Greetings, Sweet Pickles!

Thanksgiving is this Thursday for those of us living in the US of A (and for those who are celebrating outside the Oosa as well).  Since most of you will be busy eating, making festive (merry is for that other holiday that is on the other side of this one), and eventually allowing the combination of such dire delights to lull you into the deep, dark recesses of Comaville (and since Thanksgiving falls on a normal “Office” day), there will be no new article this week.

But, be not sad!  I will not leave you completely empty-handed (I know I stiffed you on the candy back on Hallowe’en.  I said I was sorry!).  To make it up to you, I present you with this paltry offering of textual-goodness.  And to sweeten the deal, I post this on Wednesday, so that reading this won’t make you experience your Thanksgiving feasts in reverse.  What goodies are contained herein?  Why keep reading to find out:

Last week I made another trip up to the Northern sector of Virginia.  This time it was to Luray, famed near and far for its endless supply of cave.  My reason for the visit – another film shoot.  This time, it was for a movie called Midnight in the Mortuary, a horror anthology film in the same vein as Creepshow or Tales from the Darkside: The Movie.

This time, however, the framing device that is to be used to usher in each story is none other than an old-school “Creature Feature Show, complete with host and side-kick!  Remember that article I wrote last year in October about the Horror Show host I grew up with, Dr. Paul Bearer?  Not only did his show inspire me to love horror films, but one of my childhood dreams was to become a Horror Show host myself.

That dream came to fruition last weekend.

The director, a good friend of mine named Matt, cast me to portray “Dr. Ghoulie”, host of “Creature Feature” show (within a show) “Midnight in the Mortuary”.  As host, it would be my responsibility to introduce each segment of the “show” in the movie.

*Cue child in me squeeing with glee*

We filmed in a “haunted house” that is in operation every October.  Luckily for us, we were able to use it for filming while it’s in the off-season.

The shoot was amazing.  My co-host was a hot little number named Phantasma.  We both got to ham it up for the camera, keeping in the spirit of the original “Creature Feature” programs of old.  To be honest, this is the most fun I have had on a film shoot so far.  It certainly helped to have such a great director, an incredibly attractive and talented co-host, and an awe-inspiring environment to play in.

The best part is that after the director watched the dailies, he made a firm decision that he would like to continue this as a web series, keeping me on as Dr. Ghoulie!  Once a month, I’ll be heading up to Luray to shoot show segments to serve as bumpers for whatever public domain horror flick we can get our hands on.

For me, it’s a dream come true.

I leave you with a promo pic of the new Duo Demento of the internet:

Everyone have a Happy Thanksgiving!  Everyone else have a Happy Thursday!

The Don will be right back after these messages…

Earlier this month, the creator of the brilliant social-parody-disguised-as-modern-high-fantasy webcomic, Bruno the Bandit, mentioned that he was no longer working on the comic as a way to make a living. In Ian McDonald’s own words:

Right now, my motivations for doing the strip, not to mention my energy levels, are nearly at zero.

The reason is simple: I failed with Bruno. My ultimate goal was to make a living at this. But it didn’t work out that way. Yes, I kept telling myself that it doesn’t matter that I’m not making a living as a cartoonist, I enjoy doing this as a hobby. Which is not entirely untrue, either. But deep down, what I really wanted was to join the illustrious ranks of webcartoonists who are making a living by publishing their comics online. That ain’t gonna happen. I’m just not that good… either at cartooning, or self-promotion, or both.

Furthermore, my readership has been dropping steadily over the past few years, though I’ve nobody to blame but myself for that, due to all the “breaks” I’ve had to take. As well, feedback on the strip has been at an all-time low. I rarely get any e-mail from readers these days, and the Bruno the Bandit forum is all but dead. I can’t help but wonder if you the readers aren’t getting fed up with the strip. If so, I’m not sure I blame you. I can’t help but wonder if my lack of enthusiasm for working on the strip hasn’t affected its quality of late. Rather than plod along and churn out comics I’m not proud of, I figure I should take a break and recharge the ol’ batteries.

Is this the end of Bruno the Bandit? No. But from now on, when I create new comics, it’s because I feel like doing so, not because I feel compelled to put them out on a weekly schedule.

I’m a huge fan of the comic. Being a long-time reader means I’m pretty familiar with the ebbs of flows of the comic over the years. Which means, I have to agree with much of McDonald’s blog about why Bruno so far hasn’t been successful as a business, having seen things like the frequent hiatuses. And that’s where I’m going with this post.

