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First all-digital GPF strip is in the queue
January 22nd, 2008 (10 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
As previously forecast, the first all-digital GPF strip is now officially in the queue. Since yesterday was a holiday, I was able to sit down and spend some time scripting and planning for Year Nine of the comic (after finally packing up and moving all our Christmas decorations into the attic). I then got my first chance to sit down with Hermes and work from a raw script to build a finished GPF strip, from start to finish, without the single use of pen and paper. Mind you, I’ve done a few strips that were up to 95%+ digital, reusing old art or having tons of digital effects. But even on those the panel boxes were drawn by hand or the original art lifted from other strips were drawn on paper first. This was the first time I “penciled” and “inked” everything in the computer without touching a single sheet of Bristol board.

It was… a learning experience.

I used my old process as a template and modified steps as I went along. I had created some panel templates a while back using Inkscape and imported that into Paint Shop Pro, splitting them into their own layer. I then created background, sketch, and ink raster layers (when imported there was no background, so I had to add one), then added a vector layer for the text. Just like working with my old process, I put in the text first; only this time, the typed text went directly into the panels as the finished product rather than measuring out space to add it in later. I sketched my rough lines in the sketch layer, which gave me the added benefit of being able to remove the sketch lines at will by turning the layer on and off. I found out my sketching technique doesn’t translate cleanly to digital work. I pick my pencil up quite often and quickly set it back down and sometimes this move is so quick the stylus doesn’t register it at first, resulting in missed lines. (I noticed this before with my Wacom but it wasn’t as obvious when I didn’t use it as often for sketching.)

Once penciled, I moved to a different layer and put in the inks. I haven’t been able to get pressure sensitivity to work with Hermes; I know it does work, as there’s a pre-installed app that supports it, but I haven’t gotten it to work in PSP yet. However, since I’ve always drawn with technical pens in the past, I’m used to working with lines of set sizes, fudging occasionally when I really need to taper something. (Bill Holbrook of Kevin & Kell does the same thing.) So I used varying sizes for my paint brush, mimicking the approximate sizes of each technical pen I used to use. It took a few tries at first to get what I wanted, but it worked out fairly well. I decided to do my character flat colors in the ink layer as well so they would sit above the background gradients, which was an added step I never had to worry about before.

I tried to do vector word balloons for the dialog, but I’ve never been happy with the predefined “callout” objects PSP came with. So I drew those by hand as well, making them not a far departure from the way I used to draw. Of course, one advantage I have now is that I can flip and rotate Hermes around as I draw, making straight lines easier to freehand. That’s not something to do with Bristol board taped to a big, bulky art desk.

All in all, it turned out pretty well. I’m satisfied with the results. Not impressed, but satisfied. Admittedly, the first story of the new “year” is a pretty simple one artistically, which was a conscious decision. I knew I’d being trying out new things so I wanted to make things relatively easy on myself. This should give me time to find a new groove before the second story, which will be a bit more ambitious. (The only hint you’ll get for now: the honeymoon.) I imagine things will get easier as I get used to my new process. The big advantage, of course, was that I wasn’t hidden away in the basement away from my family, so I was instantly accessible if my wife or son needed me. I do think it took me less time as well, but I didn’t bother timing myself to make sure.

So when do you get to see the final result? March 10th. Which makes this a good time to transition to the next topic of this post….

March 10 will mark the beginning of the next GPF “year”, Year Nine. Year Nine was supposed to start in November 2006, but because of the many delays that plagued me after Ben was born, I’m seriously behind. That can’t be helped, of course, so I’m just going to continue on as best I can. Year Nine will be abbreviated, running from March 2008 through October, with Year Ten starting on the day after GPF’s tenth anniversary, November 3rd. I’ll then try to return to the old November through October “year” schedule I maintained from the beginning, for as long as I can keep the strip running.

