alienday426
I’d pay to visit the alternate universe where this was made.
“So where you been?” asks no one in particular yet he uses this as a cliché intro to talk about a thing.
Skroode has been quiet for…a month? Really a month? I have to apologize for that. The life, she demands our time and this last month was an occasion where I had to answer the call.
This time of year is busy for a lot of people. A tradition in our house is The Christmas Card. Sometime back in 2003 we started making card to send. That year I reached a point where I was having a long arduous time finding any card I liked in the stores. I had been making cards for holidays for my wife long before we were married, so we decided to make our own.
So this is year 13 and every year since November means ‘time to come up with an idea’. So this year skroode took an unplanned short break as I pulled a card together from the “I guess this will work” idea to “Thank God it’s done” printing. It’s a simple ink/watercolor/pencil/whatever else is in arms reach affair.
The front:
Then of course, the inside:
We include a little image on the back, like the things you find on the cards in the stores as a small bonus joke. There was Discussion this year, as the first idea was judged “probably not quite right for many of the audience”:
I don’t think anyone wants to walk Great Great Aunt Ida through the humor there. So we went with:
Colored by the kids. They don’t realize it but this is so I can foist the whole thing off on them in five years.
So thanks for your patience. Things will be back on schedule after the holiday. In the meantime, here be the Christmas 2015 skroode.
If you are of the curious sort, here are the cards from 2008, 2009, 2011, and 2012.
Let’s start sharing some sketchbook stuff in 2015 shall we? The gruesome, rough, inky trough from which each strip emerges into the world. More or less.
This random page was apparently during a Torrence the Triffid run, just playing with the angriest plant in the world and seeing what he was up to, judging if any had potential for sharing.
Also we have a few fairies roaming in the lower right. When I have my sketchbook out my daughter will often ride shotgun and commandeer the pen or make requests for certain topics. “Draw a fairy!” She says this knowing she will get two pictures. The first will be delivered the way a questionable genie delivers wishes – with some aspect warped intentionally. The second as she wanted in the first place.
There was a short discussion on “How do you draw hands?”. However it did not fit in the 60 second attention span so all we got is a couple rough hands floating about.
Something from the depths of the sketchbook, funneled from my subconscious to the page. (Click for the big.)
Various boogens and monsters that have found a cozy home in the back of my head. Some are pretty self explanatory – I mean, a floating head right? What more do you need to say?
The Blob was the first movie to leave me sleepless. At five years old it was nightmare fuel for a young imagination. The triple play of horrible deaths – drowning, burned AND eaten all at once. Hurgh.
In grade school I was convinced by another kid that a vampire lived in the garage down the street. I avoided it for a year. I like to think he got a Twilight Zone ending and an actual vampire lurking in the garage snatched him in his later years.
Myself and some friends are fascinated by the things that scared us – really scared us – when we were kids. In our adulthood we track them down as best we can to bask in them now. I’m sure the Germans have a word for that. I know we’re not alone as there is a website where people share their childhood terrors and try to reunite with them. Which is, I think, 50% of what the internet was invented for.
The comments on the latest Begging for Candy strip got me thinking about comics, syndication, newspapers, webcomics and the whole complicated evolving Thing. I was going to add a comment and realized my brain and spleen contained enough to put in a post instead.
The state of the comics page has been talked about for a long time – how newspapers, especially the comics page, has been in a slow decline for years. All you have to do is open one up and read Close to Home to see the End Times from where you’re standing.
I used to love reading the comics in the paper – it’s what got my interest in cartooning started. I grew up with Doonesbury, Bloom County and Calvin & Hobbes. My father introduced me to Pogo. I found strips like The Neighborhood and The Far Side. I even poured over the Wizard of Id and B.C. in their heyday.
These days I read two in the paper – Dilbert and Pearls Before Swine. The others I look at because…well because they are there and I have the page open anyway. My brain reacts either with disinterest or rage. Some strips continued existence makes my skull feel like it’s about to pull a Scanners.
(Full disclosure – yes, I submitted a strip to the syndicates years ago. No, I am not bitterly lashing out over the rejection. It did not leave me mentally scarred or anything – I was a realist and knew it was Long Odds.)
Some because the quality is just mind crushingly lacking. Hey if you can do what you love and get paid, more power to you. But when I see strips that last for years where the art and writing range from blase to painful I start to see conspiracies everywhere. I believe in a higher power as 60% of any given comics page proves the existence of Satan.
The other half are The Strips That Will Not Die. You know which ones I mean. Some of these strips were created by DEAD PEOPLE, which holds some morbid fascination to me. Why does someone spend time keeping a strip on life support instead of working their own creation? What other creative industries turn to the kids to continue pumping out the work? “Star Trek season 9 by Gene Roddenberry, Jr.” Seems to me most attempts to prop up creative work in other areas with stand ins, related to the creator or not, fall flat. For some insane reason, in comics people shrug and keep going.
Let’s be honest: the readers are looking at the work, not the person behind it. There is not a real connection there. For the publishers it’s safe: “Drop Snuffy Smith? Sounds risky.” I do get the loyalty to old familiar strips that have a long (and often important) place in the history of comics. I also see why someone would want to work on one for a period of time. Really I get it. At the end of the day it’s a cartoon – no one will live or die due to what is printed on the comic page. But at a certain point you have to face reality – is pumping out the closest heir you could find to the Far Side niche really helping the creators OR the publishers?
It occurs to me that most of the syndicates and papers may not have any true idea what their readership is like. I have no idea what sales are like for collected strips, but I know many of the long lived strips are not even on the shelves. Print papers have no way of measuring what readers like or not on the comic page. They only way they even try to find out is either a random poll or they pull a strip and see who screams. And God forbid some 80 year old calls up in a fever because Prince Valiant ain’t in the Sundays this week.
So it is quite likely your comics page is sailing blind. I wonder if the editors and syndicates have no idea themselves why they publish many of the strips they do. They may well be guessing, fingers crossed. And they have no reason to change. They’re stone age sailors sailing right for the edge of the world with no plans to change course because that course has always worked (so far as they can tell). When they go over, they won’t have much to say about it beyond ‘people don’t read comics anymore’. Crazy thought: maybe they just don’t read the comics you’re publishing.
So newspapers are in decline, sure. Many artists have moved their work online. The investment is small and the total control over your work is a huge advantage. No worries about upsetting someone in Bumcrap, USA and having to have a tense call with an editor. On the other hand, you have total responsibility for promoting and building an audience. The other missing piece is making a living from it. For every Penny Arcade and PVP there are thousands of others trying to get off the ground. What should worry the syndicates is even with those odds, people are still choosing to go digital instead of pursuing a one in a million lottery win of syndication with it’s fame, fortune and encyclopedia of rules regarding approved material.
Anyway. There was probably a coherent point to this. If I remember what it was, I’ll be sure to add it here.
©2010-2022 tkane Powered by WordPress with ComicPress