When you get down to it, there’s a lot that can go wrong when it comes to webcomics. That’s hardly news. We’ve probably all seen creators who started out strong and raked in the donations, only to hit a writer’s block that killed the comic and alienated the fanbase. Or, say, creators who got in over their heads when it came to merchandising, spending so much time stressing over pre-orders and getting things shipped out that their core work, the comic itself, suffered. The two biggest wildcards in making a business out of webcomics are, of course, the creating artist(s) and the audience. An artist may have the best story idea in history, but if you can’t ensnare and hold your target audience with it, you’re screwed. Likewise, the best comic in history won’t stay on top if the artist repeatedly flakes out on updates, delivers empty promises to the fans, or just drives them away with bad behaviour outside the comic.

If you’re seeking to make webcomics a business, you have to be open to listening to your fans’ suggestions. As part of the audience, I’m-a gonna list some of the things that destroy my enthusiasm for any given webcomic and lead me to spend my money elsewhere. I won’t be naming names (though I might be linking links). As always, it’s just my opinion; your mileage probably widely varies.

Flaky updates and empty promises. – Look, it’s okay to have a comic that updates sporadically, but be clear about this point on your site. Don’t say “Updates every Monday!” if it’s more like every Tuesday or every other Wednesday, Thursday, Friday…or whenever you remember you’re supposed to be working on it. Don’t change the update schedule every few weeks. Don’t say “comic will be up tonight” if there’s a chance outside of power outage or family emergency that you can’t deliver. If you have a schedule, stick to it. If you can’t, change the schedule to something that you CAN stick to, even if it means your updates go from three times weekly to once monthly. Hell, even “Updates sporadically” is a legitimate schedule since it tells us not to expect an update every time we check the site. Flaking out on your promises makes you look like a sloppy businessman. If my mechanic doesn’t have my car ready at the appointed time because he never got around to looking at it, I’ll be Googling for a new repairman. Same for webcomics. If you can’t deliver what you promise, I’m not trusting you with my donations or merchandise orders. You’re unreliable.

Semi-relevant to the above: Don’t use your “issues” to be flaky if you want to succeed as a business. – You’re not a freak if you suffer from chronic depression or adult ADHD or any myriad of other mental, physical, and emotional ailments. And I’ll smack anyone who says you are. But if you want to be a strong business, you can’t repeatedly use your issues as an excuse for backing out on your promised delivery of goods. In the “real world,” you get fired if you continually call in sick, no matter how much your boss sympathizes with you. Online, the audience is to some extent your boss, if you’re working for profit. If you constantly disappear for three months and then say each time, “Sorry, my *insert ailment here* wouldn’t let me draw,” the sympathy we all feel for you at first gradually turns into frustration. Millions of people work every day, doing their best to compensate for and conquer their ailments. In order to succeed, you have to work even when you don’t feel like it. I realize this is a touchy subject, but far too often, I’ve seen a webcomic artist vanish for an extended period, only to blog, “I was too depressed to make any updates, but please keep donating!” Your ailments are an explanation, never an excuse. I say this as someone who’s worked hard to defeat my own issues.

This next one invokes Will Wheaton’s Law: “Don’t be a [rhymes with 'stick'].” – You guys might wanna watch your behaviour even when you’re not on your personal site. Whether you like it or not, people’s eyes are on you anywhere you go online, once you gain any sort of following. About four years ago, my favourite webcomic was this unique and well-drawn story about a boy summoned to save another world, only it turns out the boy has so many mental issues and voices in his head that he needs saving almost more than the world he’s supposed to protect. I was in love with this story and its world; I recommended the comic to everyone I knew. Then I noticed that I was on several unrelated forums with the comic’s creator. Then I noticed what a liar, hypocrite, and all-around trolling jerk said creator was, when he didn’t think any of his fans were around to notice. He would deliberately start trouble on these forums, get smacked down by the moderators, then go back to his comic’s forum and cry to his fans about how racist and closed-minded everyone else was, and how poor widdle him got in trouble for being a decent person surrounded by trolls. I lost respect for that person then, and the comic was soon replaced by another in my “favourite” status. Prior to that, I’d been chomping at the bit for the comic to be released in book form. Now the comic’s finally seen the release of its first book, and I don’t care anymore. My interest is gone; that comic isn’t getting my money. I still read it out of habit, but my love for the comic has waned (though that’s also partly because the story’s pacing is awful–almost nothing has happened to advance the plot in the past few years). Some people can separate the artist from the attitude, but I’m afraid my blind eye is only a little bit nearsighted. I’ve had similar issues with a now-idle sprite comic whose artist constantly insulted his own audience, and the writer for a comic in which two people on opposite sides of the world see each other’s lives when asleep. Long rant short: if I catch you being a jerk, you can forget seeing my cash.

