Earlier this week a guest comic I did for Chris Routley’s charming twice-weekly webcomic, Life Of Ronnie, was printed! Go read it! (This was the one I was talking about in a blog post I made a month ago – so I guess I had nothing to worry about!)

Big thanks to Chris for running my guest strip, and a warm welcome to all Life of Ronnie readers who are checking out Plant-Man for the first time! I hope you like what you see. If not, check out my other strip, Funny Webcomic, it’s neat.

Oh! A pin up page I did for Road Crew was also chosen for inclusion in their upcoming collection. How very very cool!

It’s a lot of fun trying on other comic styles. I really wish I can do more of it. Let me do a guest strip for your comic!

My laptop has a boring black desktop. This is no good! So I’m thinking of making some Plant-Man themed desktop images to have here on the site. Everyone likes desktop images, right? Right.

If you have a suggestion for a Plant-Man related desktop image, let me know! I’m also really curious about what resolutions I should be aiming for. Everyone’s got some kooky setup that I want to cater for. (Cue meandering monologue about how back in my day we didn’t even have desktops, we just had command lines and we were happy, etc, etc, etc…)

In other comic-related news, I’ve entered Plant-Man and Funny Webcomic into this year’s Webcomics Idol competition. The number of awesome webcomics I’m competing with is massive! I have no idea at all if it’ll make the top 10, which is where people can then vote for it to win, but I’m enjoying seeing what everyone else is doing too much to care.

Tonight I sat down at the drawing table and just drew a page of Plant-Man. Then I finished it and drew another. After that, I busted out two Funny Webcomics. During that time I didn’t check my work email. I didn’t think about any of my other side projects. I didn’t answer the phone. I didn’t really think about anything but getting the lighting right on Flowerin’s petals or whether or not to use color in Funny Webcomic.

It was incredibly selfish and I loved it.

See, usually I’m all over the place, mentally. There’s 30,000 things I set myself up to do in any given day and my comics stuff, or any stuff that’s considered fun, usually takes a back seat. That’s not me complaining by the way – it’s just the way my life works right now and I have a pretty good life – great house, great day job, great wife – so why complain? I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve stopped beating myself up for putting what I want to do slightly higher in my list of priorities.

And what I really want to do is draw comics all day.

Of course, now that I’ve drawn all that stuff, I think I deserve to go and play some video games, don’t you agree?

Do you feel selfish when you do stuff for yourself? I’d love to know what you do to handle that.

A friend of mine, Clint, used to do comics a lot. He even had one of those keenspace pages and updated his comic pretty regularly. Like most webcomics drawn by people who had no real life experience it was about the slacker life of him and his friends but with all the lines changed so they said funny things instead of bitch about how their parents are trying to make them get real jobs. Anyway, I thought it was cool that he did comics and it’s how we became friends in the first place. Unfortunately for him he got a real job and the comics kind of faded away.

However since I started Plant-Man I’ve been hounding him to start again. Look how easy it is for me, I’d exclaim, and it’s fun as all heck! The poor bugger has had to put up with me hassling him all the time. Have you brought the comic back? How about now? Now? C’mon hurry up man! Etc etc. I even offered to do a comic with him to save him time writing it. No dice! Something always comes up and thwarts his efforts every time he tries to do a new comic. His archive hard drive dies. His computer blows up. A plague of locusts invades his house.

In better news, my father has been inspired to get back into comics. It turns out he used to draw them all the time before he had kids and his life was ruined! So one day I was talking to him about an idea for a comic and that night – that night – he called me and said he did the art for the first strip. I went over to his house tonight and he showed me a heap of new stuff he did and some plans for comics he wants to do in the future. How freaking cool is that?

And the guy is sixty years old. Sixty!

Clint, you’re getting outpaced by a man almost three times your age.

I’m just saying.

My first ‘real’ career was in the journalism trade – it looks kind of glamourous on television shows but in reality it’s a non-stop barrage of boring tedious junk. Re-writing press releases from advertisers to run as “news”, reviewing bad products and having to say nice things about them and generally learning how to damn with faint praise while appearing to be impartial. The pay was lousy and I didn’t even get one of those cool old hats with the “PRESS” card stuck in it.

Anyway, what I did learn from that job was that deadlines are super important. It’s something that’s stuck with me over the years and I’ve become quite fanatical about hitting deadlines and never being late. This is why since the sites have launched both Plant-Man and Flowerin’ and Funny Webcomic have always updated on time. You can bank on it. Plant-Man has a buffer that extends to March of next year and Funny Webcomic is always at least a week ahead of schedule.

