So after an hour spent futzing around with the software and scanners and whatnot, plant-man.com is online. Hurrah!

Plant-Man and Flowerin’ was a comic book series that started (as all good things do) in the early ’90s. Back then we didn’t have webcomics so distribution was seriously limited, but now technology has arrived! And now everyone around the world can read the adventures of the world’s silliest ecologically sound super heroes. I’m still not exactly sure if this is a good thing.

So every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we’ll have a new page up here on the site, scanned and tweaked to the modern web’s exacting standards. I’m going to start with Issue 3, because the first two are terrible. There’s about a 100 pages to go before we get to the new material that I’m doing now – so at least you’re guaranteed regular updates until December

Hope you like.

Over the past week or so I’ve spent a lot of time tooling around with the website to make sure the colours are nice and everything works – and boy, everything’s a lot more colourful, right? Right.

I’ve decided that as of today this blog will be updated a lot more. The comic, as always, goes up every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning, but now on Tuesdays and Thursdays I’ll be updating the blog so there’ll always be something to come back for every day. In the blog I’ll be talking about how progress is going with the current comic I’m working on, show some sketch notes and whatever else is on my mind while I’m at the drawing board.

Here’s today’s question: Do the old copyright dates on the pages we’re seeing now throw you off? I mean, I did draw these pages back when you could wear plaid flannel shirts outside and not be laughed at, after all. I have to admit that time has moved on since then. Should I edit that out so the pages don’t scream “I was drawn fifteen years ago!” or just leave things as is?

I’ve been playing a lot of Nintendo DS lately – the portability is a big issue, since I feel guilty about playing video games at home instead of drawing or being otherwise productive. There’s a lot of old school games getting re-released for it (handy fact – did you know that playing Arkanoid DS at full volume on a bus makes it more likely you get the seat to yourself!) and there’s also lots of ‘homebrew’ applications. ‘Homebrew’ is stuff that isn’t officially released which means you need a special cartridge for it, but they can open up what a DS is for!

Besides the Commodore 64 emulator I’ve been ‘playing’ a lot of “Colors!“. It’s an art program that in a ways is a lot like Corel Painter. (Anyone remember that?) Pick a colour (yes that’s how I spell colour), set your brush size and start doodling on the touch screen. Simple! What makes it really cool is that the screen is pressure sensitive, you have real control over the size and opacity of the brush and the image you are editing is pretty high-res for the DS – 512×384. And even better, you can email pictures out to yourself or other people.

Hey, here’s something I quickly knocked up just to test it out:

Cool, huh?

I won’t be drawing any comics on it any time soon but it’s a very, very cool utility. A while back I was looking into buying a Wacom Cintique because the idea of being able to draw directly onto a screen really appealed to me. That would have cost me several hundred dollars for a really heavy, old, second hand one that’s permanently tied to my PC.

Instead, I now have a portable version I can use anywhere, any time, for practically nothing.

Yeah, very cool!

One of the cool features of Colors! on Nintendo DS is that it does this nice visual playback of how the image was drawn. And thanks to some clever hackery, these videos can be exported!

Neat huh!

I’ve added a little thing on the right that tracks how this site is doing on The Webcomics List. Do people pay attention to that kind of stuff? I’ve been doing comics for years but the whole webcomics ‘scene’ is still pretty alien to me. I am however kinda chuffed that of the 12,000+ comics listed on that page I’ve already managed to crack the top 1,000! How on Earth did I manage that, I only put that up a week ago!

Also I added one of those ‘share the comic with people’ thingy doodads. You can tell I know a lot about technology, huh!

Oh! I wanted to ask you something before I finished for the day. You know how we have that “Archives” drop down menu? Is there a way I can instead of a “Storyline” drop down menu? Since this comic is a series of multi-page self-contained adventures, it makes more sense to be able to go straight to the start of an “issue”. (Starslip has this feature, as does Achewood) Any ideas?

I thought it might be a neat idea to post a picture of the drawing board where I make this silly little comic. How voyeuristic! Now stop peeking through my curtains.