Don’t air your dirty laundry to your fans. – For the past year and more, the creator of another comic I follow has been repeatedly begging for more donations, complaining of the financial crisis he, his wife, and their year-old son are in, already having lost one of his family’s properties and dealing with only sporadic employment on top of the bills for the baby. His most current blog posts have been mentions that the comic is only drawing in a fraction of the donations he needs to fund his expenses….Only, he recently blogged that he had the chance to buy the car he’s always wanted. (Note it’s not NEEDS; it’s WANTS.) And even used, this particular model doesn’t come cheaply. My research results averaged from $5,000 to $10,000. You’re probably having a similar reaction to the one I had: “How is it that someone who can barely afford to feed his family can buy a car he doesn’t even need?” I don’t have a problem with people in financial crisis making little splurges. Sometimes that’s all that keeps you sane. But THIS? Is not a little splurge. Many of us have things we’ve wanted to buy for years, but being an adult and providing for your family must come first, particularly if the money situation is as dire as you claim. I acknowledge maybe there’s some unwritten backstory that justifies him buying a car instead of saving for bills, but the situation is presented on his blog as I shared it here. It gets worse, though; the most recent blog post has him complaining that he’ll never be able to buy this car, and putting the blame for it on an unspecified party. His equally underemployed wife, who shares a blog column, posts at the same time that she’s upset that she’s being misunderstood and ignored. Neither one says who they’re talking about, but the timing? Hmmm….If they’re not talking about each other, a little blurb clarifying this would go such a long way. As it stands, right now I’m not donating to someone who appears to value a car over family financial needs, not even if his next post says the three of them are living in a cardboard box.

Now, what’s probably the most important sum-up point of my lengthy rantings–and this part comes from my previous experience with running Web-based enterprises: If you don’t run your webcomic like a business, you won’t succeed as a business. – Just putting up a donation link and three updates every week usually won’t float you. You gotta pimp yourself out more than a five-dollar hooker. A successful business has to advertise, network, merchandise, reinvest…all those things most people hate doing. Most webcomics can’t sustain themselves by selling just books, either–these books tend to be expensive small-run prints with little to no profit. Begging for donations usually doesn’t work either, except to recoup some expenses. Most fans want something more substantial in exchange for their money, like T-shirts, mugs, and plushies, just for starters. Just look at Penny Arcade. Those guys are the classic model for how to run a webcomic business correctly. They stick to their schedule. They offer varied merchandise in their stores. (And they know when to delegate responsibilities like merchandising and advertising so they’re not overwhelmed with projects and can focus on the comic.) They don’t usually talk about their issues, and when Gabe does, it’s not in a whinging way; it’s more educational. They keep their business and personal personas largely separate online (chances are, you’ve been on a forum with one of them in the past and never even knew it), or at least try to be neutral about talking of personal matters on their site blogs. I’m not saying that doing everything Penny Arcade does guarantees you success; after all, their comic has a more mainstream appeal than many others out there in the Interwebs. But learning how to be a businessman won’t hurt you, either.

As usual, this “little” rant got away from me, but it’s all done…for now. I must now go reinforce my pillow fort against angry artists, so ciao!

Welcome to this week’s post of my Geek Journal!

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Keeping it short this week with a review of Disney’s latest version of A Christmas Carol. I managed to see the IMAX 3D version and was quite impressed. The CG was done in a photo-realistic way, similar to The Polar Express, but it managed to keep the characters looking just cartoony enough to avoid what is known as the “uncanny valley” most of the time. It also managed to avoid the “dead eye” issue that Express had and it looked like the animators paid quite a bit of attention to making sure the eyes were animated correctly. The film did the usual “hey, we’re 3D” thing by having objects coming out of the screen at the audience (it wasn’t too overdone and the falling snow was a nice effect) and had a flying sequence for each ghost’s visit to play to the IMAX audiences.

