Well OK then.
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OH MY GOD. Your computer is now SAVED by the wonderfulness of this Flowerin’ desktop! Oh thank goodness we have such technological marvels of the modern age.
CLICK HERE FOR YOUR RESOLUTION: 1900 x 1600 | 1900 x 1200 | 1280 x 1024 | 1280 x 800
Yay! The action-iest girl we know, Action Sally, now has her own desktop image! You know it’s what you woke up today for!
Hey! Here’s Gotpork City’s hardest working (in the sense that vacation time counts as part of the job) police commissioner, ready for your desktop!
CLICK HERE FOR YOUR RESOLUTION: 1900 x 1600 | 1900 x 1200 | 1280 x 1024 | 1280 x 800
Plant-Man is turning a year old in a few months! Well, the website, not the man himself, I really should figure out how old he is. I always figured he’d be 27 since that’s how old super heroes always are in the comics. Old enough to have their stuff together, not too old so they aren’t able to leap tall buildings or die forty times an issue.
Anyway, I want to go ahead and do a new site layout. Not only will a fresh coat of paint look nice, but (and this is the main reason) I want to change the layout so I can have the comic appear larger. The new ‘Graphic Novel’ layout in Comicspress 2.7 seems like a perfect fit for a long form comic like Plant-Man and Flowerin’.
I like the current layout but compressing the art to fit into 600 pixels seems a bit silly in this day and age. Even those tiny little netbooks (oh, you delicious little things, one day you will be mine, oh yes) have enough pixels to handle a wider layout.
Of course knowing how these things go it’ll probably take me ages to get it working right and geez I put a lot of work into the current layout agh why am I doing this?
Oh and then of course I’ll have to rescale all the old comics to the new size that should be HUGE MEGA FUN!
Someone talk me out of this, please!
Look, I really love Twitter, honest I do, but geez it makes writing blog posts a pain in the patukas. I’ve gotten so used to putting my thoughts out in easily digestible, 140 character pieces that the thought of writing several paragraphs on the some subject just seems alien and weird.
Remember when people had their own webpages? And used stuff like Livejournal or Blogger? Yeah, those days sucked. I’m kind of glad everyone’s moved over to more centralised systems like Facebook, Myspace etc. It makes finding people you have nothing to say to much easier.
I’m the kind of guy that forgets about an idea as soon as I put it out there, so I shouldn’t be surprised that I keep forgetting to blog about a game I’m playing or a book I’m reading or a trip I’m taking once I’ve twittered about it.
So I guess what I’m saying is…follow my Twitter? Actually that’s a good idea anyway. I’d love to have people that read this comic add me to their list!
Wow Plant-Man is almost a year old! Holy hand grenades that’s pretty cool. And let me look at the buffer…OK so we can assume Plant-Man will be around for another six months at least.
Ha ha I am a funny jokester because Plant-Man isn’t going anywhere. I love those crazy critters! And they’re easy to draw. That’s always a plus.
If there’s one thing I would love to change it’s the number of people that read my comics. I’d love there to be more.
Ideally by the end of the year Plant-Man will have gone from having 20 readers a day to 200. Likewise it would be great if Funny Webcomic went from 200 a day to 2000.
Too optimistic? Well, yeah, probably, but a guy’s gotta aim for the stars to hit the moon, right?
So in order for me to achieve this, I’ll need to make up some ads and start running them all over the place.
Let me ask you this though: What brought you to Plant-Man in the first place? I’m really interested in this because it’ll help me pick out what ‘angle’ I should bring to the ads, where to promote the site etc. This is going to be crucial I think because it’ll be pointless advertising Plant-Man on places that aren’t interested in what I’m doing.
Oh and apparently I should have quality updates that bring people back? That can’t be right, surely, I’ll have to re-read my copy of How To make Webcomics to be sure.
…huh, how about that: it says comics should be funny! Damn it!
The wife and I were out having coffee one morning.
Me: “So I want to do an Action Sally story”
The wife: “OK”
Me: “I have no idea what to do in it”
The wife: “uh, I dunno…” (looks at muffins behind the glass counter) “how about she fights a muffin?”
Me: “That’s BRILLIANT”
The wife: “I was just kidding.”
Cut to my drawing board a few hours later:
nom nom nom
I’ve really got to stop saying yes to every silly little idea that crosses my brain. It’s leading to way too many late nights and shifted priorities and I really want to focus on Plant-Man for a while. Sigh.
But still…if I have a spare hour or so, what’s to stop me from doing a guest strip here, or a podcast there? I have the time, there’s nothing on TV and it’s something I can use as content later, right? Right.
I have at last count six websites that I don’t update any more, that were great ideas once but don’t have the time I need to focus on them. Geez, I’d love to bring some of them back, but I want to focus on the comics for a while. Comics are fun. Don’t you think they’re fun too?
Have they made cloning machines yet? That would be ace.
So far NOBODY has targeted me for that “Write 25 things about yourself” meme that’s sweeping Facebook. Well that’s fine, I don’t mind at all that NOBODY OUT THERE HAS THOUGHT OF ME. No I’m fine it’s just something in my eye…sniff!
Here’s my 25 Things. Use them at your peril.
1) I have never owned an Xbox, but I wrote for the Official magazine for like 3 years. Oops!