I draw on a really, really old wooden drawing board that I nabbed from high school and have been repairing and using ever since.

I use regular A4 paper to draw on, any pencil I can grab to lay out the roughs and a combination of fine tipped black ink pens and various sized sharpies to lay down the inks. I don’t usually do a lot of erasing of the pencils since the scanner takes care of 95% of that for me.

Above the drawing board is a little lamp to keep the board lit up instead of the room lighting. Since the room lights are behind me my head ends up casting a big shadow over the art, you see.

Over to the left is the scanner, and on top of that are the last 30 or so pages I’ve done that I’ve just recently scanned. I waited until I got my copy of How To Make Webcomics before scanning them – and the quality increase was amazing! I don’t scan pages until the whole storyline is done, just in case I abandon ship halfway through.

On the drawing board is the current story I’m working on. It’s being done in a really different style than the regular comic, but I’m having an awesome time drawing it. Lots of fine line work and detail, and it’s being drawn in a regular ‘comic strip’ style – sort of. They won’t be online until the middle of February 2009, so we’ll see how it goes down then

The different format means I can leave notes for myself in the right side of the page for when I scan and clean up the art – rewording suggestions, notes to fix up some parts of the art, etc.

Not pictured: Tall glass of chocolate milk waiting to be drunk…drunken? Drank?

That is the question!

As I write this there are 94 comics in the buffer, waiting for their turn to be published. That’s not counting the 10 comics I’ve drawn that I haven’t scanned yet – I wait until the complete adventure is drawn before scanning, but I’m only a few days away from having that finished.

That’s a lot of comics! And the sad part is, some of these won’t see the light of day until February next year!

This is because new comics are published three times a week so at that rate it’s going to take a long time to get through the backlog. It’s kinda frustrating, but here’s the problem:

I set up the M-W-F schedule because I figured I would only be able to make new comics at a rate of three a week. If I go daily, I could be burning through the backlog quicker than I can replace them, if that makes sense. At some point I would have to go back to M-W-F.

Daily would be a good idea at the moment – I’d like you to get into the habit of checking out Plant-Man’s adventures regularly, and a new comic every day would be a great way to do this.

Do you have an opinion? Let me know!

It’s true, they do! And anyone who doesn’t is weird and unusual.

Here is a sketch I did on the DS while waiting for my wife to get her hair cut.

I think the gag worked out pretty well and I’ll probably end up using in the next Plant-Man story that I do after the current one.

I have to admit I’m currently stumped with the current storyline I’m doing. I built it up to a dramatic climax and every ‘solution’ to it just feels kind of cheap. One of the thing that annoys me about the earlier stories I did was the cheap endings so I want to improve on that. I need some chocolate milk to help come up with an idea!

Over the weekend I put up the first Banner ad for this site and used Project Wonderful to get it displayed on a heap of cool sites. If you’re following the link to here, welcome! I hope you enjoy your stay. Feel free to check out the story archives and indulge in the gang’s antics!

I spent a long time trying to come up with a look for the ad, but could never be satisfied with it. I was trying to fit a logo, some character heads and a snappy tagline to entice people to read. For the life of me I couldn’t compress what the comic is about into a few clever words. “Wacky Funsters” is too generic. ” Silly adventures of two lovable super heroes” is too long. “Imagine if Roger Ramjet was written by the people who did Carry On movies” is far too obscure.

And then I thought – instead of trying to explain what the comic is, why not just show it?

I drew up a modified version of the sketch I did in the blog post below, sized it so it would fit in a skyscraper style ad and put it up – it’s clean, it’s simple and it instantly gives readers a chance to check out the comic without leaving the site they’re on.

What do you think? Are there any other types of advertising tricks I can try out?

As usual, about halfway through the current Plant-man storyline I start drumming up ideas for the next one. This is when the pen and notepad come out and I come up with some genius.

Plant-Man and Flowerin’ go fishing? They can pull hard when they feel a tug.

