I’ve finally gotten off my giant bean bag (well actually it’s a giant sack of potatoes but who’s counting) and set up a Facebook fan page for our lovable plant-based heroes! Hoorah! It’s what all the cool kids are doing these days apparently, and I’m ever so eager to be thought of as cool.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Plant-Man-Flowerin/284726619457 is the link you need to activate in your Web Terminal Device. I don’t know how that works ask a grown up to help.

I’ll be adding all sorts of little goodies to the page - next week I’m adding character grids which is a cool little technique I’m using to learn more about the characters that fill my head all day long. Plus I’ll put up sketches and other bits and pieces. Come on by and say hi!

“FIVE DOLLARS FOR A HOT CHOCOLATE FROM THE STARBUCKS ACROSS THE ROAD?! AGH”

Man I sure hope the poll results don’t change before Monday, because I’m gonna be royally stuffed.

In other news, the locals are duly impressed with my over the top “Alf from Home and Away” Australia accent. I expressed wonderment with their “dollar bills” and told everyone how good a documentary Crocodile Dundee was.

Happy 24 Hour Comics day, everyone!

Hi! I’ve decided on what the name of the Plant-Man book will be: Small But Perfectly Formed.

It’ll be a manga-sized book with over a hundred pages of wacky tomfoolery, hence the name. It’ll collect many of Plant-Man and Flowerin’s first adventures with a handful of new comics, never-before seen pieces of art and a surprise or two. With a bit of luck we’ll have it on sale here before Christmas!

I don’t have any details on the price yet but stay tuned. I’m really excited about having a piece of Plant-Man in my hands.

Work on the cover has begun. I started with a couple of quick sketches, trying to make an image that works with the title and somehow sums up the feel of the comic:

Trampoline, eating cake and…being shrunk? OK, I guess. Let’s keep going…

I like the one where they’re looking at the bonsai tree. It’s about plants!

Then I was tinkering with a more arty one, with close ups of the character’s eyes and some character poses next to them:

I like it but it’s not really evoking the feel of the comic. I showed the sketches to the wife, each image on a seperate layer and then she grabbed Photoshop and made this:

Hee, she’s funny. BUT! It kick started an idea…how about a cover drawn in crayon, like it was drawn by Flowerin’?

I like this one. I like this one a lot. It might read a bit too kiddie given some of the humor inside…

So…what do YOU think? Maybe none of these ideas will end up as the final cover - all I know is that I want it to be vibrant, colorful and evoking the carefree attitude of the comic. Please let me know what you think!

So you might be wondering just what is so special about the new story, Choose Your Own Plant-Man. You might also be wondering about what that smell is, but that’s not important right now.

Choose Your Own Plant-Man is an interactive story! That’s right, YOU decide what happens next! Simply vote for what you want to see happen in the poll on the right. The winning poll decides how the story goes! Wow the future really is here alright.

Okay there is a drawback to this awesome interactivity…while this story is going, Plant-Man is going to be a weekly comic. The trick is of course that I’ve written the story ahead of time, and YOUR decisions will determine if we get to the good ending or one of those horrible endings that you pretend didn’t happen!

Let’s see how this goes and how quickly I can build up a buffer again. Thanks for your support!

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!