Waffle

I'm not sure if I should go on with the experiment in digital work. The latest update turned out better than the previous one (though there may still be changes to the colouring) but it took forever to make, was not a lot of fun and I still don't have a good working process for digital inking. As a result, pretty much every procedural decision I made while working on it turned out to be wrong, and once again a lot of time was wasted. I'm not that happy with the result either; being better than the March 16 update is an awfully low bar to clear, especially with four weeks between the two updates. I think next update, I'll be definitely going back to inking on paper and setting aside enough time to do it all properly. Having Easter Monday off from work should help with that.

On the other hand, Aggie hated the switch to digital when she got started on it, and is now getting much more comfortable. Maybe all it needs is more time and practice.

In the longer term, I'm concerned about my ability to keep a big-production comic like this Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan storyline going in my spare time from work. Perhaps I need to do a simpler comic that I can write and draw in two hours per episode and that doesn't put such demands on me. I've been developing some ideas during the last working week (time I don't normally spend on regular ROCR anyway because it tends to come in two-hour blocks) and will be posting some sketches as Vote incentives on Topwebcomics next week. To be continued....

To prepare for the return of Feral as the ongoing serial on ROCR.net, I have moved Invasion back to the Crossovers section of the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archives. Feral returns on Monday with a (hopefully) weekly schedule. Until then, you'll be seeing the last page published, from back in September of last year. I hope this doesn't confuse people too much - it's what happens when you've got two series from the same continuity running over the same period.

Now that Invasion is over, I'm switching back to the Feral storyline, so that'll be coming back soon. Unfortunately, I'm still strapped for time and the switch involves writing a lot of new material before I can even start drawing, so it'll be a while before new updates start coming. I'm aiming for new updates to start on a weekly basis on Monday, February 23, 2009, though.

They'll be some changes to the process again. I'll be doing things mostly digitally for a while, at least until I've got the A3 scanner working again. Penciling is still done on paper, but Aggie has challenged me to come up with a comics page that's done entirely in digital media before she does. Sounds like fun!

In short, new comic on Monday the 23rd. Hopefully, I'll have the whole story in the bag before the end of the year.

In the comments to last week's Invasion episode on ROCR.net, reader TuuronTour asks:

Is this storyline going to be the final end of ROCR? I get the feeling everything is being wrapped up to get our rogue's a well-earned "and they liveth long and happily".

Tuur is almost right: the ending to Invasion doesn't so much wrap everything up as set things up so that I have the largest number of possibilities open. It'll be a while before the world will see a sequel to Invasion, but when I decide, in a year or so, to pick up where I left, I can treat the next story as essentially a new series, with a new cast of characters: Tamlin, Ragnarok, Atra, Jake, Owen, Hildegard, and... one more, with their offspring. It won't be necesary for new readers to learn the backstory - this new lot will be the gang. Older readers will still enjoy the similarities and differences between, say, original Atra and rejuvenated Atra, or be able to see the Tamlin-Ragnarok dynamic in the light of the dynamic that there used to be.

Or... I might scrap that plan altogether, bring Kel and Jodoque back a few years down the line, fast-forwarding to the year 1010. Either way works for me.

Before then, though, I will work on the three remaining stories set in the "old" ROCR universe: Feral, King Groy and Muscle. I am now writing material for Feral and while the first batch of new writing came out as drivel, there are some salvageable elements in it that should get the story moving again. I expect to be taking a few weeks off before I get around to posting any new comics though, and when I do, they will almost certainly be irregular again.

There's also the possibility of a spin-off comic set in the Wodeskog, based on the faerie village and what else might be living there. That's another thing that may or may not happen though.

Next: one more digital drawing. It's an inked version of the penciled character drawing of Aleas I did some six months ago:

Aleas inked digitally

If you have a Webcomicsnation account, could you do me a favour and review some of the comics on Chronicles of the Witch Queen? Anyone who has an account, even if you only use it for commenting on WCN comics, can post a review which will be posted on the WCN homepage and on the Talk About Comics blog, which has seen a flood of new reviews lately. What with the boost my readership has got from a writeup in a comparatively obscure e-zine, I think getting written up in a few other places that are read at the same level would make a lot of difference for the readership numbers.

Here are the details. Some of the comics on Chronicles of the Witch Queen are also published on Rocr.net, but not all of them are. They are also divided up differently, with each storyline getting its own homepage and URL. Below, you'll find a list of comics available on the site, and where to post reviews:

Reviews don't have to be positive but the intention of the feature is to spread the word about comics you like - so if you like Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan and the related comics, and have a Webcomicsnation account, spread the word! I'll be grateful for any and all reviews, long or short.

