Waffle

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan now has a Twitter feed at RoguesClwydRhan. I'm spectacularly late to the party. Here in a few days I'll try to get an RSS feed working for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan as well.

My plan is to announce comic and websites on there, nothing more, nothing less. I will continue to post them here as well.

My other plan is to do something concrete for the comic every day that my day job sucks. So yesterday I made the feed; today I ...tell people about it through my existing channels. Any step, no matter how tiny, will count, but it has to be completed, so "Working on an update" only counts if an update is finished that day.

I'm not going to claim that I'm nearly ready to start full-scale production again. I've got burned on that too often now. However, the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan remaster project has picked up some speed. As of today, the latest remaster is the comic for November 3, 2003 ( http://www.rocr.net/index.php?p=20031103 )

The Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan remaster project started in 2006 as a way to upgrade some of the earlier comics from their poorly-scanned, tiny images. Remastered versions of several stories were posted on my DeviantArt site and on the Drunk Duck mirror site for ROCR, but it wasn't until recently that I've started posting new ones on the main site, working both backwards from the end of the story The Corby Tribe and forward from the start of The Rite of Serfdom.

The project has been beset by accidents and hardware failures including the simultaneous failure of both my main and secondary system, located at the time on two different continents, in late 2009, at a time when an earlier incident had caused me to temporarily lose faith in automated back-up software. That faith has since been somewhat restored, but some of the earlier remasters, including much of the work for The Corby Tribe, have already been lost and will need to be redone.

Currently, the remaster process involves work on scans that were high-res, but low bit depth, which at the time were coloured in on the main layer. The gutters and panel borders are cleaned out, then on a new layer, the line art is improved, with particular attention on areas where the low-bit depth lines run into each other, causing areas of the art to become crowded. Sometimes, new detail is added that will be visible on the larger final images. The art is re-lettered, with British spellings now the norm for all pages, and sometimes new word balloons are drawn using Photoshop. In addition, some pages are redrawn entirely from scratch and some characters, particularly Maghreid, Abúi and P'Séaigg are partly redrawn and recoloured nearly every time they appear. Final results are suitable as source images for even higher-res remasters in the future, and for print in the unlikely event that there is real interest. The work is done in 15-minute blocks during the working week, and in longer blocks of time during the weekends.

The remaster project should be complete by the time my wife is ready to work in the Netherlands, by which time I should be able to work fewer hours in my day job and get back to regular production of new work. That could be as early as next year, or as late as 2015.

It's been almost three months since the last new episode was posted. I apologize for that, and would like to assure everyone that not only have I not abandoned Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, but I've actually been very busy for the past month or so; just not on any new material. Instead I've been reviewing and revising the archives, putting up new, higher-quality files for the old comics, fixing link-rot and re-inserting episodes that were lost from the various server moves the comic's been involved in over the past ten years.

This process has actually been under way for a long time. I started revising episodes from The Faerie and the Earth-Pig onwards back in early 2006, re-scanning material that I created when I did not have the quality of equipment I have now, recoloring them with help from DFG and re-texting them. When I started re-running the comic on Drunk Duck in August of 2007, the pace picked up and I remastered the all of the comics until midway through The Corby Tribe, when I had a series of setbacks and had to give up. Late in 2010, I picked up the project again, and I've been working on it nearly every day since, and in the process, I have redrawn about half a dozen old episodes on top of giving a hundred more a facelift.

The only problem is that until recently, all the results so far have been on Drunk Duck. The only times a remastered image made it to this website were when I discovered a missing strip or when during the work on the old file, I hated the existing images so much that I redrew them. I am working very hard to change that: for the past week, I have uploaded remastered images to the site every day. I am working backwards from the end of The Corby Tribe (which is done but some early work may have been destroyed in those setbacks that I mentioned above and need to be redrawn) and forward from the beginning of The Rite of Serfdom, which I put up as soon as images are done. At the time of writing this, the string of consecutive new versions starts with the comic from August 29, 2002 and ends with the one from November 15, 2002 but the string will be longer before the day is over.

Even the pages that haven't been redrawn are still improved: they are larger, they have had new lettering added and colour faults fixed. In some cases, the colouring has been revised and shading and effects added. None of that will stand out (unlike some of the redrawn art) but it gives the images just a little more oomph. And all of it is now in my working files in Photoshop format at high resolution, so that any further work on them can be done quickly without having to retrace my steps again.

The whole process will take up another year until I'm caught up with the beginning of Feral. I do not intend to leave Feral where it's at for another year - though it might happen. In fact, I plan to spend as much time on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan as possible, because this is the 20th anniversary of the comic; I started creating it in May 1991 and put out the first small press collection of it a year later. I intend to celebrate that with a lot of new material. But more about that later. For now, this is what I'm focused on, because the site and the archives need it badly.

