I see it. Most people who read the comic should find it easy to stay within them.

The advertising campaign that Mithandir and Alien of Chasing the Sunset bought me for the tenth anniversary of ROCR online brought several hundred new readers in. Combined with the fact that I had been advertising a little bit starting the day before the anniversary, and with the changes I made to the places where the 120x600 skyscraper ad is displayed, this led to a huge spike in the number of pageviews on rocr.net and associated websites: over 20,000 on the second day of the campaign. This triggered an automated bidding war between two sites that like to advertise on larger webcomics sites, and as a result that skyscraper ad earned $6,50 per day in the US for most of July 3.

This is hugely motivational to me. Starting next week, I will be &eur; 120,000 in debt because I'm about to buy a house, and while I obviously cannot quit my day job for something that earns $ 6,50 a day, it would really help me out a lot if I could make that money on top of my day job for a few months. And the fact that it's earning that much without the comic being regularly updated, and with there being an F-bomb on the latest page (two big strikes against any webcomic; F-bombs turn off audiences very quickly), makes me wonder how it would have done if there had been regular updates around the time the campaign ran. I expect to see a drop-off in the next few days but am also wishing for the numbers to stay the same. Practically speaking, the house purchasing process is going to make it impossible for me to get back to the comic in the next week.

But I want to get back to it soon. And it will become easier if at least some money keeps rolling in.

On July 1, 2000, I started the English-language online run of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan with an introductory strip to the Gudrun storyline. That wasn't the first time I'd put the comic online, but it was my first proper go at it, in English and with the intention of making it primarily a webcomic.

Amazingly, ten years on, I'm still here even though the comic now goes for long periods without updates, Day jobs and life plans will do that to a webcomic. And what is there, the 1300+ updates, is still a huge archive that people nevertheless take the time to dive into, and I'm proud of having lasted that long. Next year, the comic itself will be twenty years old. Amazing.

This year, neither I nor Aggie got around to doing an anniversary comic. Too much going on in our lives. We did get an anniversary present though: Mithandir and Alien of Chasing the Sunset bought us a short Project Wonderful advertising campaign! And it's a good one, with a good range of websites, some of which show promising conversion rates - if you come from one of these sites, welcome! And thanks Mith and Alien. I'll return the favour when the right time comes.

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan was shortlisted for a Clickie this year. The Clickie is an award for webcomics made in the Netherlands and Belgium, instituted in 2005, and is noteworthy because it is a real-world award with an awards ceremony in meatspace, during which an actual physical trophy is handed out. This year's ceremony will be at the Stripdagen Haarlem 2010, a major comics convention for the Netherlands, on Saturday, June 5 at 14:00.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to the awards ceremony. My fiancee is over from the United States and she's only staying for two weeks, most of which we will be spending trying to buy a house. Even on the weekends, we will have plenty on our plates and though we have been to comics conventions together in the past, right now it's not something we need to be doing. In addition, I have learned in the past that going to conventions as an artist is something that takes preparation, and right now, I am woefully unprepared. The comic is on hiatus; is no longer part of my professional career; I have no promotional materials, product or prepared statements; I did not rent a table. I have no business being there on the off chance that I might win an award. So instead I'll offer my regrets that I can't be there and hope someone who is going will be able to pick up the award on my behalf if I do win it. Sorry.