First off: follow my NaNoWriMo effort on My DeviantArt site. It's a Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story and actually fills in the big gap in the archives between The Stone of Contention and the stories that feature Jodoque as a character.

Second, here are my latest original scans for Invasion:

It's slow going... it's not so much a question of time as of motivation and priorities. For the weekends, my number one priority now is catching up on sleep. After that follow some time talking to Aggie online, grocery shopping, household and administrative chores, NaNoWrimo (during November only), and then working on ROCR if I still have time and energy. I find writing Feral particularly hard at that point so I work on Invasion first as that's already scripted. The reason Feral is hard to write is because the original outline has been superceded by the shape the story ended up taking in execution. This means that I can't end it on a cheap gag as originally planned and have to rethink in mid-story. This takes effort and concentration which I may not necessarily have in me. I do hope that the discipline of NaNoWriMo will help me improve in this area.

Because I sleep very little during the working week, I give my body as much time as it needs to catch up during the weekends. I turn off all external wake-up cues. So today I slept until half past one, PM! Admittedly, it had been a late night as I'd been up writing until past 2 AM, but that's still a long time to spend in bed.

So for ROCR outside of the NaNoWriMO novel-in-progress, this weekend is once again a bust; I know I've been racking up a lot of busts in the past six months, and I do want readers to know that despite appearances to the contrary, I am still engaged in my work on the series as a whole, just at my own pace and in the media that I can work with the most easily, which right now is the written word.

What does this mean in practice? One way or another, the King Groy story will make it to the ROCR website, resulting in a complete archive by the time I finish off the series. What I think will happen is that the second draft of the novel will go on the blog. The final draft will then be posted to the website proper, with illustrations. Historically, putting prose based stories into a webcomic archive has not been a successful move for those who have tried it, because readers tend to get stuck on their expectations and can't get over the work not being a comic anymore. However, I'm willing to give it another shot, provided I am convinced that the finished product is really, really good. It's going to take a lot of work to get from what is on the DeviantArt site to the quality I'm looking for. So it won't be any time soon.

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.

Using uninked pencil art, like I've done on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan for the past three weeks and on American Gothic before that, saves me some time, but not as much as you would think. The time savings don't come from skipping the inking and colouring phases - all the effort that used to go into inking and colouring (keeping in mind that DFG has been doing the colour flats on my comics for almost two years now) now go into the final pencil line art and the grey pencil tones.

The time savings that I do get come from a) simplifying the process so there is no longer a separate Photoshop colouring stage after I get the colour flats back from DFG, and b) the elimination of wet media accidents, which I'm very prone to. The comic creation process still takes a whole afternoon even if I cut corners in drawing backgrounds - a page full of close-ups is easier for me to do than one with lots of scenery or action, so that's the sort of pages I've been drawing. I am very envious of Aggie's ability to just knock out an American Gothic page in a few hours.

Last long weekend (a local holiday), I didn't get two pages of Feral done so there's still no buffer. The buffer for Invasion is running out already. Next weekend, I may end up not having an afternoon of uninterrupted drawing time. It's gonna be a bumpy ride, and it's only three weeks into my resumption of art duties on Feral.

Aggie's facing a huge workload, and my schedule has stabilised a lot. I'm drawing two pages of Invasion a week even though that's set after the end of Feral. So we've decided that it's time for me to get back to drawing it myself, all the way to the finish, starting with the next update. The next update will be on Monday, August 18, because we've been unable to get the update done this weekend.

I'll run some filler though... even if it's just a re-run of an old story. There must be something I haven't dug up yet from the old galleries. Sorry.

Not everyone liked Aggie's work. I enjoyed her take on the story a great deal, and learned a lot from the six months she worked on it. Especially when it came to tightening up the scripts. I think you will see that reflected in the new pages I'll be drawing.

I've got some more character art for sale through my Comicspace galleries. This time it's four nude character drawings, of Abui, Sash, Kel and Shireen, made in preparation for the Feral and Invasion storylines. Because they're nudes, only members of Comicspace can see them, but signing up is easy and safe (and if you sign up, you can see all my other galleries, mark some as your favourites and join my friends list there, which is one good way for a reader to help raise my profile just a little bit).

Sizes range from A4 (210 x 297 mm) to A4+ (297 x 370 mm) and prices range from $20 to $40, depending on the size and my subjective assessment of what they're worth - if you disagree with my assessment, you might get a bargain! As with all character art pieces, shipping is free if you also buy any item from the Invasion or Feral galleries!