I get that other people aren’t like that. I get that people have daily responsibilities that take up time. I’m married and I have a day job that consumes a lot of time, too. So generally I don’t get frustrated when people miss an update. After all, family and home life comes first when all is said and done. (One of the reasons I was so happy to do a guest comic for Life of Ronnie recently was that he was just about to become a father, and the last thing he should be worrying about then is stupid comics!)

But geez, it really gets my goat when people give stupid reasons they didn’t update, and then have the gall to say they’re committed to doing comics.

Two of my favourite comics at the moment are behind schedule, which normally wouldn’t bother me, but they’re followed up by really aggravating blog posts. If you’re behind schedule, do not Twitter about how you’re having trouble installing the latest patch for World of Warcraft. Do not ask for donations for your new computer so you can get back on schedule and then report about how upset you are that you’re not going to BlizzCon. Do not write a 1,000 word blog about how tired you are and you’ll get back on schedule soon because you spent the night out drinking and having cake or whatever.

Doing any of that is an insult to your fanbase who are eager to see what comics you do next. You ask them to make your comic a part of their daily routine, and then you’re telling them you don’t have time for them because you’d rather be playing video games or partying with friends. I don’t have a problem with playing video games or partying with friends, I’m just saying you need to be honest about where your priorities lie.

Here’s a hint: If you’re behind schedule and you honestly feel bad about it, nail your ass to the drawing board and get back on schedule.

On Saturday I woke up early, made sure the fridge was full of chocolate milk and proceeded to work on my entry for the 2008 24 Hour Comic Day Event.

It was a lot of fun! “Action Sally’s Day Off Of No Action For Sally” was 24 pages following a day in the life of Plant-Man And Flowerin’ Star and super sleuth Action Sally. It was her day off but she still somehow managed to have some ACTION.

Doing a 24 Hour Comic is a weird task. There’s no time to plot it out or script it or even do pencils unless absolutely necessary. The panels where Sally would be doing stuff I would slightly pencil before going in with the inks, and most of the time I managed to get away with it. There’s a couple of shots where the angle is a bit wonky or her face is a bit messed up but oh well – the important thing is that I hit the deadline – in fact, I finished it in just over 18 hours. Whoo! I was really worried I wouldn’t be able to finish it at all.

I am so glad I decided to do a story about Action Sally. She’s really a one note character in Plant-Man (aren’t they all?) and I was really worried that I’d get bored of her by page three. It turns out all I had to do was take her for a walk and get to know her a bit. She’s an interesting woman with a lot going on and eager to live some life. She’s now my favourite character and I decided that if there was ever a Plant-Man movie she would be played by Autumn Reeser.

Big thanks to my wife for keeping me concentrated on the task at hand – about halfway through the day I was losing my sanity.

Anyway…I’m now wondering what to “do” with it. Here’s what my options are…

1) Make the comic a gift for people who donate
2) Include it as a bonus feature in an upcoming Plant-Man compilation book
3) Run it as a regular story on this site in the middle of next year.

So…I decided to do all of the above.

Here’s my crazy plan: If you donate (to help keep me in 0.3mm pens which I’m going through at the rate of two a week these days) I’ll send you Action Sally’s Day Off Of No Action For Sally via the magic of email. Click here to donate via PayPal!

“But Cameron, you crazy bugger”, I hear you say, “how is that an incentive if you’re just going to double dip us when you print it in the Plant-Man book next year?”. Ah here’s the cool bit: Any donation you make will count as a pre-order for the book and you’ll save that much if you buy one. So it’s a win win! Donate to get a cool story and help make the Plant-Man book happen.

Of course, if you’re willing to wait, I’m going to run the story as regular content on the site – probably around May of 2009. Now being a 24 page story it’s going to take two months to tell the whole story if you wait for it that way, so it’ll be like July before you get the full thing. Just sayin’

Anyway…in other cool news, my guest strip on Road Crew Comic ran last week! Check it out! Huge thanks to Tommie Kelly for letting me draw his characters!

This week I took some time off from my day job (yay!) to clean up a spare room in my house (boo!). Several hundred dollars spent at Ikea later I have an awesome shelfing unit that takes up an entire wall, a giant pile of unsorted magazines and comics and a swanky drawing table that faces a window with lots of sunlight streaming in, and enough room to put all my drawing equipment and not take up the dining table. Ace!

While sorting through the giant mounds of old magazines and comics and junk (how many video cables do I need? Why did I buy a S-Video to line in audio adaptor?!) I found three pages of original Plant-Man art. I have no idea when I did them. I have no memory of doing them at all. I guess I have some vestigal memory somewhere since I used one or two of the gags on these pages in some recent material, but it still leaves me with the question of: what am I supposed to do with it now?