Commissioner Gorgon launches a campaign to become mayor because they get all the best car spaces.

Action Sally writes a self help book entitled “How to make a million dollars writing self help books”

See? It’s easy! However it might not be as easy for other web cartoonists out there. I hear all the time about people who just go crazy staring at a blank piece of paper or screen while deadline looms closer. So here’s a great opportunity!

For only ten cents you can have an idea, created by the same brilliant mind that brought you “A comic about a guy who always runs out of ink and then he drinks ink by mistake and then tries to write something down but he can’t because he ran out of ink and dies”. I mean how can you go wrong?

So now you know what to say the next time you’re asked where ideas come from. Me!

Hey there, internet person! I bet you like all sorts of stuff that is popular on the Internet. Pictures of cats. Amusing powerpoint presentations in your email. Talking with the thirty people who watched Firefly about how it was unfair there were only 30 people who watched Firefly, etc.

Forums seem like a pretty cool thing, so we’ve gone ahead and set up the Plant-Man Forum! Wow!

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Gazunta, all forums suck when they start, because there’s nobody there! You crazy guy trying to get us to go to your little forum!”. Before you think you’re just so smart, how about this:

Plant-Man is posting in there! And Flowerin’ the Seedling Wonder! And Commissioner Gorgon! And Action Sally! And even Daisy the Moo Moo Cow! They’re all having a swell time in there, so why not go and see what they’re saying!

See you there!

Here are five things about Plant-Man and Flowerin’ you might not know:

• Commissioner Gorgon and Action Sally are based on real people. Kind of.
• If I got to cast Plant-Man and Flowerin’ in a movie, Plant-Man would be played by Hugh Grant and Flowerin’ would be played by Julian Clarey.
• Plant-Man’s favourite brand of chocolate milk is Milo, while Flowerin’s is Quik.
• Flowerin’s costume has eight petals – four that face the front and four that face the back (in diagonals)…unless I change my mind about it again later.
• There’s now been more people read the comics on this site than there ever were that read the original mini comics. How cool is that!

As if all their rocker music and wearing of jeans and t-shirts wasn’t enough, now the youths are getting into their facebooking. I don’t know much about anything that happened after 1997 but I take it on reliable evidence that it’s a big important thing that people use to share stuff they like.

Well, you like Plant-Man, right? Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to share it with all of your friends on Facebook?

I’ve made a small application that lets you do just that. Wow, technology, eh!

Just add this application to your facebook and you should get the latest comic update directly into your feed. You can then send it along to your friends with just a click!

http://apps.facebook.com/plantman

It only takes a second to add to your profile, and it helps spread the word about this little comic of mine, so hey, how cool is that! Thanks!

(And BIG thanks to Tony at Calamities of Nature for his help getting it working! Now go read his comic!)

Oh and PS: Tomorrow is Plant-Man’s 50th comic!

Wa-hey! Yesterday the 50th comic went up. Amazing how quickly I reached this little milestone. Over the last few months I’ve been able to introduce Plant-Man to a heap of new and cool people, learn my way around Comicpress, set up a Facebook app and a forum and generally dive headfirst into this whole webcomics thing!

Who knew sticking to a schedule would updating regularly with good content would have its benefits? Oh wait, that’s right, me.

So with 97 comics in the buffer, you’re guaranteed more comics, on time, from now until March of next year. How many other webcomics can make you that promise? And I’ll be using that time to make even more, so hold on tight – it gets better from here on, honest!

It’s kinda funny coz I’m recieving some great feedback about the comic from around the place (and I really appreciate it – keep it coming!) but thanks to the super huge buffer any changes I make based on the advice won’t be seen for nearly a year. Like for example someone suggested the other day that I use a lot more grey tones and tighten up the lettering. Good advice, but thanks to the buffer…

…oh what the hell, to celebrate hitting comic #50, I’ll post a comic I just finished to address that issue. It’s not scheduled to go online until the middle of next March, but here you go to show that I am improving, honest!

How’s that work for you?