The only real issue I had with the film was the IMAX 3D presentation itself. With non-IMAX films that are released in 3D, Disney (and most others) use RealD, which uses circular-polarized glasses (left eye is counter-clockwise, right is clockwise), while IMAX 3D uses standard polarized glasses where the lenses’ polarization are set 90 degrees from each other. The circular method is much better than the standard because it’s not affected by the viewer’s head being tilted left or right, which will cause the other eye’s image to start bleeding over in the standard method. So the whole time watching the film, I had to make sure to keep my head in the proper position. I may avoid IMAX 3D presentations in the future due to this.

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That’s it for this week’s post!

Greetings, Kandarian Demons!

As I am sure you are all already well aware, Fox has cancelled “Dollhouse”.  And with that, another Joss Whedon creation meets an unfair and premature demise.

It’s unfortunate, really.  Joss has proven time and again that he has some damn good skills when it comes to making stuff up and putting it out there for the masses.  “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel” were both extremely popular and well-written shows, each of which managed to last at least five seasons.  Then there’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog – a whimsical internet sensation crafted by Whedon during the WGA writers’ strike back in 2008.  It ended up winning multiple awards, including an emmy.

So, it’s obvious that Joss makes good product.  That being the case, why is it that his last two returns to the small widescreen have each met with failure?  Let’s look at what both shows have in common:

Fox… and Fox.

The first show Joss brought to the 20^th Century jag-offs was that ingenious little sci-fi/western show called “Firefly”.  What made that show work was not just Whedon’s typical mastery of character and dialogue, but also his ability to deftly handle combining two widely different genres into one entertaining show.

Sadly, Fox mishandled this one from the beginning.  First pre-empting it several times with their coverage of the World Series, “Firefly” was stuck on Friday nights – the place where shows go to die.  And to add insult to injury, Fox didn’t even show the episodes in order.  Skipping the two-hour pilot that would have introduced all of the characters, as well as get viewers properly acquainted with Joss’ new universe, the nutwork instead went with the second episode.  This caused a lot of viewers, including me, to scratch my head as I tried to figure out who everyone was and why things were the way they were.  Fox continued to show the episodes out of order until they finally made the decision to pull the plug, refusing to even show the last couple of episodes.  The salt – airing the full two-hour pilot after the cancellation was announced.  That’s showing them, Fox!

And now we have history practically repeating itself.  Once again, Joss Whedon has the plug pulled on a show that had the potential to be great.  Now, I know that he first season of “Dollhouse” wasn’t quite as brilliant as his previous bodies of work.  In fact, the first half of season one was kind of dull, with characters that were difficult to invest in.  Joss’ signature repartee was there, but it felt forced and ill-fitting with this cast of players.  Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that none of these characters seemed to embody that balance of dour and humor.  They were mostly dark.

The blame for this doesn’t rest solely on Whedon’s shoulders, if it lies with him at all.  Once again, the Fawkes network stepped in and did their usual meddling.  First, they made Joss rewrite and/or reshoot several episodes.  Joss has admitted in interviews that the first half of season one was different than what he wanted.  This would explain why the second half seemed to improve.  Then the “Dollhouse” was put where the last Whedonshow died a miserable death – on Friday nights.  Ratings remained abysmal even when the better half of the show aired.

But then, something incredible happened.  Despite bad ratings, “Dollhouse” was renewed for a second season.  Could it be that Fox was finally realizing how badly it kept screwing over the guy who created Captain Tightpants?

Nope.  Sorry.  Just a slight ray of hope only to be extinguished as the network that didn’t understand “Herman’s Head” put “Dollhouse right back on Friday nights.  From there, things continued to go downhill for the show, until Fox made it official a few weeks ago that they were canceling it.  Oh, I know – the official announcement was only made last week.  But Fox made it clear by their actions first – through TV spots announcing that new episodes would not be airing until December, filling their slot with repeats of “House”.  And further, they made it known that they would burn off the rest of the episodes in December.  That’s pretty much preparing the rope for the gallows.

So, here we are… another Joss Whedon show has been canceled.  It’s unfortunate, as the second season was really starting to amp things up.  I stuck with the show through the muck and mire and found myself really starting to like it by the time I got to the most recent new episode.  But once again, Whedon and his fans find themselves back to the drawing board.  As we wait to see what genius he can pull of next and where it might turn up, Joss bides his time until he can put something new out there for everyone to enjoy.  Question is, where will it turn up?