If I just use them as the first three pages of a new Plant-Man story (after I finish the current one, which I haven’t had a chance to work on over the past week thanks to the aforementioned renovations – but hey, I’m 6 months ahead of schedule and I did a 24 hour comic on Saturday so cut me some slack, Jack!) then I’ve got the problem that the art is all over the place (It’s pretty average – i’m thinking I did it over a year ago when I wasn’t really commited to getting back into comics yet – I even change the pen I use for lettering three times in the one speech bubble).

If I scrap it then there’s three Plant-Man pages that aren’t doing anything and taking up space and not being printe and that’s a huge waste. Agh. I have no idea what to do with the story I started (they start off by going to the zoo and it just kind of stops there before the story can move on to the main plot) so I guess I could make it anything I want.

Still…it’s kinda nice to find three practically finished pages that you had no idea about…hey, that’s a week’s worth of Plant-Man updates, so I guess overall I wasn’t behind schedule this week at all!

One of the things I’ve been struggling with recently about this comic is how to explain it really quickly. It’s what they call an elevator pitch – a way of describing your creation to someone in the amount of time it takes to go for an elevator ride. You have to do it in a way that makes it sound fun and entices them to find out more – in my case, check out the web site. I’ve been writing a few of these recently as I’ve been making forum signatures and quick descriptions for use on advertising and stuff like that.

But golly gee willikers, it’s hard! I usually end up with something like “The adventures of the world’s most environmentally friendly super heroes as they fight crime and drink lots of chocolate milk”. However it’s not really accurate – the ecologically friendly stuff almost never appears in the comic, they very rarely fight any actual “crime” and there is sadly not enough chocolate milk.

Sometimes it’s something like “If you like Roger Ramjet or old british sitcoms, then you will like Plant-Man!” but there’s two problems with that – first, it references two really old things (who the heck remembers Roger Ramjet any more?) and second it doesn’t really tell you anything about the comic.

The pun-filled antics of two wacky superheroes, their lazy police commissioner and his overworked crime solving assistant. Accurate…but not really enticing.

Agh! I need some chocolate milk to figure this out…Do you have any ideas?

I’ve been reading a lot of old comics lately. Something triggered the nostalgia gene in me and I dug up all the Marvel books I grew up with in the ’80s. Squadron Supreme, Secret Wars II, those big cross over events like Mutant Massacre and Acts of Vengeance and a ton of Spider-Man books. One thing led to another and I found myself reading the ‘little kids’ version of Spider-Man Marvel published for a year or so, Peter Porker The Spectacular Spider-Ham.

It’s a really charming kids comic, complete with all the good stuff like background gags, clever puns that the kids don’t get and just a generally good nature and energy about it. It, and the Archie books I dug up over the weekend, made me realise that the inspirations for the art style on Plant-Man were coming for a long time. I like comics done in a clean style with lots of energy in the page and funky camera angles…and Spider-Ham did it in spades.

Shame Marvel completely botched the Spider-Ham book they did last year. You owe me five bucks, Marvel.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that it’s really charged me up to put more energy into the page. Shame the next page of Plant-Man I’m doing is all people talking to each other. I really need to do proper action scenes and maybe even some villains for our duo to fight. I also need to do a storyline in color – hopefully I can do that on the next story I start work on soon.

Doing a kids comic would be very cool.

I know this may come as a shock to you but your favorite webcomic (?!) isn’t the first thing in the world to be called Plant-Man. I know! I shoudl have told you to sit down or something first before reading that. Sorry. Anyway, let’s take a look at these so called Plant-Men…

The first one I discovered while reading through a bunch of old Marvel comics recently. It’s a D-grade Marvel villain that can use plants as his weapons.  Ooh he looks all teen angsty and stuff. Not my cup of tea! He should be more happy and learn to get along with things. PS: Please don’t sue me Marvel.

Plant-Man reader Ryan L. pointed me towards the Mega Man 6 Boss character Plantman. Not being much of a Mega Man (or NES) fan myself I can’t say I caught him the first time around. Still, pretty nifty! If I put my Plant-Man in as a boss character he would always win.

Many many years ago a Plant-Fan (ha I just made that up) made a neat little DOS game based on Plant-Man + Flowerin’, but unfortunately it’s been lost forever. It was a kind of cool Boulderdash clone that didn’t have much to do with the comic besides the name. There’s a Pac-Man clone on Newgrounds called Plant Man, and it’s pretty cool!

Have you discovered any other Plant Mans out there in the wild? Let me know!

Because, you know, if I go there will be trouble. On the other hand, if I stay there will be double.

I’m going back and forth about going to the local comic convention next February, and in what capacity. At first I considered the idea of printing the first Plant-Man collection book up and having it on sale at a booth, but I think we’re still way too early to be doing that kind of thing, especially since printing up a book is new territory and I haven’t considered the costs yet.