OK, I better get back to work. I’m going back to planning the writing before I start work on the art – I’m spending too much time staring at a blank page trying to write everything instead of drawing. It’s working out pretty well!

But I guess you’ll find out how well next April

Thanks for checking out the comic!

Since I started this site up and began bringing Plant-Man and Flowerin’ to the web I’ve been drawing new comics and to be honest I am absolutely loving every minute of it. I can’t wait for you all to see the new stuff when it comes online next year.

But I was writing and drawing it a lot differently this time around. Instead of planning out stories and jokes ahead of time, I would be writing it as I drew it – there would be a lot of pages where I didn’t know what would happen at the end while I started inking the start!

Thankfully I’ve managed to worm my way out of several corners and finished the stories in fine style. However for the new comic I just started I’m going back to basics – writing everything ahead of time in a well-used notepad.

I start with plotting out the entire story, with one brief line to indicate the basic “idea” of that page. This is to make sure the storyline “works” or at least doesn’t have too many glaring continuity holes. Then I scribble  down dialogue and basic panel layouts for each page – this is where most of my time is then spent staring into space trying to think of the perfect joke about ice cream or whatever. And then after all that’s done, it’s time to draw the darn thing.

It’s slightly more time consuming, but it’s the best way to do this – and even better, once all the boring writing stuff is out of the way I can get stuck into the drawing side of things!

PS – The Plant-Man and Flowerin’ Forum is up and running again, come in and say hi! All the characters from the show are posting on there and I’m sure they’d love to hear from you!

Plant-Man and Flowerin’ will bring you to JUSTICE:

The question about this being a black and white or color comic has been going back and forth around in my head for a while now. It’s enough to drive a man to drink, I tell’s ya! So, I thought I’d do up a recent comic in colour and see what it looks like.

The big problem I have is that I draw with black and white in mind and so no matter what you do it kind of looks like a colouring in book. Also when it comes time to reprint these in a book, using colour becomes really cost prohibitive.

Still, it looks nice, doesn’t it? What do you think?

The funny thing is that I registered a twitter account like a year ago, but never used it that much – but now it’s back in a big way.  I’m sure you’ve all heard about the cool little instant broadcast service that Twitter is, and if you’re someone who is already using it, I’d love it if you add me to your list of twitter feeds!

http://twitter.com/Gazunta

Over the past week I’ve been posting a lot of little behind the scenes tidbits via my Twitter feed – including a sneak preview of some new comics I have been doing! i’d really love to hear what you think about them. Oh and I promise I won’t be cluttering my feed with noisy junk like “I really like chocolate muffins” or random links to YouTube videos nobody cares about.

…damn, I really do like chocolate muffins though. I think I’ll have one now!

I may or may not have done something silly. After re-reading How To Make Webcomics for the fourth time and seeing that Kris Straub is now doing 3 comics at the same time, I decided to start a second comic in addition to Plant-Man and Flowerin’. Agh, what on Earth am I thinking?

As some of you know I’ve been on the fence for a while, trying to decide if I’m going to make this comic update daily or not. I think webcomics that are updated daily are easier to get into people’s routine, especially for a story-driven comic like Plant-Man and Flowerin’. However there’s the extra work involved, and that goes double for what I do here because it’s a “full page” comic. As stern as I am about updating on time, I enjoy being able to put extra effort into the art and writing Plant-Man. It’s a really tough call.

But I figured out that I could do a daily comic – if it was a regular “strip” comic.

So for the last couple of days that’s what I’ve been doing – and it’s working out great! I think you’ll like it a lot.

I’ve set myself a deadline of the first of September to have 30 comics in the buffer. So far I have 8 of these done, so 22 to go. (You can follow my progress on my twitter feed!) They’re only taking an hour or so each to make – hell, I’m not even pencilling these things; it’s a pure brain-to-paper process.

Wish me luck! If you send me a message or post a comment, I’ll do an extra comic.

The current story that I’m writing (not the one that’s up above this blog at the time of posting – remember I’m writing stuff that won’t be online until next April!) is a mystery of sorts. After a couple of storylines where I just kind of pull an ending out of the hat I decided to actually pre-write the mystery before I started work on the main script.