I think he should go back to the web.  His craft seems to work better there.  His fans have unlimited access to his work, and his art seems to thrive in that environment.  There is money and success to be had there if you know how to approach it correctly, and I think Joss has already proven that he knows how to do that.

He certainly seems to have a better grasp on it than Fox.

The Don needs his handler.

When I do webcomic reviews, it’s mostly to show my love for a comic that I feel doesn’t get enough exposure.* But what about when a comic I love is already popular enough that I probably can’t tell you webcomic fans anything about it that you don’t already know?

*That doesn’t mean I’ll never write reviews for comics I don’t like. But for my past reviews, I’ve just gone through my regular reading list of comics–and I don’t tend to keep reading things that have stayed past their welcome with me. That said, I actually do have a review in mind for a webcomic that I gave up on, but as it’s only a few months old, I’m giving it half a year to improve before I make with the frowny-faces. Fair’s fair.

Originally, I planned to just leave off reviewing these ceWebrities of webcomic fame and only mention them in terms of comic news and what-have-you. Still, though, I couldn’t escape the desire to blow these guys’ horns. In order to satisfy myself without beating too many deceased equines, I’ve settled on a compromise: the mini-review.

This time, I’m singing the praises of Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius (with colourist Cheyenne Wright), a success story in print as well as online. Girl Genius has in the past been nominated for the Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards, the Eisner Award, the Hugo Awards, and the Eagle Awards; it’s won a Hugo and numerous WCCA categories. The Foglios themselves are no strangers to art fans. Phil Foglio is probably most famous for providing his uniquely-styled illustrations to the MythAdventures series of books by Robert Lynn Asprin, as well as creating former Dragon Magazine comic series What’s New with Phil & Dixie (which you should really check out on the Foglio’s website, along with Girl Genius and the equally-entertaining Buck Godot!) See? There’s some serious talent behind this print-comic-turned-webcomic-turned-print-comic! That alone should be enough to persuade anyone who’s heard of Girl Genius but never checked it out to take a look.

But we all like pretty pictures, right? And I did say that Phil’s art style is unique…extremely unique. If you’ve seen his work before, you’ll instantly recognize it again. Combine Phil’s art with the colouring talent of Cheyenne Wright, and you’ve got a lovely little vision of sequential art to massage your eyeballs. Let’s take a look at the art of Girl Genius, in which the Foglios’ love of Victorian-era dress and culture and steampunk are allowed to roam freely. (Kaja invented the term “gaslamp fantasy” to describe the comic’s less punky, but no less steamy, setting. I don’t mean “steamy” in the saucy way, either. I mean it in the “Water plus heat equals steam. The world can be saved by steam!” way.) Girl Genius takes place in a version of Europe where mad scientists known as “Sparks” run rampant with their minions and twisted creations. When the heroes of your comic are mostly inventors with tenuous grips on sanity at best, problem solving tends to take on new and amusing levels of meaning. Let’s pull out that art and allow me to illustrate (hehe) with a recent storyline:

The disembodied voice in the second panel talking about tours is the voice of the mostly-insane castle/fortress/mad laboratory the characters are currently trying to repair…so that its homicidal behaviour is directed against, well, pretty much anyone OTHER than the guys doing the repair job.

But the life of a Spark is not all fun and games and dissecting of brains. When you muck about with the very forces that hold our world together, you’re bound to run into a bit of backlash. One of the Sparks, a prince named Tarvek, ends up with the contagious lethal disease Hogfarb’s Resplendent Immolation, which apparently turns its victims all sorts of pretty, pretty colours before death (which may involve spontaneous combustion, or may just lead to a literal meltdown of the body). And also makes them delirious. But really, who notices the difference when the infected is a mad scientist?

And how do you treat a terminal illness? Well, if you’re ALSO a Spark, the solution is easy: you hook yourself up to the sufferer to stabilize him (which also gives you his symptoms), move his brain into a nice safe jar or something for storage, then kill him, drain his blood, decontaminate it, and then bring him back to life, at which point he’ll be good as new! Simple, huh? I wonder why doctors never use this treatment in our world….