Then I thought maybe I’d just go and walk around and talk to some other comic artists that I come across there. That could be cool, and with a bit of luck I’d get free entry through my day job.

Then I thought…how about doing up some flyers? A page of Plant-Man on one side and a couple of Funny Webcomic strips on the other. I could run around the place handing them out and avoiding the security people who would no doubt be frowning on that kind of thing.

But then I thought back to the original idea and how I crossed it off the list because I didn’t know how to print up books. But wait – Plant-Man + Flowerin’ started as printed books! Well, little mini comics, but that still counts, right? Of course. Maybe I could have a little booth to promote the strips and maybe even sell or give away some mini comics?

What do you think? I would really love to hear your feedback!

After a bit of cleaning and resisting my natural urge to keep everything I’ve ever touched, the art room is now ready to make some magic happen!

Alright so it doesn’t look like much but it’s minimalist. It’s nice to have some dedicated space for making comics. It doesn’t help that I just took the photo when it was dark outside so the window blinds were shut. It’s a nice view outside during the day, honest!

OK so I’m doing some tinkering with the site. My wife’s work colleague was checking out Plant-Man and Funny Webcomic and had some issues navigating, especially on Plant-Man. I know I’ve followed the ‘blueprint’ from How To Make Webcomics but that was designed around horizontal gag strips. Plant-Man’s a vertical long form comic that stretches a storyline over anywhere from 10 to 20 pages, so it has different requirements.

To start with I moved the titles and some of the functionality buttons to the top of each page. This helps seperate the text about each page from the blog stuff on the front page. I also need to replicate the navigation buttons underneath each comic.

Another issue that came out was that people have a hard time trying to figure out if they’re still in a storyline when they go from page to page. Back in the old day I didn’t have to worry about this since the entire comic was in your hand but on the web each page is seperate. One way to do it is for me to rename all the pages so they’re like “Wacky Adventures: Page 2 of 5″ or whatever. And then in he text underneath that I put a quick link to the fist part of the storyline. What do you think?

Any other layout changes I should make while I’m at it!

Last week I got a week’s worth of Funny Webcomic done in one day. Well, one lunchtime actually, which was particularly awesome. You can read them here, if you like.

The next day I thought well, I’ll just continue onto the next week’s Funny Webcomic’s and take advantage of the time to slightly extend the buffer. If you haven’t been to the site before, it’s a daily webcomic with a totally new theme and cast every week. The hardest bit about doing Funny Webcomic is coming up with the initial idea – I have to think of something that’s easy to do (so I can do a strip during lunch) but still has enough depth I can make five strips out of it.

And then I thought…why not use this time to extend my ideas buffer?

The next few days were a lot of fun, coming up with stupid ideas and throwing out the worst ones until I had 52 solid ideas down on paper – a whole year’s worth. Some of them are just plan dumb, some I can’t wait to get down on paper to share to an indifferent world.

Here’s a snippet:

Fantasy Adventures of Magic Warriors
Bad Movie Sequels
Can It Be A Sandwhich?
Junior Detective Squad
Henry The Sexually Perverted Chocolate Bar
True!! War!! Comics!!
Blind Man and Smelly Guy
Super Elton John
Real Life Internet Guys
Things You Can Get Away With By Saying You Haven’t Had Coffee

Most of the comics that appeared in November 2008 appeared in Zarch #3 which I made well over ten years ago. They also completely lack Plant-Man and / or Flowerin’. Yeah, I know the site is called Plant-Man.com, sorry about that, the new adventure will start soon, honest.

The reason this happened was part of the larger reason that I stopped making a dedicated Plant-Man comic and made Zarch in the first place: I was really, really bored of the characters and felt really constricted making comics about them all the time.

What an idiot I was!

It’s ironic that the comics I made when I felt that way are appearing now because I can’t think of a time where I’ve enjoyed making Plant-Man more than today. They’re fun to hang out with and get down onto paper. I think the distribution and revenue limitations of mini comics back in the day were getting me down more than anything else. Now with webcomics the sky is the limit…bwahahaha, evil laughter etc.

Oh my Lord! It’s a behind the scenes video!

Some of you might remember a while back I talked about a page in Daisy The Moo Moo Cow Says Moo In The Moo Moo Farm Today that took me ages to draw and how much I hated drawing every second of it.

Well, it’s happening again on a page I’m doing now.

It’s my own fault, really. I keep forgetting, while I’m excitedly writing a new page, that at some point I have to sit down and draw the sucker. Now it’s a few months later and this page is taunting me with its weird angles, outside setting and gigantic number of background characters, tables, chairs, roads, street signs etc. I keep poking my head in the art room and that page just sits there, mocking me and my inability to draw pages that have a ton of detail in them.