Writing mysteries is hard!

The most tricky bit to me so far is coming up with a mystery that could keep readers guessing. It’s a tricky balance between throwing in enough red herrings and suspects to keep people guessing, but not too many to make people think the “result” was randomly selected.

Have you been ticked off about the ending of a mystery? Let me know!

I think it’s working out. Shame I have to wait eight months to find out!

I started looking around for local comic conventions and discovered there is just one held in my town every year.

Just one.

I’m not too suprised really – Australia doesn’t have the population of the U.S. or most European cities, but we have a ton of space, so we’re all spread really thinly over the place. It makes conventions really hard to organise, and the ones that are around are just once a year events.

I was thinking of having a booth at the next convention to showcase Plant-Man and the upcoming second comic (as well as some other nifty things) but really, what’s the use of having a booth if there’s nothing to sell? So then I started looking into the logistics of putting together a Plant-Man book, and figured that, if the convention is in April ’09, I’d need to have the books safely in my hands by February ’09. Of course to hit that date I’d need to send the book proofs off to the printers by December ’08, which means that I’d really need to have the source material (original comics + updated commentaries + brand new material + rare Plant-Man comics that never saw the light of the web…it’s quite a package!) ready by September ’08 at the latest…and whoa, we’re almost there already!

And it’s early days yet for this comic – I still need everyone who is reading this to spread the word! So I decided to just use the event to hand out flyers, meet some other comic artists and generally take it easy.

Oh well, maybe the April 2010 convention, eh?

There’s a saying that goes along the lines of ‘A hero is defined by the villains he faces’ and I really think it’s true. Batman is incomplete without The Joker, Spider-Man needs Doctor Octopus and I need that meal that always drops a bit of sauce on my shirt just before I’m meant to go to a meeting. Actually, scratch that last one, but you get the point.

Plant-Man doesn’t really have any villains. I mean there are people they go up against, but nobody ever really poses a threat. Heck most of the time they just go up against things.

I have decided to come up with a villain for the next story I write. I have no idea how this is going to work, but it should be interesting to see the end result!

Any advice you’d like to share about this?

As promised, my new webcomic is online: Funny Web Comic.

It’s a ‘traditional’ comic strip, in color no less, and it’s updated every day from Monday to Friday. How cool!

I’m going to wait until next month before I start plugging it around the interwebs so this is just our little secret, OK? OK.

So every week there’ll be a new set of five comics about one idea. Like for example this week is “Generic Gaming Comic” and next week will be “Medical Drama Comics”. Who knows what will be next? Well, me, because I’ve drawn enough comics for a month. That’s 19 comics in the buffer already and I haven’t even really started.

I like doing Funny Web Comic. It’s such a different comic to make than Plant-Man and Flowerin’ – I don’t script the comics extensively, the art is incredibly simple – in fact…and I’m sure you’ll think I’m crazy for this – I don’t even do pencils before I do the final art. Think of it as a cartooning way of throwing your hat over the wall.

It’s a pretty fun experiment and I hope you’ll come along for the ride!

After seeing a post on the Halfpixel forums by a fellow webcomic artist requesting a guest comic, I lept at the chance. 12 hours later the comic is now zipping its way around the Internet and will hopefully be used. Even if it isn’t, it’s still been a lot of fun making it.

Volunteering for this kind of thing is a great idea for an artist. Sure, there’s the immediately apparent lure of getting your name out there (and plugging your comic in the process), but it’s a good way to learn new skills. I had to learn how to draw the main characters, what the ‘hooks’ of the strip are, and how the humour works – and then somehow emulate it all to make a strip that wouldn’t look too out of place on their site.

If the guy doesn’t like it, at least I’ll have some new strip to run on Funny Web Comic later on

I gotta say though – I got a real kick out of playing in someone else’s sandpit (at least for a little while), and really want to do it again! So if you do a webcomic and you want some guest strips – drop me a line! You’ll be doing me a favour much more than I’d be helping you, that’s for sure.

