I’m in the middle of doing a long form story on Plant-Man at the moment. Well, that’s nothing new, because Plant-Man has always been long form. The funny thing is that I never thought it was.

As you might know I started doing Plant-Man + Flowerin’ as a mini comic, and they usually ran to about 12 to 15 pages of story. Compared to a regular Marvel or DC book which had 22 pages of content each issue or a graphic novel that ran anywhere from 48 to 72 pages, I always felt that Plant-Man was pretty small.

On the web however even a 12 page story is treated as an epic. Weird, huh? I think a lot of its comes from the way most webcomics are done as a traditional 3 or 4 panel strip format. They’re easy to digest, you don’t have to scroll, and you’re pretty much guaranteed a joke at the end.

A 6-or-so panel page in a multi page story on the other hand doesn’t have those conventions and so people tend to stay away from them. It makes drawing in and keeping an audience a hell of a lot harder than something like, say, Funny Webcomic, which you can drop in and out of with no prior knowledge needed. A strip comic is also a lot quicker to get through, too, which can be seen as a plus.

On the negative side though strips (typically) don’t have as much depth or length to the story-lines. I know I put a lot of jokes in Plant-Man (well, in theory) but I don’t feel like I have to do a joke every four panels or whatever.

I like the form of the full page, it’s something I’m comfortable with and I’d hate to have to drop it completely in order to keep doing comics online.

I think a week or so of ’strip’ type Plant-Mans would be good…what do you think?

I don’t talk about video games on here much because I deal with that enough in my day job. As some of you know I work in the games business and a game I was distantly involved with is due to the hit the shelves soon. I approached the local EB Games to see if it was in stock:

I think there’s a store in there!

The store is just wall to wall used games. Used games on all the walls. Used games behind the counter. Used games in giant piles in the middle of the store six foot high. I kind of just stood there, stunned at the sight of it all. The guy behind the counter asked me if I needed some help. I asked him if they sell any new games. He told me that used games offer me better value for money.

Funnily enough the guy didn’t have an answer for my next question about how, exactly, selling used games offers the people who actually make and publish these things a good deal.

*sigh*

The wife pointed out afterwards that it’s a bit hypocritical of me to complain about this when I’m such a used books junkie. Damn it!

Went grocery shopping today. Went to the cat food aisle because I have cats. Started poking around the pet toy area, and saw this:

Wow, toys endorsed by Better Homes & Garden’s lovable pet guru, Doctor Harry! I wonder what innovative ‘feline follies’ this Doctor has come up with? Surely something really cool and worth the $4…

It is, literally and without joking, a small blue tuft of fur. That’s it. I could have pulled this out of my belly button.

The tag reads “Quality Guaranteed”!

I’m looking to buy a new car in a few weeks. It’s what grown-ups do, so I’m told. I don’t really know anything about cars so the extent of my research into the subject amounts to:

1) Can the CD player work with MP3s?

2) Does the car come in yellow?

That’s pretty much it. Apparently there’s an engine inside these things? I have no idea.

However I have used this opportunity to think about what kind of personlised licence plate I want to have on it. OK I’m not that likely to have one since they cost a fortune and don’t do anything useful like a GPS (great things, those. I hate having to think and drive at the same time, we men really don’t multifunction that well).

The standard ones let me have three letters and two numbers. The mega-expensive ones let me have six characters, which is just as useless since Cameron and Gazunta and Plant-Man and Flowerin’ exceed that. So…let’s look at some of the suggestions:

This would be cool but people might think I was into weed or something. Or a relative of Robert Plant.

I hate the fact that it’s a misspelling of the greatest video game magazine ever made, but it’s still cool, and it represents the starting point of my day job career.  On a related note CBM64 was unavailable.

It’s supposed to spell “Pinata”. I really enjoyed making that game.

See…it’s “Zunta”…and I’m born in ‘74 so that kind of fits…

Anyway…head on over to the Personalised Plates site and see if you can come up with a good one!

Twitter is one of my favourite things these days. I love that there’s an instant way to broadcast out to anyone eho’s interested enough to follow you, and I’ve been able to keep up with friends, colleagues and people I think are just awesome.