2) Nothing on this planet annoys me more than people who don’t use their talent because of their laziness, apathy or insecurities. Jesus people most of us have, what, ten years tops to make a mark on the world and you’re sitting on the couch watching the game? GET TO WORK.
3) If you’ve ever talked to me on the telephone then you should know that I hate, hate, hate being on the telephone. Detest it with a firey passion usually reserved for my equally irrational source of hate and bitterness, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
4) Oh man, don’t even get me started about Philp Seymour Hoffman. His continued existence just bugs me like a nasty case of dandruff. GET OUT OF MY TELEVISION / SCALP, PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN.
5) So far none of my television appearances have made me famous. Neither have my internet ones. What’s a guy got to do to get famous around here?
6) I am incredibly lucky to have the life I have and I hope the people who enable me to have said life know that I appreciate it.
7) It’s been a year since I decided to throw myself back into the world of comics and I’ve had an absolute blast so far. I am kicking myself for giving up on them so many times before. The distribution issue always managed to thwart any attempt at getting any momentum going. The web really doesn’t have that issue.
8 – I think I’m pretty good at my day job, but truth be told still don’t know exactly how I got it.
9) I don’t cook nearly as well as my wife thinks I do.
10) No matter what I’m doing or how many side projects are going on I still can’t get rid of the feeling that I’m being lazy or not doing enough. There’s always five more projects to be doing or five more friends to be seeing or five more things I could be doing for my wife.
11) Conversely I can’t say no to anything. Want me to write a book? Sure. Want me to do a guest strip? I’m there. Want me volunteers for your yak shaving contest? Sign me up. It’s a sickness.
12) Making video games all day is good fun but nowhere near as much fun as people think it is. It’s a lot of paperwork and compromise and having to argue about your creative decisions. Having a game you helped make sit on the store shelf is awesomely cool though. (Not so hot seeing it in the second hand area a week later, but hey!)
13) There’s this giant ticking LED clock above my head for the past 20 years and it’s ticking down and I don’t know how much time there is left so I have to finish this list so I can move onto the next thing like NOW GO GO GO
14) Still can’t listen to The Clouds any more, despite them ostinsibly being my favourite band of all time. Sorry. Just can’t do it any more.
15) My time on the radio wasn’t much better than my time on television, but it did help me tick off another medium to appear on. Oh, Podcasts, I’ve done them too. Next: Hollywood movies starring Alyson Hannigan.
16) I still stand firm that Tunnels And Trolls is better than Dungeons and Dragons. You could play it by yourself, which got me through high school lunch breaks just fine. Yes, I was such a geek that not even the Dungeons and Dragons nerds would hang out with me.
17) I’m so old that we only had one computer in our school, and you had to be in the top maths class to use it. This baffled me, since I sucked at maths and was somehow able to operate my Commodore 64 just fine at home.
18) Actually in the last year of school they got a heap of giant laptops. I think I stole one. I have no idea why I did it, and have less of an idea why I didn’t remember that until just now. What the heck did I do with it?
18) The things I would do with Ben Affleck if left to our own devices can’t even be put into words.
19) I could really do with some chocolate milk right now.
20) Tinitus is a pain in the ass, figuratively speaking. Imagine someone blowing a whistle right next to your ear 24 hours a day 7 days a week, 364 days a year (he doesn’t work on Good Friday). It drove me mad until I learned to drone it out with a specific blend of early ’90s indie rock music.
21) I stand firm on the idea that they stopped making music after July 21, 1997. They stopped making video games after 1994 too.
22) I really hope Plant-Man takes off, or at least, does alright. It needs more promotion but lord it makes me happy to draw and write. I hope you like it.
23) I spent the last half hour trying to think of what my perfect day would be, but couldn’t. I guess it hasn’t happened yet?
24) I think it’s so cute that people think I want to know about their stuff.
25) If I could go back in time fifteen years ago I’d tell myself “dude, you’re awesome. Keep going exactly how you’re going” and then play some Super Nintendo.
I’m going to go to Supanova in April. For the non-Australians out there it’s our one and only comic and geek entertainment convention. This should be fun or at least terrifying in a comical way. As I mentioned before I will be making up some flyers to pass out to unwilling victims on the show floor. These flyers will then be used thus:
98% thrown in the trash
2% used to check out the website
1% used to prove how bad at math I am
My basic idea about this is that I’ll put three Funny Webcomic strips on one side and a selected Plant-Man page on the other. At the top will be the comic’s logos and url, and a brief one or two sentence description.
So right now that leaves me scratching my head thinking about the one or two sentence description…and downright scraping my brains out thinking about which strips and pages to select!
The Funnywebcomic side should in theory be easy. In fact I’ve got a wealth of good comics I can select from. Medical Drama Comic, Man Rules, On This Day In History…and that’s without even having the site open on my computer right now.
But man! Picking a Plant-Man page is going to be really tricky. I need a page that really sums up what these guys are about and the style of humor. After reading through the archives last night I’m still not any closer to being able to choose one that stands out as a stand-alone page.
One of the first reviews of Plant-Man back when it was a mini comic used the page of Comissioner Gorgon thinking to himself as an illustration. Not only is it not the funniest page ever but it didn’t even have the stars in it!
I think I’ve narrowed it down to these three contenders. Guys I am really really really in the need for you to tell me which one you think works best as a stand-alone page.
There’s also something cool that will be happening at Supanova that I can’t talk about just yet but has made me very excited to be there! I’ll talk about it when the event gets closer…
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