It’s a Kryptonite page. It makes me weak whenever I go near it. Grr.

Tomorrow I plan on sitting down and not letting myself leave the room until the darn thing is inked and there’s a new piece of blank paper sitting on the drawing board.

And then I’ll never write a scene that requires Plant-Man and Flowerin’ to leave the house again!

The good news is that I finally got through that horrible Kryptonite page I talked about in the last blog!

The bad news is that I think the way I’m doing Plant-Man at the moment is clearly not working as well as I’d like.

The story I’m doing at the moment started off as a plot, then a script, then a set of pencils and then inks…it’s a real production line type environment. It was the first time I’ve done a Plant-Man story like that and while I think it was always good to experiment with how comics are made I don’t think it’s right for me. I feel like this story has taken months to make and it’s what, 14 pages or so?

Thankfully I’ve almost finished it and I can get onto the next one….which has its own unique challenges which you’ll see in about 6 months

Comic creators that are reading this: What’s your ‘production process’ like?

It’s a bad habit but I’ve been going over the web traffic stats for both my comic sites a lot lately. It’s interesting the different kinds of audiences and numbers I’m getting.

I always figured that Funny Webcomic would be a more popular comic than Plant-Man, but I didn’t figure how much so – the raw numbers for FWC are one hundred times bigger than the numbers for Plant-Man! I guess this means that conventional ‘gag a day comic strips’ are more popular than comic book style adventures? A quick look at isitfunnytoday.com seems to back this up, with ‘story’ comics delegated to another page.

The funny thing is that making a Plant-Man page is about a hundred times more work than making a Funny Webcomic strip!

Another thing I noticed is that FWC readers seem to be more ‘temporary’, while Plant-Man folk (Plant-Fans?) are more dedicated. Also: way more awesome.

Anyway I must resist the temptation to look at traffic figures – anything that doesn’t involve me sitting down in front of my drawing board working on the next page is a waste of my time…(he says, as he sits down in front of the Xbox for another round of Street Fighter 2 HD…)

Two weeks off from the day job! What could be better! Nothing but sitting at the drawing board, pumping out comics…right?

Yeah, right. As if!

Man, nothing gets my goat (what on Earth does that mean anyway, I don’t even own any goats) more than reading blogs on comics where the artist complains they have no time at all to do comics, and here I looking at two weeks where I don’t have day job pressing its claws at my throat and it’s still hard to find the time to do the last 4 pages of the current Plant-Man story and two week’s worth of Funny Webcomic. The list of stuff to do around the house just kind of grew and grew throughout the year and it was always pushed back to the end of year break.

Aaagh. Advice: Don’t buy a house if you want to do lots of comics

The good news is that I’m sneaking time at the drawing board here and there and am near the end of the next story. Can’t wait to get onto the next one – it’s a technical challenge but I think it will totally be worth it.

I also need to get caught up on these blogs again because to me the best bit of reading online comics is reading the blogs that go with it. Anyway, what’s going on with you?

The current story I was talking about in a recent blog post is almost finished. I’m using the time off the day job as effectively as I can and getting some more pages done – one of which I’m really proud of, since I practically had to re-write it from scratch after I realised I had used a lot of the jokes in the 24 hour comic.

And then it occured to me that I could be overlooking the best way to make Plant-Man.

One extreme is to just make it all up as I go along, with no pre-planning. This makes it a lot of fun to write and draw since everything is pretty new, but it has the downside in that I tend to go all over the place with the story and it doesn’t make a lot of sense as a whole. The other extreme – which I’ve been doing on the story I’m currently working on – is to pre-write everything and then draw it a few weeks later after going over the script several times. It keeps the story tight and gives me a chance to hone the jokes but it makes drawing the comic really boring since I’m sick of it all by the time I put pen to paper.

So for the next story I do, I’m going to try and find a good middle ground. I’m going to start by plotting out the story with a series of quick notes – one sentence per page.

Page 1 – Plant-Man and Flowerin’ are going camping
Page 2 – General camp humour.
Page 3 – Commissioner Gorgon turns up and presents the latest mission

…etc etc. So when it comes time to put pen to paper, I can do whatever I want as long as it satisifies that plot point. It keeps the story focused and lets me play around a lot.

Now I just need to finish this gosh darned story and put it into practice! It’s like an elderly relative that just won’t die so you can steal her booze.