I’ve limited myself to following 50 people, simply because otherwise I’d have forty million tweets to slog through every morning. Hence, picking these 50 people can get to be tricky, and I’ve almost nailed the list…

…but Kevin Smith has got to go. I’m done with him.

Let me clear on the outset: I was a huge fan. Just absolutely die hard. I’ve bought Clerks three times for Chrissakes. Joined the View Askew message board a few days after it started. Treasure a limited edition DVD slipcase from his online store that a dear friend was kind enough to send me. No trip to the states would be complete to me without coming home with a new Kevin Smith-related DVD. I have a ton of photos from the time I visited Jay & Silent Bob’s Secret Stash in Los Angeles. I can’t help but answer the phone without saying “What, what do you want?” in that Randal-esque voice from Clerks.

So, yeah. Fan. Superfan!

Hell I even made a comic about him once and was stoked that it ran on his official news site!

But lately he’s changed for the worse and I really can’t support him any more.

I first noticed it in his Smodcast, which is usually hilarious, but lately all the episodes were just about how he all he’s done lately is sit around the house and smoke pot and watch TV. And so were his blog posts. And so were his twitter posts. And so was his latest movie, couched with high school humour about vibrators and pornography.

Zack & Miri isn’t a Kevin Smith movie, really. It’s a Seth Rogen movie…or at least a movie about how much Kevin Smith wants to be Seth Rogen. See, Seth Rogen is Kevin Smith ten years younger, more popular and able to make movies that connect with audiences that by and large spend their time sitting around watching movies while smoking pot. I really think Kevin Smith’s downfall is meeting Seth Rogen, to be honest. Smith was smart and clever and really on the ball before Rogen came along and loused everything up. Prove me wrong.

This isn’t a rant about the evils of drugs. I’m not anti-drugs by the way, I’m just anti having to listen to boring people. And unless you’re stoned as well, pot smokers are the most boring people on the freakin’ planet to talk to.

And Lord is Kevin Smith boring! I just don’t really want to listen / read / watch the adventures of someone who doesn’t DO anything. The idea behind being an entertainer is to DO things. How on Earth does his wife put up with him? I would have kicked him out ages ago. It’s like being at a bar where everyone’s wasted but you’re a designated driver and you’re bored out of your mind just waiting for your friends to call it a night.

Dear Kevin: Please give up the pot. It’s making you duller than a worn out shoe. Maybe you can make a movie I’m halfway interested in again too, or at the very least start posting tweets that are more than:

1) Neglected my wife and kid again today, really don’t like them much
2) Smoked pot and watched TV
3) Some random NHL baloney nobody cares about
4) Man, I love pot
5) Decided to mix up things a bit by watching TV and smoking pot twice as much as usual

Snore.

Oh yeah this has nothing to do with Plant-Man but hey not everything in life is you know!

A couple of posts back I dodged my way out of talking about the things I use to make Plant-Man a reality that you and future generations will cherish like stale breadsticks. But now there is no escape for my fingers that are right now getting ready for the epic task of detailing the tools of the trade.

Wait, is it a trade? Nobody’s really exchanging anything for anything. Actually now that I think about it the modern internet economy is about people trading their time for attention to your product, and leave figuring out how to make any scratch off that to Google and their ilk.

Hey did you know I’m really good at procrastinating?

It’s true!

A lot of webcomics are done all digitally these days, and while I use some digital tools later on I generally stick to the method I used to make Plant-Man back when it was a mini comic. That being:

A4 paper: Just regular photocopier paper since it’s cheap and easy to source. I never really got into the whole artists paper thing, never really saw the point and it’s not like my town is lousy for art supply stores.

Pencil and eraser: Any household pencil and eraser. To this day I don’t know what the hell 2B or HB or any of that stuff means. I just use these to lay out rough panel layouts, pencil in speech bubbles and do roughs of character placements etc. This is also the stage where I write the page - yep, more often than not I just make it all up as I go along. I’m a hack!