The best news: I’m going to try my best to move GPF back to a three-day-per-week schedule starting with Year Nine. So on March 10, expect to continue coming back Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but look for fresh strips throughout the week. By setting this as the start of the new “year”, I’m now back at my ideal eight to seven week optimal buffer; if I can produce three strips per week with this streamlined process, I should be set to keep this buffer. It will mean some modifications to my storytelling process, meaning I’ll be aiming for smaller, funnier stories and fewer “mega arcs”. (Pauses for cheers from some of the audience to die down.) However, look for things to become a bit more serial as I try to work larger-running plot threads into concurrent smaller stories.

Note, of course, that this announcement comes here and not in the official News. Ergo, it’s not officially official yet, so you can officially take it with an official grain of salt. This is a goal and not a policy yet, so don’t look for it to be set in stone (or at least Jell-O) until you see it announced there.

As I’ve hinted here and in the GPF News, there are a lot of changes in store for GPF this year. These are but a few of them. Look for several huge announcements (and I do mean huge) to be coming out in the next month or so. If you are not currently subscribed to the RSS feeds here and on the GPF site, now might be a good time so you won’t miss anything. Keenspot PREMIUM folks should pay special attention, as you will be the most directly affected. (If you’ve been ignoring the dusty old Rumor Mill page, now might be a good time to checking it periodically.)
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Introducing Hermes
January 2nd, 2008 (10 months, 3 weeks ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 4 Core Dumps
Sorry for the quality of the picture. This was taken with my cell phone’s camera, which isn’t the best in quality but all I had available at the time. (I also should have cleaned the screen before taking this. Oopsie.)

As mentioned in Monday’s GPF News post, I’m looking at a number of ways to take GPF completely digital as a way to speed up my process while not taking time away from my family. The history and reasoning behind this transition is pretty well outlined in the News post, so I won’t replicate it here; make sure you read that post to get the gory details. However, I haven’t really discussed the primary tool to implement those changes, which I felt would be more appropriate to talk about here than in the “official” GPF News.

I’d like you to meet Hermes. Hermes, say hello to the nice people. Hermes is a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC. (For those old timers who may be confused by seeing the name “Lenovo” attached to IBM’s old flagship ThinkPad notebook PC brand, IBM spun off its PC business in 2005 to Chinese company Lenovo, who had already done most of the manufacturing for IBM’s PCs for several years.)

As mentioned in the above linked News post and in the publicly accessible Behind-the-Scenes page, GPF has been a half-analog, half-digital process since pretty much the beginning. What I’ve apparently failed to mention in (or perhaps it would be better to say that I’ve failed to update) either the public Behind-the-Scenes page or its expanded Keenspot PREMIUM-exclusive counterpart is that I’ve been using a Wacom Intuos3 tablet for several years now. Wacom is probably the best known manufacturer of digital tablets which are used by digital artists, 3D modelers, and CAD architects the world over. Digital tablets are much more intuitive for artists to work with than most other pointing devices (mice, pointing sticks, trackballs, etc.), usually giving you a pen or stylus to manipulate the cursor on the screen. I’ve spoken to many digital artists over the years who swear by their Wacoms who eventually convinced me to splurge and give it a try. The Intuos is their mid-range line for advanced amateurs and frugal professionals; many of the artists at my day job use Intuoses (Intui?). My Intuos has gone a long way in improving the GPF development process, and it’s only with great reluctance that I fall back to the mouse or other pointing device for really high-precision details.

That said, the combination of a tablet and a laptop is a bit… cumbersome. Usually when I do the digital half of a strip, I’m sitting on the couch in the living room with Apollo, our previous “alpha” ThinkPad, in my lap and the Intuos hovering in my hand above the keyboard. This works well enough as long as I don’t need to type anything, but leads to some awkward flipping of the tablet up and down when I have to change certain settings or use a different pointing device. It also leads to some uncomfortable right hand positions as I try to balance the tablet above the keyboard without accidentally hitting keys. But perhaps the most fundamental problem is the disconnect between what the hand does and where the eyes are looking. Many of us have been trained for years to move a mouse with one hand while looking at the moving cursor on the screen. This becomes a little more awkward for an artist who is used to looking at the art beneath the pencil/pen/brush in their fingers. I minimize this somewhat by having the tablet so close to the LCD of the laptop, but it’s still not as intuitive as I would like. If only I could actually draw on the screen….