Back in the olden days, when the only good thing you could do with a PC was run Wolfenstein 3-D, I made this comic the old fashioned way. Pencil and ink to lay down the image and then add whiteout to make corrections or, if no whiteout could be found at 3am, I’d cut out a piece of paper with corrected art on it and sticky tape it over the original. (You can kind of make out some of the sticky tape marks on the originals if you go back through the archives!)

But now it’s a bit different. Thanks to Photoshop being the final step in the process I’m finding that I’m leaving a lot of mistakes on the page for me to fix up later. Spelling mistakes are the big one (I really need to stop lettering while listening to people talk) and there’s a lot of times where I flub up the art (draw an extra line on someone’s neck, or get the eye positioning wrong, or more often the case stuff up the HANDS AAGH HANDS). These days I just go “oh I’ll fix that in Photoshop” without really worrying too much about it.

This kind of kicks me in the butt later when it comes time to scan and fox things because what should be a twenty minute job suddenly turns into a two hour job because of all the mistakes I didn’t fix until now. It also has the problem of leaving the original art full of errors. I don’t sell my originals at the moment but one day I might, so that’s going to end up kicking my butt again later on.

The lesson is: don’t try to save time now, and always keep a bottle of whiteout ready.

Back when I drew the current storyline, Phil Donahue would be the start of my day. I’d wake up at the crack of noon, make myself some Corn Flakes covered in honey and sit myself in front of Donahue for an hour before proceeding to…well, do not much.

He showed me the world outside of my sleepy little suburb and I didn’t really know much about it. Politics, culture, modernisation, gender relations, censorship…it was like the first time I heard actual grown ups talk. The show had a big impact on how I approached the world from then on.

We really don’t have people like him on television any more, and I think it’s a shame. Instead of analysis and debate we have bubble gum news – disposable, distracting and can’t be swallowed. I really wish he was covering the election instead of…well, pretty much everyone else. Instead he’s making movies and doing other behind the scenes stuff. Oh well.

But still, when he’s on, he’s on.

I hope his people don’t sue me for using him in my comic! I guess I’m just using my mental image of him, really, if that helps.

So right now we’re gearing towards the end of Daisy The Moo Moo Cow Says Moo In The Moo Moo Farm Today. It’s the longest Plant-Man story I’ve ever done at over 20 pages. It’s kinda weird because to me 20 pages really isn’t that long at all. As you know Dave Sim’s Cerebus is one of the biggest influences on the way I make comics and Cerebus is 6,000 pages. 20 is nothing!

But when you make people wait 2 or 3 days between each page, a 20 page story can take forever to get through. What’s the right length I should be aiming for?

The current Plant-Man story I’m doing – due to be published in March 2009 – is 15 pages. That’s about five weeks of updates! Is it too long? Am I pushing people’s patience? I really do like the advantages that the “long” stories offer – I can take the storyline in lots of cool directions and add more depth to all the characters. I’m worried that short stories make everything seem too simple.

Thoughts? Is there a way I can accomodate new readers and people following the long storylines at the same time?

10) Plant-Man becomes a vegetarian (rejected because we all know how much he loves meat in his mouth)

9) Plant-Man and Librarian’

Commissioner Gorgon’s Day Off (it would have gone on too long)

7) Plant-Man and Flowerin’ Travel Back In Time To Guest Star on The Two Ronnies

6) Action Sally Finds Some Gum

5) Plant-Man and Flowerin’ Get Stuck In A Lift With Fans of the Band U2 (I couldn’t put them through such a horrible torture)

4) Thinly Veiled Autobiographical Comic About A Guy Who Spends His Nights Making Comics And Is Really Funny and Good Looking and Everyone Loves Him

3) Everyone Goes To Sizzler and The Ice Cream Machine is Busted

2) What’s Inside Lava Lamps?

1) Daisy The Moo Moo Cow’s Revenge

Back in the day when I first got into making comics, Scott McCloud invented the 24 Hour Comic.