Unipin Fine Line pens: 0.1mm for fine detail and patterns, 0.2mm for lettering, 0.3mm for most of the work and 0.8mm for panel borders and thick character outlines. I never did like the idea of using a brush and again these pens are easily available from the local newsagent or corner store. In a comic like Plant-Man where consistency of line and style is important having these fixed width pens lets me concentrate on getting the drawing done instead of experimenting.

Plastic ruler: I can’t remember buying any plastic rulers, but what the heck. I just use them for panel lines. Curse my inability to just do a regular 6 panel page, everything has to be wacky and original!

So yeah, it’s all very low-fi so far.

After the page is inked I scan it at 600DPI with a dodgy old scanner I’ve had lying around the place for ages, throw it into Photoshop (Hoorah for an old hand me down copy of 5.5!) and convert the grey scale scan into black and white line art. From there I get the trusty old Wacom tablet and clean up any mistakes (not I don’t have any whiteout in the above list - I used to use that all the time but it turned into a powder after a while) and sometimes add greys or computer patterns to varying degrees of readability.

Once the art is locked down I save it as a high resolution TIFF for storage and then a 600pixel wide image for the site.

So…that’s about it.

Thrilling huh. I think my overall cost per page is a millionth of a cent.

Which is about as much as I make back on the thing! HA!

As I write this I’m working on what I figure to be the 200th comic that will run on Plant-Man.com. Yay me! Whoooo time to get some chocolate milk and party in my underpants.

And then it’s time to start on the next 200.

Plant-Man + Flowerin’ visit the land of the robots. Plant-Man + Flowerin’ start gardening. Plant-Man + Flowerin’ extreme sports adventure weekend…

Hey this writes itself.

I’m still having fun making this wacky comic. Sure I could wish more people read the darn thing but that’s something everyone making anything has to contend with. I’m glad you’re here, though!

While at Supanova I got the chance to check out Groovy Gravy 11 which features two seperate three page stories I made (which I’m sure will appear on this site in a few months). It was freaking cool to see something I made in print! I’ve been in the web world for so long I forgot what it was like to see my drawings in real ink.

Anyway, I was talking to Brad, the mastermind behind Gravy Gravy and he was kind enough to thank me for my contribution, which was uneccessary because I really just wanted to be a part of it. Thank you Brad!

One comment that stuck with me was that he was saying that it was cool to see Plant-Man stay the same as it did ten years ago.

Either one of two things have happened:

1) I’ve managed to find a ‘house style’ for the comic that I’ve stuck with consistently for ages, or
2) I haven’t grown as an artist one little bit in over a decade

Yikes, I hope it’s the former!

So, Supanova was pretty eye opening.

The major component of that was the size of the crowds. The place was a hell of a lot more packed than the one I attended a few years back, which is encouraging on a surface level.

One of the reasons for the extra people as it turns out is that the scope of the event has gotten wider. There’s comics and video games like last time and now therea huuuuge manga area and wrestling now. Oh and there’s the area for the celebrities to turn up and….get stared at? I don’t know how it’s meant to work.

No matter how lovely I think Amber Benson is there is no freakin’ way I’m gonna pay $40 for her autograph and ten seconds of her time. What the hell?

Anyhoo, I made comics about my Supanova experience over at Funny Webcomic. Check them out!

There were a ton of cool comics and creators on show which is very encouraging and we came out of it more sure than ever that a Plant-Man booth next year would be a good idea. The wife has wisely advised me she doesn’t want to deal with that crowd again.

I can’t say I blame her.

This year’s Supanova will be more of a research kind of thing for us. My idea, in theory, is that next year I’ll be having a booth where I’ll be selling Plant-Man and Funny Webcomic books and can promote the comics.

There’s a million questions I have to answer in the meantime. What books will I have? How will I print them up? What about merchandise?

I’m sure I’ll have blog posts for all those questions but the one that’s keeping me up at night is…

Is there an audience for this kind of stuff?

I honestly have no idea, but I’m curious to find out.

And of course there’s the excitement about seeing Groovy Gravy 11 on sale, featuring a brand new Plant-Man + Flowerin’ adventure AND a brand new Action Sally story that the wife concocted over brunch one morning! It’s a pretty cool story and it gives a good indication about the next stage of Sally’s life.

So stay tuned