Wacom has a line of LCD displays with tablet capabilities called the Cintiq. I’ve wistfully mused about one for some time, but didn’t really covet one until I played with on at SIGGRAPH 2007. The large, crisp, bright display combined with the ability to draw directly on the screen was intoxicating, and I had to admit that I began to rationalize the high price tag just to get my hands on one. After all, I haven’t been to a con in a couple years now, so the GPF checking account has reached all-time highs with much more coming in than going out. But the Cintiq would be wholly impractical in my situation, where my digital art is technically a secondary source of income and the return on investment would be minimal. It would also be impractical from a physical standpoint; having seen one now in person, it’s completely unrealistic to sit on the couch with my son playing in the floor while having this massive 20″+, 16+ lb glowing brick in my lap. I’d have to move the digital work to a dedicated location, further isolating me from my family while working on the strip. If only I could have the draw-on-screen power of the Cintiq in a portable form….

It was about then that my wife called my attention to the latest employee purchase options at her work. Whereas I was laid off from IBM back in 2003, she’s still an IBMer and still has access to their employee purchase program. Since Lenovo now produces IBM’s old line of PCs, the two companies undoubtedly have a deal that allows the old IBM employee purchase program to access Lenovo machines at significant discount. And sure enough, Lenovo has recently added a line of Tablet PCs to the ThinkPad brand.

The Tablet PC is an interesting concept, but one I wasn’t very enamored with when I first heard of it. The concept is to apply the idea of a “notebook” further to the “notebook PC” by introducing the ability to write directly onto the computer’s screen. Handwriting recognition software would translate the user’s hand written notes into traditional computer text, making note taking more intuitive for less tech-savvy individuals. The concept, however, has been pretty slow to take off. In some places, the PDA (admittedly a dying breed of technology) continues to be more portable and better at converting handwriting to text. In others, the laptop is so deeply entrenched that the target users have already made the move to typing over writing and returning to a stylus would be a step backward. (How many words per minute can you type versus write by hand?) But there are two places where Tablet PCs have really taken off: replacing the traditional clipboard charts in hospitals and… digital artists on the go.

Let me start off by saying that I’m really impressed by this little guy. The transition from using a mouse to using the Intuos was rough at first, despite the fact that the tablet is more intuitive to an artist. You get used to doing things a certain way and relearning things always introduces a few speed bumps. The transition from the Wacom to the ThinkPad, however, was a lot smoother and I barely noticed the difference in speed. In fact, text entry has been the biggest speed bump so far. Using the on-screen keyboard is a bit clunky and is probably the biggest bottleneck in terms of physical speed. However, since Hermes has more memory and a faster processor than Apollo, any slowdowns from removing the keyboard from the equation are probably negated by the beefier hardware. I did have one problem with losing the touch strips on the Intuos which are usually mapped for zooming; I never realized just how much I used those until I lost them. However, I was able to remap a couple hardware buttons on Hermes’ screen to emulate the mouse wheel (which also does zoom in Paint Shop Pro), eliminating this problem.

The real Achilles heel in this transition, however, is my software. I’m still using my old decrepit copy of Paint Shop Pro 7 that I’ve been using for years now. I’ve been disappointed in both the increasing price of the software and the constant upheaval Jasc (the original developer) caused with each revision of in the interface, so I never bothered to upgrade. Then Jasc was bought out by Corel, and constant complains from our Corel Draw users here at work have convinced me to steer clear of upgrading my beloved PSP from here on out. I’m still too cheap to justify the ridiculous price tag for Adobe Photoshop, which I’m unwilling to switch to anyhow because I don’t really want to relearn a whole new interface. (I always felt that PSP’s interface, at least in versions 4 through 7, was much simpler and easier to use.) And while my long term goal has been to switch to completely free alternatives like the GIMP and/or Inkscape, that’s yet another completely different way of doing things that I’d have to unlearn and relearn, and the reason I’ve never made that transition is that my time is better spent now making comics than learning new software.