Recently I submitted a guest strip to Calamities of Nature and it DIDN’T MAKE THE CUT. This is CLEARLY a sign of the END TIMES and we all need to MAKE PEACE WITH THOSE WHO HAVE WRONGED US and preapre to MEET OUR MAKER in these nigh hours of…oh wait, you mean it’s not the end of the world? Well, that’s OK then.

Sure it’s a bit of a disappointment that it didn’t get selected but the ones that did get selected are so good it’s hard to complain. Congratulations to the winning guest strip creators and of course CoN creator Tony Piro for having so many people wanting to make guest comics for him!

I still count the entire process as a win, though. The guest strip (which I’ll end up running on Funny Webcomic at a later date) was the first thing I’ve done in a long time that was created entirely digitally. Both Plant-Man and Funny Webcomic have some digital editing after I scan them as required (usually some typo fixes in my hand lettering or an errant slip of the pen here and there) but I haven’t created a comic from start to finish – in colour, no less! – using just a Wacom in years…and back then I was hopeless at it!

A lot of people have a hard time learning to use drawing tablets thanks to the ‘disconnect’ between where your hand is and where the image is. That never really bothered me so much. The problem I had – and even had when I borrowed a Cintiq for a short while – is I have a hard time drawing when I can’t see the entire page. It’s completely irrational but I can’t draw properly if I’m zooming in on a particular area. Maybe I just lose all sense of scale. Thankfully with the advent of higher resolution monitors this wasn’t so much of a problem this time around.

Pencilling and inking were a breeze – I loved how the pen felt making soft curves, something that was nearly impossible a few years ago when my machine was chugging and lagging with every brush stroke. Colour on the other hand was a right pain in the petunias. Coloring with an LCD monitor made it hard to get the colours right since if you move your head a lot or if I was on the laptop and the screen was angled too much. It took me a while to get the soft ‘hand painted’ look I was after but I’m pretty happy with the end result.

The strip took me about three weeks of on-again off-again work and I’m glad I did it. I still prefer the feel of making comics on paper and a piece of A4, two pens and a pencil are certainly a hell of a lot cheaper than a Wacom.

Would you want to see Plant-Man in colour? Let me know!

Anyway, that now makes three guest comics I’ve done – I just need two more to do Guest Comic Week on Funny Webcomic!

Plant-Man first hit the web on April 7 and has been making immature double entendre jokes three times a week ever since. Pretty cool to think it’s only a few months until we celebrate the first anniversary of the site! I really love doing this comic, so thanks for checking it out. The stuff I’m drawing is really exciting to me and I can’t wait for you to read it. The world’s most lovable crime and pollution fighting duo are going to have some great adventures next year. Stick around!

Funny Webcomic started on September 1 and has been a modest little success so far. The idea of a daily webcomic that changes completely every week was a bit daunting when I started it but seems to be pretty smooth sailing at the moment. I need to work on the art a bit more of course and it would be nice if I did more colour strips there, but I think people have responded to it pretty well. I’ve got a stack of ideas for upcoming strips and who knows, maybe some of them will even be funny!

So five months after launching my first webcomic I launched the second one…so does this mean in a month or two I’m going to launch the third one?

I’ve been kicking around an idea for a third strip that I think would work pretty darn well on its own, instead of just as an “idea of the week” in Funny Webcomic. There’s no way on Earth I have the time right now to draw the thing, though, so unless there’s someone out there who has the time and awesomosity (tm) to handle the art side of things…is there? Hello?

Oh well, at any rate I’ll keep plugging away at these two swell comics I’m already doing until my arms fall off and my eyes jump out of their sockets.

Which at the rate I’m going will be next Tuesday!

One of the biggest things people who make comics lack – besides money, respect or success – is time. Ideally, we would have all the time in the world to sit down at the drawing board and make a perfect comic, but the realities of the world don’t work that way. We have jobs, relationships and responsibilities to take care of.

We also have a nasty habit of absent-mindedly killing time.

A lot of people think they don’t have the time to do a comic at all, or maybe only update once a week. Some people think they don’t have time to do their strip in color or figure out some tricky website layout issue. It’s something we’ve all dealt with, but if you objectively looked at what you did with your day you might find a useful hour or two that you usually kill.

At Work: If you’re an office worker stuck at a computer all day, there’s no reason you can’t open up Notepad and write down a blog post or two when the ideas hit you (It’s what I’m doing right now!). If you have web access, you can use a service like Google Docs to keep your scripts for upcoming comics easily accessible at your work and home machines. Take a notepad with you to meetings – you look like you’re paying attention but you can be working on that killer punchline.

If you work outside or at a retail job, try sneaking your pad and pen with you to your breaks instead of wasting half an hour making idle gossip with your co-workers. Funny Webcomic is written, lettered and inked during my lunch breaks I would have otherwise spent killing time.