And then, after nearly three months, there were two new comic episodes within a week. I am going to try to pull this comic out of hiatus and back to some sort of regular schedule. I miss doing regular art and want to get back to it. At the same time, I still have a LOT to do to prepare for my wedding and emigration and I'm nowhere near being on track for it all.

But if I can combine the spiritual need for art with earning a little extra money for emigration, I can probably give the comic more of my attention. The current situation is as follows: during the last three months of hiatus since my return from Tennessee, the viewer numbers have finally plummeted as people gave up on following Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. I am surprised they stayed as high as they were for a long as they did, to be honest. I'm not complaining: through these months I've found that even if I do nothing, there will still be a couple of dollars a month coming in from one ad provider. My Project Wonderful ads are dead in the water, but the ones delivered through Comicspace's network perform very steadily if at a low level.

As I'm also a paying member of Comicspace, which eats up those earnings, the site overall operates at a modest loss due to the cost of website hosting, drawing materials, hard disk storage and the annualized cost of computers and scanners. A quick estimate would be that the net loss per year is about € 400 - not budget-neutral but also not the most expensive hobby in the world.

So a reasonable first-step goal would be to earn those € 400 a year back. Increasing the revenue from both my ad providers would help, and that simply requires getting the pageview numbers back up, preferably without investing any more money myself. My strategy should be to rely mostly on free publicity. Over the years, I have spent more on Project Wonderful advertising than I have made, so that is right out. I am, however, paying more attention right now to websites like The Belfry, which have served me a steady stream of readers over the years at no cost to me.

I can also go back to selling more originals. Just three or four would get me a long way towards that goal of making the comic budget-neutral.

The next step would be making a profit - any profit would go straight into my pockets and help me save for my future in Tennessee. Apart from building out the ad revenues and original art sales even more, I could get there by building another tried and tested revenue stream like donation-supported e-books. Unfortunately all the work I did on that last summer was destroyed in one of the many hard drive crashes that have plagued me over the past 9 months, so the Headsmen e-book as already published is al I have to show for that work. The DTP masters were lost as was the master-quality PDF file for that, so I don't even have a printable version. But it may be a good summer project for me to try this again, if I can get a steady stream of new pages going first. That has to be the first priority; I have found that if I spend all my time re-editing old work, I get very frustrated and discouraged.

That's the state of the comic: I will try very hard to get the production up again, as long as this does not interfere with my other plans.

Working my way through my old scans and colour files for the remastered version of the The Corby Tribe storyline, currently running on the mirror site on Drunk Duck, has been one surprise after another, with missing scans, corrupt back-up disks and more problems cropping up seemingly with every new page. But there are also some rewards: I discovered that one comic, the one for January 23, 2002, was missing from the archives entirely. Of course it had to be one that consisted of multiple panels with text inbetween, and it had to be one where my local copy on the hard drive was broken for some mysterious reasons, but thanks to the Internet Archives, I was able to retrieve the missing text segments and I have now restored it to the archives, improving the flow of that part of the storyline.

...it looks like it's going to need some work for the remasters though.

Update: Some missing text in the comic for January 15, 2002 has also been restored.

While you're waiting for new Feral updates, go take a gander at the mirror site on Drunk Duck, where the revised version of The Corby Tribe starts its run today!

Back in 2001, I really wanted to experiment with a comics format that America hadn't seen in so long, few readers were even willing to recognise it as comics. The format of a row of panels with a block of captions underneath is a throwback to the early days of newspaper comics, when word balloons were by no means universal. In the US, the captioned comic format is best represented by the old Prince Valiant Sunday pages, but in Europe, it was both very common and very enduring. The Dutch comic Tom Poes ran in this format until creator Marten Toonder*)'s retirement in 1986 and was re-run in some papers for a decade and a half afterwards. The British comic Rupert Bear ran, and still runs, in a similar format, only with verse.

In the late 1990s, there seemed to be a minor revival of the format in the Netherlands, with artist Eric Heuvel contributing a captioned comic to the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper.

As publication went on, I ran up against a problem: I just wasn't that great a prose writer and couldn't churn it out day after day. Over the two or so years that the story ran originally, I ended up diluting the format. So in the end, it looked like every other strip out there.

Drunk Duck doesn't support this format well (there is no option for adding formatted text in the place I need to add it), so I'm using this as an opportunity to learn how to do desktop publishing using Scribus. It's been many years since I last used any DTP software. The new revision will stick more tightly to the format and may or may not have substantial text revisions. There may be an e-book at the end of the process.

*) The characters in Mr. Toonder's work were anthropomorphic animals, and to an English speaker, his name may sound like a furry pseudonym; it is not. As someone who often gets his name misread, I sympathize.

It's half past nine on Saturday evening, and I haven't even started on the Feral update that's due on Monday. The odds of there being an update on Monday are not zero, but they are slim.