Mind you, overall PSP has worked extremely well with the tablet. It’s not an OS/application problem, as Hermes runs Windows XP, just like Apollo did. The problem comes in with one tiny yet critical aspect of the PSP interface and the apparent lack of precision in the tablet stylus. There’s one control on the PSP palette toolbar that controls switching between flat colors, gradients, and patterned fills. The only way to switch between options is to left-click a little black arrow in the tool, which brings up a tiny context menu with the options. Once you’ve chosen a general option, you can left- or right-click the rest of the control to bring up the option dialog (to switch from, say, linear to circular gradients). The problem is, I can’t for the life of me get the stylus to register a click on this tiny little arrow. I’ve literally tried repeatedly to get this click to work to no avail. There is no keyboard shortcut for this action, which in a way makes sense given the nature of the tool, but is completely frustrating because I could easily remap a hardware button to do this if such a shortcut existed. So for now my only option is to stop what I’m doing, flip the screen back around to traditional laptop orientation, use the TrackPoint to click the arrow and choose what option I want, flip the screen back around to tablet mode, and usually rotate the screen around again so it’s back to the orientation I originally wanted. This is brings my process to screeching halt, completely interrupting my work flow and is annoyingly disruptive. The problem might be easily solved by switching to a different image editing program, but that’s an issue I’ve already addressed.

All that said, I’m really loving this new little toy. It has done incredibly well so far, even though all I’ve done is use it in my traditional analog/digital production flow. The real challenge will be when I start making all-digital strips, which I plan to do with the next story, i.e. once To Thine Own Self… is completed.
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I have some of the coolest fans…
November 19th, 2007 (1 year ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 1 Core Dump
The above picture was sent to me by GPF readers Jeremy and Teresa the other day. Accompanying the pic, Jeremy wrote:

BTW, I don’t know if I sent this to you last summer, but I meant to. My wife and I had a Nick & Ki figure made for our wedding “cake topper” in July, 2006. We had Nick’s hair done blonde to match mine, and I thought it looked great.

And it does. Another fine example of Lanin Thomasma’s excellent handiwork. If you haven’t seen his awesome GPF sculptures, then you need to go give them a look. Lanin has crafted a good dozen (or more) GPF and non-GPF maquettes for me personally, some of which have accompanied me to shows & cons. I don’t really want to turn this post into an advertisement, but these sculptures are so incredible it’s hard not to.

As for the statue in question, Nick looks a little odd to me as a blond, but it definitely fits with the rest of their wedding photos. (Jeremy was gracious enough to share them with me.) I hope you two have an awesome future together. I certainly hope nobody at your wedding was kidnapped by any “evil twins” from alternate universes….

(Random trivia: The “cake topper” for our wedding was Mickey & Minnie Mouse, since we were going to Disney World for our honeymoon. While Nick & Ki existed at that point and I knew they were eventually destined to be married, nobody outside of a circle of close friends and family had read the GPF scripts yet and I certainly didn’t know of anyone that could make custom maquettes for us. Oh, well….)
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GPF’s ninth anniversary
November 2nd, 2007 (1 year ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
Woo.

You know, I could wax all philosophical, get nostalgic and misty-eyed, ramble on and on about how things have changed between 1998 and now, but… I’d rather not. If you care, celebrate in whatever means you are so accustomed, although I request that if you do so in the name of GPF that you do so in a socially responsible manner. (Don’t want anyone going to jail for some drunken GPF-inspired murder spree.)

I guess I could mention, in the light of other comics celebrating a decade of existence recently, that GPF was actually created in 1997 and I spent over a year developing and honing it before it came online. So in a sense, GPF is also a decade old, although not officially until November 2, 2008. Somehow, I doubt anyone would really count that.