At Home: Take a good look at your daily schedule for any ‘dead’ areas. Are there regular chunks of time that have no real use? Of course I don’t mean you should be locked away in your drawing area while the rest of your family are having dinner together, and certainly it’s important to unwind at the end of the work day. However if making comics is as important to you as you say it is, you need to put in the extra effort to find some time for your art every night and establish it as a habit. I realised that I was spending an hour or so every night doing nothing in particular – half heartedly playing video games, aimlessly browsing the net, watching television shows that I wasn’t really interested in…all the while thinking about what I wanted to do in the next Plant-Man! That hour is better spent actually at the drawing board getting it done instead.

On Breaks: People take books with them to read while sunbathing, why not take your drawing equipment instead? Tell stories of your comic characters at camp instead of ghost stories – bonus points if your comic is about ghosts.

If you have a good example of how to avoid killing time, I’d love to hear it!

Plant-Man and Flowerin’ would like to share their sack of treats with you!

I’m not going to talk about comics today. Honest! My awesome wife (who is awesome, don’tcha know) spoiled me like a week old egg for Christmas and we’ve spent the last few days doing pretty much absolutely nothing besides playing them. (And yes I kept making comics, no slacking off around here…but I gotta do something when I’ve stuffed up Plant-Man’s arm for the fifth time in a row GOD WHAT I WOULDN’T DO TO BE ABLE TO DRAW HANDS THAT DON’T LOOK LIKE OVEN MITTS)

First up, the Wii. I didn’t like the machine back when I borrowed one early in the year but now I get it. It helps if you have games that don’t suck like Sonic and Mario at the Olympic Games. That thing cheesed me off big time. It was like an interactive exercise in the effects of negative reinforcement. The whole premise was ridiculous anyway because Sonic the Hedgehog should just win everything.

LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga: These games don’t really rely on graphical showoffiness (that’s a new word Firefox, deal with it) so it’s just as good on the Wii as it is on the 360 or the PS2 or even the DS. A lot of fun and each of the levels is broken up into tiny chunks that match how much ‘free’ time I have to play pretty well. I’m working through the prequels at the moment and saving the good movies till last. The flying levels suck though.

Super Mario Galaxy: For some reason I’m not digging this. Maybe I just don’t have time for another action adventure game right now and I’ll get into it later. Blah blah blah princess has been kidnapped blah blah blah spherical worlds blah blah blah. I’ll get back to you on this one.

Boom Blox: Wow! This is a fantastic game. It’s the first game I’ve played on it that feels like something you just couldn’t get on any other system. It’s like Jenga but without having to clean up or have friends. Tons and tons of physics-based puzzles and great multiplayer games. It’s rare as hen’s teeth but totally worth the hunt.

De Blob: This is the big surprise of the lot. It’s a 3D platformer where you paint the world with different colours and mix them up to make new colours. It’s fun, presented with flourish and just exudes style from every frame. Plus it reminds me of Wizball and anything that reminds me of Wizball is aces in my book.

OH by the way if you have a Wii and you haven’t got component cables then sell your body fluids and go and get them. I seriously thought my Wii was broken before I plugged those suckers in. Ouch!

We also bought Guitar Hero 3 to get the extra guitar, and Lordy is it a lot harder then World Tour. Some great tracks though, I always wanted to play Cherub Rock. Can’t stand playing the single player though, it’s just way too hard to be remotely fun.

While picking up Guitar Hero 3 I also grabbed some old PlayStation games. The original Need for Speed is still the best one. It’s almost like Out Run with the long sweeping roads…shame what happened to the franchise since. It’s so weird playing a racing game without analog controls.

Recommend me some video games! I always want to know what people are playing…

600 pixels wide for Plant-Man, 850 pixels wide for Funny Webcomic

HA

For some reason typing “Best comic ever” into Google doesn’t result in Plant-Man.com appearing as the top result. Yeah, I know, what’s up with that? I don’t get it. Anyway, I thought it would be cool* to share some search term results that apparently did result in people coming to check out what I would like to call the BEST COMIC EVER.

“Wacky” – Well, that’s a nice way to start things. I like to think Plant-Man is wacky. He’s just that kind of guy, you know the guy at the party who goes outside to rearrange your lawn furniture so it spells out words for Google Earth to take photos of.

“Bad guy cliches” – I guess this one is OK. I did a page called that once. I’ll let this one pass. Do you hear me, Google? You get that punch for free.

“Planting man” – I don’t know what you sick freaks are into. Some kind of sick sex in dirt fetish. Oh lord, I hope I didn’t just invent that. I don’t want to go down as the man who invented seed planting.