Yesterday after work, I made a conscious decision to tackle my to-do list in the order of easiest-to-hardest rather than starting with the most urgent or most important thing. This strategy has worked well in the past (except in situations where the most important thing is critical, which completing a Feral update is not). It eliminates the distraction of having little nagging tasks at the back of my head, and assures that the doable tasks actually get done even if the harder tasks end up taking more time than expected. So on Friday evening I took out the trash, did grocery shopping, washed dishes, and so on; I got the household chores out of the way so I'd have more time to work on the comics-related stuff in the morning.

Then I went to bed early, with the alarm still set to my regular workday wake-up time of seven AM. When the alarm went off, I turned it off and slept until noon.

Oops.

I guess I needed the sleep, but it did eliminate all the time savings I made by doing my chores the evening before. Still, I went on as planned:

My first task was setting up a load of voting incentives (Vote for ROCR on Topwebcomics and get rewarded with a behind-the scenes look at preliminary sketches for ROCR and related comics) and blog posts to remind readers to vote, all scheduled in advance. They are buffered until April 28, so I won't have to do any more until then. This took more time than planned; in all, I spent over five hours on the process. I will need to bring that amount down in the future.

My second task was a little more involved: I wanted to prepare a single episode of the old storyline The Corby Tribe for republication on the Drunk Duck mirror. To do that, I needed to reassemble the images and add two columns of text in a PNG file, and to do that properly, that is in a way that would allow me to reuse the result later, I needed to work with the DTP program I have, Scribus. This turned out to be less than intuitive (and wasn't helped by Scribus's Dutch localization, which like many open-source projects is of very poor quality). Also, it turned out that the master image needed a lot of extra work, so this, too, took several hours. I've got the hang of the basics now, though, and I expect that the next attempt will take less than half an hour.

The thing I've uploaded to Drunk Duck looks like this:

By the time I was done with those things, with cooking dinner and the occasional break into the equasion, it was well into the evening and too late to get started on Feral. I may still do the work tomorrow, and maybe go back to pencil-only for a while. That's a fast process and one that I could do outdoors if the weather is nice enough.

I am, however, very concerned about my ability to get Feral updates done on a weekly schedule. It looks to me like the weekly schedule is dependent on me not having any other things to do during the weekend, and not oversleeping. If I had not lost five hours to oversleeping, I would have had five hours more today to work on it and would have been mostly done with the art. But i don't like cutting the schedule even further, and not having an update on Monday would leave me with 10 days worth of voter incentives without giving my audience anything to come back for that would entice them to vote. Bit of a waste, that.

I may need to make an unpleasant decision about Feral soon.

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....

Last month, I publicized my usage statistics over my entire network of websites and added some targets for March. The targets were: 12000 unique visitors on ROCR.net (the only one of my websites where I can easily measure my uniques) and a third of a million pageviews (333,333 if you have to be pedantic) for all sites taken together.

Sadly, I missed two updates in March and had to suspend my ad campaigns as I refuse to advertise for a website that isn't updating (though some sleeper ads continue to run as they are very cheap and take more effort to cancel than to leave running). So I didn't make it this month: total pageviews across my network were 260,000. Uniques on ROCR.net came close to the target though at 11513. More specifics: the Drunk Duck rerun mirror had a disappointing performance in March at just 4900 pageviews, whereas the Chronicles of the Witch Queen website and the ROCR archive on Modern Tales performed very well indeed at 42000 pageviews jointly, according to Project Wonderful. In the end, it all sort of evened out. The irony here is that COTWQ/MT archives only had 3 updates in March, whereas the Drunk Duck mirror had 31 updates, all of which were remastered editions of older comics, some of which were a pain in the rear to put up because they included a week-long crossover.

April has started off very poorly indeed due to the lack of updates, but I expect it will pick up again starting Monday when updates resume. Targets, therefore, will be the same ones that I missed in March: 1/3 million pageviews over the entire empire, and 12,000 uniques on ROCR.net. I may have some new things up my sleeve to help those numbers along, too.

Tomorrow morning (Saturday, March 21), I'll be getting out of the house at an ungodly hour to catch my plane to Nashville for another week at Aggie's place. We've got to stop meeting like that and during that week, I'll be taking several important steps to making that possible. You'll be the 936th person to hear it from me.

Meanwhile, my day job's been draining my energy pretty hard, so I didn't get the next update ready before the weekend as I'd planned. I'm not going to get it ready during my week with Aggie either - we'll be traveling a lot. So that means no update for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan on the 23rd or the 30th. Sigh... I really want the comic to become regular again even if it's just one episode a week, but I had to compromise the quality a lot to even manage that for four weeks in a row.

Still, having a life and especially a love life is more important to me these days, and in the longer term, I think readers will realize that I will finish my story one way or another, and for newcomers, there's a huge archive to dive into.

So apologies if you were hoping for more story progress! It's all for the best really. ROCR will be back on April 6.