Woo.
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Current GPF schedule plans
October 18th, 2007 (1 year, 1 month ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 1 Core Dump
Following up last week’s post, here’s the current GPF update schedule plans. The strip will continue to update weekly (please hold your groaning until the end of the post) until February 2008. While I’m still trying to be optimistic that I’ll soon be able to increase my updates to at least thrice per week, I’m also realistic enough to know it’s definitely not going to happen with the big fall/winter holidays coming up (namely Thanksgiving and Christmas). So I’m taking the safe route and officially putting off any frequency updates until well after that. Sketchbook reruns will continue on Wednesdays during this time.

For Fridays, we’ll start running the Book 2 bonus story on November 2nd (GPF’s ninth anniversary). This story will run until January 18th, and we’ll double-up on the Sketchbook reruns until February 1st. Like the first book’s bonus story, this will run once and never again, so if you don’t have a copy of the book this is your only chance to see it completely free. Technically, there’s an archived online version available for owners of the book, but you need to have access to the physical book to get in the first time. (Unfortunately, it probably suffers from the same problem as the book 1 online version in that different printings of the book won’t match the questions asked, so not everyone will probably be able to get in. I’m trying to think of a good workaround for this, but I doubt that’s going to happen any time soon.)

Much to my chagrin, I’m drastically chopping down the final chapter of To Thine Own Self… to alleviate the torture to all of us in having it drag on too much longer. If I were still updating seven days a week, I could see spending several weeks each expounding on the wedding reception, Trudy’s internal conflicts about her return, why Patty hates weddings, and what really happened to the Gamester. But even I can’t really justify dragging it out that much, not when we’re getting buffeted by the wind gusts of passing snails. So I’ve cropped Chapter Eight down to the bare essentials, the plot points that we absolutely can’t go without, and I’ll push out some of the otherwise unresolved threads to be answered later on. This means that TTOS will either end on February 13th if I can actually increase the updates to thrice per week in February, or March 3rd if we continue at once per week to that point. Beyond that, GPF will officially enter Year Nine (about a year and a half behind schedule), where I’ll be heavily concentrating more on humor than plot. (Even I need to take a break.)

More updates as soon as I have them….
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Too ambitious
October 12th, 2007 (1 year, 1 month ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 5 Core Dumps
Last month I stated that I hoped to have GPF back to a M-W-F schedule by November. Nuh-uh. Not gonna happen. While Ben’s sleep patterns are much more predictable (save for the occasional oddity like this past Wednesday night, where none of us got more than two hours sleep) and we’ve made significant headway in cleaning up and organizing our basement, I haven’t gotten any strips done since that September 10th post. Getting seven comics done in that week must have been a fluke, because I certainly haven’t been able to repeat it.

The hardest part of maintaining my schedule has to be the scripting. Drawing the line art is difficult because it means I have be sequestered in the basement at the art desk for about a half hour to an hour per strip. I’ve been working on ways to do the line art digitally, but all those R&D efforts have been largely on hold since Ben’s birth. And while it’s possible for everyone else to come down to the basement with me, I really don’t want to dictate what everyone else can do just to buy me art desk time. (At the moment, there’s little down there to entertain Ben with anyway.) Doing the digital half of the strips (clean-up, text, colors, etc.) can be time consuming but at least I can do those on the laptop in the living room with the rest of the family, so I can be a part of what’s going on and readily available if someone needs me.