“Comic strip about plant” – That would be pretty boring don’t you think? Plants don’t really do much. Unless it was something like Bob The Angry Flower. That would be kind of cool.

“Comic strips for pollution” – I’m pretty sure I’m against pollution. Yeah, I just checked. Pollution bad.

“Man with plant hands” – Eww. How would you pick your nose? You’d get pollen up there and start sneezing like mad. Forget that.

“Diplomatic Problem” – I don’t think Plant-Man is actually in the business of solving diplomatic problems. It would be nice if he was. Boring comics though. I pity the poor guy who had a diplomatic problem and turned to this comic for advice. We’re really only good for tawdry double entendres.

“Ideas buffer” – As opposed to buff ideas – thoughts about guys who work out a lot.

“Paranoid man” – Are you paranoid? Or do you want to find out what it’s like for a man to be paranoid? Let me tell you, it sucks. Everyone is out to get me. There will that do?

“Webcomic updated” – I’ve come to learn that a webcomic that is updated is actually a pretty rare thing so I’m glad that Google acknowledges that this comic is always on time. It might not be all that funny but at least it’s consistent.

*cool is a relative term. So is Uncle.

Wait, I can hear you thinking to yourself already: “What’s Cameron talking about now? There’s a million billion comic conventions every year! He must be off his medications again and back to drinking tobasco sauce”. OK, you’re right (about the convention thing, not the medication thing, and the tobasco sauce thing I can quit any time I want, honest) – there are a ton of conventions every year…

…In every country but mine.

There is one comic convention in Australia – Supanova – and it’s held once a year in Sydney, Melbourne and my home town of Brisbane. It’s a pretty popular event, to be sure, but it’s not really a comic convention. It’s more of a popular entertainment convention, with a big focus on television stars, movie memorabilia, science fiction merchandise and video games (my day job will be holding a huge booth there). Comics are represented with the occasional booth for local stores and one or two artists plugging their wares.

It’s cool and all but it’s not really a comic convention.

Which poses the problem for me because I’m tryinig to decide if it’s worth going there to plug Plant-Man and Funnywebcomic. Having a booth or a table doesn’t make much sense since I don’t have any books or t-shirts to sell, so I’m thinking of going and handing out flyers (more on that later). Will it be worth the hassle? I can’t imagine it’ll be a real comic crowd. I’m happy to be proven wrong though.

It really worries me because every ‘pro’ web cartoonist keeps saying that going to these conventions is a critical part of anyone’s success. The implication there is that if you don’t go to four or ten conventions a year to sell books, you’re pretty much screwed, and I don’t really know what I can do about that.

I’ve changed the way I draw Flowerin’ a lot.

His origin story had him a bit thicker than usual, and his petals were just done really haphazardly.

Soon I was defining his petals a bit clearer, adding that little line in the middle to show the crease in each petal.

For a long time I used this kind of petal layout. Eight petals of equal size looks good but I soon found myself running out of room in each panel he was in. This era also saw the start of him being really thin – if his head was the where the petals came from, it only made sense for his body to be the thin, bendy stem.

I also started doing the shading around this time, too. Note that the shadows are always arranged so that Plant-Man and Flowerin’ are each other’s light source. See, I’m not just making this stuff up as I go along, there is a rhyme and reason to it all, honest!

I occasionally slipped up and drew four flower petals instead of the full eight. However, I did like the way I could make each petal stand out with the lower number.

I also experiemented with making some petals stick out at the edge, like they’re protuding out from the face in two directions at once. It almost makes Flowerin’s face ‘sink’ into the petals.

The logical extension of that face sinking effect. Just looks kinda silly, don’t you think?

Hang on, what’s this? Four petals at the front, four at the back…I might be onto something here…

Getting a lot closer to what I want. The arrangement of the petals seems to be spot on, but they’re all too square for my liking.

Eureka! Now we’re cooking with week old cooking oil. Four petals at the front pointing up / down / left / right, four petals at the back going at diagonal angles. Definition lines in the middle to indicate roundness. And look at how it looks from behind! Yay! For the first time I think it actually works as a costume enough so people could actually make it if they wanted to dress up as Flowerin’ for some bizarre reason.

This is the design I’ve been keeping in my head whenever I draw him and I really need to make up a character model sheet at some point.

There have been some times that I’ve gone decidedly off model…

Anime Flowerin’ shows my completely lack of anime skill.

Rob Liefield Flowerin’ ready to dish out justice!

It was the early ’90s and it was time for people to grow their fringe over their eyes.

Uh oh Flowerin’ you’ve been eating all the pies!

Chronologically speaking the 1912 version of Flowerin’ (back then he was simply called Flowering) was the first one. Look out, old chap!

Which Flowerin’ design do you like the best?