Basically, the challenge is to make a 24 page comic in 24 hours, with no pre-planning or sleep. It resulted in some interesting comics being made, the early ones being printed in the back of Cerebus which I devoured like crispy sausages.

I even attempted to make one myself, but didn’t last too long. I stupidly started late one night after making a page of Plant-Man and slept away most of the hours once the sun came up. I can’t recall what it was about or whatever happened to the pages I made, but I do know that it was a complete failure.

Which is one of the reasons I decided to enter this year’s event, which is being held this October 18th.

Why else do it? Well it’s kind of like the closest thing we get to the New York Marathon, minus the horrible “going outside” and “sweating” bits. What a challenge!

Will I be more successful this time around? I certainly hope so. I’m far more disciplined about deadlines and getting things done in time no matter the circumstances than I was on the first attempt, but on the other hand I am now litterally twice the age I was back then!

I checked the official site for a local store that will be hosting an event, but there doesn’t seem to be any, which means I’ll be making my 24 hour comic from my drawing board at home. I couldn’t think of a better place to be honest. I mean really all my chocolate milk is there and I guess my wife too so she can deliver said chocolate milk to me while I draw.

My current plan is to start at 6am on the 18th and just keep going all day in the hope I’ll finish by midnight, 18 hours in total, but if I need longer I can keep going. However, even though I’ll be on my lonesome (wife and chocolate milk notwithstanding) I’ll be needing your help to get me through it. I’ll be twittering through the day and checking email – if you can send me a quick message through the day that would be a huge encouragement. Or try to knock some sense into me and tell me to get some sleep!

Can anyone suggest any way I can ‘broadcast’ what I’m drawing over this website? Anyone?

The other night I told my wife I needed some pencils. We were down to one full size pencil left in the house and she was using it to solve a puzzle book, and I was using the little pencils you steal from Ikea. Hey if they’re going to charge me twenty bucks for a plastic stool I’m going to come home with a pocket full of those tiny little pencils, OK? OK.

I grabbed the cheapest pile of standard pencils I could find. She looked at me like I was stupid and grabbed a super duper expensive mechanical pencil and asked me if I prefer B or H.

“Uh, I really have no idea. I don’t even know the difference.”

“What do you mean you have no idea? How could you not know? What have you been using all this time?”

“I guess I just grab a HB and hedge my bets.”

“Oh my God, you really don’t know the difference do you? I thought you were the artist of the family. FOR SHAME.”

So she explains what B and H mean and I try out pencilling a Plant-Man page with my fancy new mechanical B pencil and holy flying catfish on a weekend bender, I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on all this good stuff for all these years!

I’m still living down the shame of my wife, someone who has to be strong-armed into drawing so much as a stick figure, having to teach me the difference between H and B pencils.

I’m really enjoying making Plant-Man again. It’s pretty much the highlight of my day, which just goes to show you what I think about the rest of my day compared to drawing a comic that has yet to land me return phone calls from the Hollywood people.

I mean how cool would that be? I always imagined Hugh Grant as Plant-Man and Julian Clary as Flowerin’. Lately I decided that Kristen Bell would make an ideal Action Sally but I have yet to figure out who would play Commissioner Gorgon. I’d love to hear your suggestions!

ANYWAY, I’m also having a lot of fun making Funny Webcomic. It’s a daily comic strip I make in a portable sketch pad really quickly with no pencilling or pre-planning. The whole point of it (to me) is to prove that you can get out a gag comic really quickly as long as the core idea is good, and I’ve been updating it every day since it launched at the start of September.

However it’s starting to become a real drag. For some foolish reason I decided early on to do them in color, and now I color them in Photoshop after scanning the artwork. This is REALLY BORING. It also defeats the whole “get it done super quick and move onto the next one” aspect. However I can’t deny that the color really makes the strip ‘pop’, you know?

So. I can either do Funny Webcomic in color three times a week or I could do it five times a week in black and white. Which one would you rather have?

Thanks y’all!