But scripting is tough because I really need to shut myself off from everyone else and concentrate. Big stories like To Thine Own Self… usually have a large, overall time line that I follow from the beginning, but I very rarely script things down to the individual strip level that far in advance. Individual strips, jokes, and dialog are usually written as I come to them unless they are so critical to the plot that they need advance planning or I come up with something so good I can’t afford to forget it. So before I work on each “week” of strips (Sunday + six dailies) I hide myself somewhere quiet and script each line of dialog, block out each panel, and occasionally reorder things if necessary. This way I have a plan by the time I get to the art desk so my time there is most efficiently used and I’ve got a second chance to improve the art before it becomes semi-permanent. Scripting is time consuming because I write out each line of dialog (which I don’t do during the art desk phase; I just leave sufficient space and add the text digitally), occasionally erase and reword it, and sketch every panel. Often I have to think hard about how the dialog flows, who says what in what order, and what kind of punchline I can use for the last panel. I actually think scripting is the most time-consuming part of the process, because to do it right I can’t be interrupted. I can step away from the art desk or laptop and come back with little mental paging; scripting is a mindset, and when I am forced out of it, I often have to reorganize my thoughts to get back to where I was when I left. And none of what I’ve mentioned so far has brought research to light, since many times I have to go back and re-read old stories to make sure I get all the back references correct.

And that’s where I am now. I’m in the scripting phase for the next “week”, and I just can’t get enough time together to step away from everything else to hide myself away and just write. I may need to re-evaluate my process and look for alternative scripting methods, like typing dialog and descriptions into the computer first at times when I can’t sketch. I’ve tried that before, usually when I’m working with another artist for a crossover, but it rarely seems to work well for me. Part of the scripting work is figuring out how much space the dialog takes up per panel and balancing text versus art so one doesn’t overpower the other. That’s hard to do in a word processor. But right now, I can’t think of anything better to do than forsaking my family and effectively ceasing to exist for several hours.

So no big comeback in November. Sorry, folks, but thems the breaks. Nobody could be more frustrated about it than I am. I’m not sure what, if anything, I’ll do for GPF’s ninth anniversary. The strip will likely continue on the weekly Monday schedule at least through the end of the year; there’s no way I’ll be able to up my schedule with the winter holidays coming up. The Sketchbook Reruns will probably continue the “Rejected Story Month” updates during that time, and I’ll probably run the Book #2 bonus story on Fridays once the Book #1 bonus runs out. After that… we’ll just have to wait and see.
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The (ambitious) plan
September 10th, 2007 (1 year, 2 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 2 Core Dumps
It’s been a while since I’ve made an update here on the state of all things GPF-ish. Of course, the official state of the comic stuff should come only from the GPF News, but I tend to occasionally give those of you who visit this site (both of you) more nebulous, wishy-washy updates that may or may not come to pass. I guess the blog has taken the place of the old Rumor Mill, only not restricted to just Keenspot PREMIUM subscribers. (Man, I feel guilty for not keeping that up. But truth be told, I honestly haven’t had any “rumors” worth posting there for ages.)

Things are moving along slowly but surely. I will assume everyone has read the September 3rd News update by now. The important thing to pull out of that one is that Miscellaneous Fridays will be the Book 1 bonus story until the end of October. This wasn’t my first or best choice, and I was very reluctant to use “exclusive” content from one of the books as main page filler. Still, that content is now a good seven years old and will not remain permanently archived on the site in a freely available form (you have to have access to a physical copy of the book to access the online archive), so I will assume this is okay. I also didn’t have much else I could pull of the old archive DVDs that would buy me enough time to play catch up. I’m still sitting on the Book 2 bonus story, which at twelve pages could last me a good three months of weekly updates, and I’ll pull that out of the hat if I have to.

However, the extremely ambitious plan is to get GPF back to three real comic updates per week by November. This, of course, will mark GPF’s ninth anniversary and will be a perfect opportunity for an at least partially triumphant comeback. Fortunately, this is looking a lot more possible that it was several months ago. It’s still going to be difficult, but at least it looks more obtainable than it has for the past year.

