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

Remember when I was trying to decide between doing a 3 page Plant-Man + Flowerin’ story and a 3 page Action Sally story for Groovy Gravy 11?

Well, er, I decided to do both. Because I’m an idiot, that’s why.

Anyway.

I showed the art to a couple of people after they were done, just to prove to myself that I did actually make these things and it wasn’t some kind of crazy hallucination, and got an interesting piece of feedback:

“How Well Could You Draw if You Actually Cared?”

After some umms and errs, it turns out that I was being asked that because some of the art (especially in the Action Sally story) was quite good, but I made a couple of errors here and there.

My reasoning for this was that I was under the gun, time wise, and I’m the kind of guy that cares more about hitting the deadline over making sure everything’s perfect. A couple of other people in the room didn’t think that was a clever idea, since they’re used to taking forever to do a comic.

But on the other hand, none of these people do a daily comic strip and a 3 page a week adventure / comedy comic. Deadlines are a fact of life for any cartoonist that wants to build an audience rather than just please themselves with their art (though that in itself is a noble goal)

So which is better? Consistency in schedule or consistency in aesthetics?

And I’m choosing not to take the comment as an insult

I was going to talk about the tools I use to make Plant-Man + Flowerin’ today but I’ll have to leave that for another day.

As I spoke about in my last blog post I’m spending this weekend pumping out a 3 page comic, so the tools I use to make a comic don’t really matter that much right now.

What is important are the tools to help me get through a weekend where I have to get a 3 page story done from scratch to final ink!

So here we go:

• Television with The Simpsons on it (Yeah yeah I know you’re going to tell me it sucks these days, but I still love it, and even bad Simpsons is a hell of a lot better than pretty much everything else on the box these days)
• Internet Radio with XM54: Lithium playing on it (thanks to Sirius XM for giving free trials in exchange for a unique email address – great stuff if you own some domain names and have, in essence, unlimited unique email addresses!)
• Sarsaparilla. Best soft drink ever.
• Chocolate Milk. My weapon of choice is Nestle Milo. Its cold and yummy and chewable.
• More Sarsaparilla. Sugar!
• Wife that knows how manic I am about deadlines.

I think you’re good to get through a deadline like this with only one of these things, but there’s no sense not being prepared, right? Right.

Groovy Gravy is a Brisbane comic institution, and has been for around a gajillion years. It’s an anthology book published sporadically and I’ve been a fan since the first issue.

I’ve been involved with it on and off again – after they kindly put a character wearing a Plant-Man + Flowerin’ t-shirt in the second issue, and a fan letter in an issue shortly after that, I even got the chance to write a page for…I think it was issue eight? At any rate it’ll appear on this site shortly. It was a full page adventure of Daisy The Moo Moo Cow!

Anyway, fast forward to now, and I’ve been asked if I’ll be interested in doing a story for issue 11 which will be sold at Supa Nova in a few weeks. Of course I jumped at the chance.

So if you’ll excuse me I have to hit the drawing board. I think a 3 page Plant-Man + Flowerin’ story would be good.

Or maybe a 3 page Action Sally story?

Hmm.

Anyway, later.

Over on Funny Webcomic – my daily webcomic with a different theme and cast of characters each week – I’ve added a poll where people can vote on what the following week’s theme will be. It was one of the ideas I had for the launch of the site but the wife wisely advised me that nobody would car enough to vote then. She was right, and now that there’s around 200 strips on the site people have developed a taste for it.

I’m happy that people are voting now, because I love the idea that old strip ideas can be resurrrected if there’s enough demand for it and I’m also free to explore new ideas if that’s what you guys want. It’s cool watching Funny Webcomic evolve like that, especially since the original original idea was that it was just going to be “Generic Gaming Comic” and it wasn’t until I visited the hospital shortly after launching it I drew “Medical Drama Comic” and changed everything.

Um, anyway. Voting! It turned out good on Funny Webcomic, but I’m unsure about it’s implementation on Plant-Man. Until now I just had a simple “What’s your favourite character?” poll, but maybe I should change it. A poll about the plot of the current storyline? A poll about what the next storyline should be about? A poll about the art?

So I’ve decided to make a poll about the future of the poll. Everyone get on Plant-Man’s big poll!