The biggest obstacle to upping the frequency has been Ben’s sleep schedule, which has been very erratic and difficult to manage pretty much since he was born. However, we’ve had a major success in getting him on a pretty regular schedule lately (although he’s only been complying while literally kicking and screaming). This has freed up some of my evenings again; I managed to get almost an entire old-style week’s worth of comics (one color Sunday and six dailies) done last week. We’ve also finally started making some headway in cleaning up the basement, which for over a year after our move back to West Virginia has remained a catch-all of unpacked boxes of stuff we haven’t found storage for. Now most of the moving stuff is packed away or discarded, my GPF corner is an organized and semi-efficient workspace, and the remaining unpacked boxes are lined against the walls, making much of the floor space actually usable. More storage space is on the way (once I put those do-it-yourself cabinets together) and many other home improvement tasks should be relatively easy to complete.

What remains to be seen is what will happen to Tuesdays and Thursdays if GPF actually does return to a three-updates-per-week schedule. The two primary options are to (1) let the T-days lay fallow as they currently are or (2) move the Sketchbook reruns there and update them twice per week. Option #2 has the obvious benefit of increasing page views and thus ad revenue, but with the detriment that it depletes the backlog of sketches twice as quickly as they are generated (as new Sketchbook updates occur only once per week). I suppose Option #3 would be to make one day Sketchbook reruns and the other Miscellaneous Thursdays or somesuch, but I’d rather not go that route; I’m running out of miscellaneous stuff as it is. I think the most likely scenario is Option #1, with the possibility of Option #2 leading to the ultimate goal of GPF returning to at least five updates per week (M-F). (Six or seven updates shouldn’t be likely for the foreseeable future.)

As for story line stuff, that’s pretty much up in the air. I have a number of loose ideas of where I want to take the comic once To Thine Own Self… finally comes to an end. I think I have only one or two really major story arcs left unresolved that I want to complete before I can comfortably see the strip end. I might take a diversion from the main comic and move Surreptitious Machinations II into the main archive; as awesome and ambitious as the idea was to make it an exclusive pay-only feature, I think it might be more practical to simply finish it and get it out into the open. Since it’s already scripted, it would just be a matter of finishing the art, which I’m already over a fifth of the way done with anyway. It would also provide an excellent diversion for both me and you, the readers, as we take a break from the main cast and from TTOS’s weighty length.

(Note: The above paragraph should not be misconstrued as rumblings that GPF is coming to an end any time soon. I’ve always kept the option open that if I had to I would end GPF if the needs of my family were too great to let it continue. My family has and always will remain my top priority and will always come before the comic. However, I still have plenty of ideas and I’m sure more will present themselves as time continues. At the moment, I only have two major stories I’d love to see published before I brought the strip to a comfortable conclusion, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t tons of smaller, lighter story arcs I could pursue. When I started Surreptitious Machinations, I was afraid I would have to end the strip once it concluded because I would run out of ideas. Quite to the contrary, SM seeded even more story ideas and kept feeding the comic all the way up to today.)

I suppose that’s all I have to tell you for now. I’ll try and give you a greater feel for how likely the schedule increase will be as the time draws closer.
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Doug Marlette dies in car crash
July 11th, 2007 (1 year, 4 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
Okay, it’s not necessarily a “webcomics” article, but definitely comics related. As I was reading the Reuters feed on AvantGo this morning, I stumbled upon this article. Cartoonist Doug Marlette, best known for his scathing editorial cartoons and his long-running syndicated comic strip Kudzu, died yesterday at the age of 57 in a car wreck in Mississippi, ironically after attending his father’s funeral.

I’m not a big fan of syndicated comics anymore, and I only read three of them now with any sort of regularity. I only read them online and one of those three, Calvin and Hobbes, is no longer being produced and is running in reruns. Like many online cartoonists, I’ve found syndicated comics have lost their flavor, having been drained of all originality by syndicate editors seeking to appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to get into the most newspapers (and thus make the most money (for the syndicate, of course, as the artist sees very little of the profits)). Still, I remember Kudzu fondly from reading it when I was younger. I never really kept up with it after my local paper dropped it, and never bothered to follow up with it once I started following other syndicated strips online.

Then a few years ago David Allen of Plan Nine Publishing asked me to do a little bit of coloring work for him. It turned out that he was able to secure a contract for a few books with Mr. Marlette. He was one of the first syndicated cartoonists to hook up with Plan Nine. David needed someone to color the cover art for Marlette’s first two Plan Nine books, and he asked if I were up to the task. You can find the two books in their catalog here and here. David assured me that he was quite pleased with the results; his exact quote was “Again, Beautiful, David. My compliments to the colorist. This is fun.” I’m afraid this was as close as I ever got to Mr. Marlette, and I wished I had taken the opportunity then to contact him directly.

I know this post is far heavier on information than it is on sentimentality. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not. On one hand, I could expound on the virtues of a man I barely know and only through his mass-produced work… which probably wouldn’t be very deep. I could spit out something “profound” about the brevity of life and how we should live our lives as if there were no tomorrow, but that’s been done to death and I doubt I have much noteworthy to add. Yet at the same time, I do feel a tiny bit of loss, as this was an individual that I had at least the briefest touch of a professional relationship with, even if I never met him in person. I’m not sure if they would be in the slightest bit interested, or if they would ever even hear of this post, but I certainly wish to express my condolences to his family and friends.
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Security, Technology, Webcomics
SIGGRAPH Key Signing Party?
May 24th, 2007 (1 year, 6 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
As previously mentioned, I’m headed to SIGGRAPH in August. The pre-con report is now up on the GPF Shows & Cons site and, as usual, will become the core place for news and updates about my trip there. (I’ll probably end up mentioning the same stuff here as well, but that’s the official place to look.)

It occurred to me yesterday while I was writing up a News item for Monday that SIGGRAPH may–or may not–be a good place to hold a key signing party. For those unfamiliar with public-key cryptography, this is a gathering where PKC users can verify each other’s identities, prove you are who you say you are, and obtain signatures on your public key. This increases your perceived level of trust; the more signatures you have on your public key, the more people who say they have verified your identity and thus the more trustworthy your own signature becomes. This “web of trust” is the core to PKC; without it, anyone could create a key and say they’re somebody else and there wouldn’t be an easy way to prove otherwise.

I said it may be a good place for a key signing because there will be a lot of computer professionals there. It might not be a good place because most of those computer professionals are more involved with graphics than with cryptography (which is ironic because both require a great deal of mathematical knowledge). Thus, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to find anyone there willing to sign my keys or not. My public key has a pitiful few number of signatures, mostly because I haven’t been able to meet face-to-face with like-minded cryptography nuts to add any. I’ve searched and searched and have yet to come up with anything in this vein officially or unofficially attached to SIGGRAPH.

So here’s a two-pronged appeal. First, if anyone does know of an official or unofficial key signing event somehow attached to SIGGRAPH or that might be going on in the area during that week, please let me know the details so I can somehow get involved. If there isn’t one going on, I’d love to see one organized. I’d consider organizing it myself if it weren’t for the fact that I’m not from San Diego and I don’t have a clue about where would be the best place to hold such an event, let alone how to get the word out. I’ve put my entry up on BigLumber’s San Diego listing in hopes that someone might see it, and at least one San Diego resident has expressed interest. If someone else might take the initiative to get things started, I’d be more than willing to promote it on the GPF site.
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Jesus Geek interview now up
April 25th, 2007 (1 year, 6 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
And here it is.

It’s funny how after you do something like this and you listen to yourself hemming and hawing and stuttering, you realize just how many things you wanted to say that you completely forgot about at the time. Oh well. And of course Suddenlink would have a major outage today, meaning the blog would be down half the day, starting about when the interview went live. [Rolls eyes]

Anyhoo, enjoy the podcast. There’s a lot of interesting discussion, especially around Year Seven’s Providence, Nick and Ki’s relationship vs. Fooker and Sharon’s, and this here little slice of the Intraweb. Discuss the podcast either on the podcast’s comments page, or use this thread on the GPF forum.
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