Hijinks ensue, of course, and our heroine Agatha Heterodyne ends up catching the disease herself. Which rather complicates matters, as she was the one who was going to be treating both Tarvek and rival noble Gilgamesh Wulfenbach (who did the hooking up of himself to Tarvek in order to stabilize–and rationalise–him). Oh, you wacky Sparks! But this also brings out the “romance” part of the comic’s tagline, “Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!” Our two rich boys are both gunning for Agatha’s affections, which means putting her health before theirs:

If you’ve fallen behind (or, gods forbid, never started) reading, how can you not want to read this comic after all that? Have you no sense of adventure? Have you no love of romance? Have you no obsession with MAD SCIENCE!?

Well, now, even without doing character bios and exposition of the overarching plot and whatnot, this Girl Genius “mini-review” was still a bit longer than you’d expect a “mini” to be. But that just shows you how enthusiastic I am about the work of the Foglios and Wright!

Welcome to this week’s post of my Geek Journal!

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Sorry about the lack of a post last week, I was quite busy helping the Tech Crew of Nekocon’s Main Events room. It was very tiring, but I’m happy to say that most things went off without a hitch.

I almost missed making this post as well; between almost getting swept away by the nor’easter that came out of the remnants of Ida (ok, not really, but I did see quite a bit of flooding), and keeping myself busy with some coding I had been meaning to do (when my power wasn’t out due to the former), I’ve been busy these past few days.

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Still running the release candidate of Windows 7; I’m hoping to be able to hold off changing over the release version until I get my new system built sometime early next year. Speaking of my new system, I decided that I’m going to try to go for one of the new six-core i7 processors instead of the current quad-core versions. Yeah, I currently don’t know what I’d do with all of them (with HyperThreading, it makes a total of 12 virtual cores), but I’m sure I’ll find something.

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I’m a fan of the TV series Numb3rs, and while the producers try to do their research, they don’t always get things right. Take, for instance, last week’s episode: The FBI is trying to find a couple of hackers and one of the characters suggests that they keep an eye out on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for them. Now IRC is real, but some of the things mentioned about it in the episode aren’t completely true. The episode makes it seem like there’s only one IRC server on the internet (there are hundreds of different IRC networks, if not thousands), that it’s totally anonymous (not true on most networks), nothing is tracked (again, not true, some channels on IRC have bot programs whose purpose is to track stats of the channel), and that all users speak leet (yet again, not true; a lot of users just chat normally in their language of choice). Just remember that this is a TV show and sometimes (or most of the time) the facts are stretched to keep things interesting. Not to say that there aren’t IRC networks out there where this stuff isn’t true, but it is usually not the norm.

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That’s it for this week’s post!

Greetings, Banana Splits!

There comes a time in every child’s life when they must put away childish things and become an adult…

…or they can say “To Hell with that” and continue to have fun by going to conventions like Nekocon.

Guess which one I did this past weekend?

To be fair, I was there in an official capacity, as my partner-in-crime Danny Valentini and I were invited to the convention again this year to be guests.  Supposedly, we do this web comic together called “The Draconia Chronicles” that grows in popularity every year.  Now, I would just chalk this up to rumor for now, because everyone knows that there are no such things as web comics.  That’s just a story parents tell their children at night to scare them so that they won’t grow up to get online degrees.

You should know the drill by now – I do a quick recap of my weekend at a convention, you skim over it feeling unfulfilled, then we both reluctantly agree that we need to see other people as we give back all the items we borrowed or gave to each other.

I’m still waiting to get back my copy of the “The White Album.”

As con Fridays go, this year’s Neko offered pretty much the standard fare – I show up at the convention center about two hours before the Opening Ceremonies.  Heading up to the “Con-Ops” room, I procure my Guest badge.  After some spirited conversation about topics I have no recollection of discussing, I make a dotted bee-line for our table in the Artists Alley.  I say dotted because one can never just go to where they are going at a convention.  Invariably, there will be many stops and restarts as you run into old friends for a quick chat, pose for pictures, stop to take pictures, notice something shiny, pause to ponder the secrets of the universe, stop because you’re chewing gum, or hesitate because the all-powerful con gods sent a messenger to you with a gift consisting of this confection called “Pocky”.  And no, I don’t mean the owner of Spwug.

As I survey the landscape of the cavernous region known as the Artists Alley, I catch up with more fellow AA (not Alcoholics Anonymous) commoners as I wait for my cohort to arrive.  I also wait for time to slowly transport me into the future, for that is where the Opening Ceremonies await me.

When the Hour of Trying to Fool People Into Thinking You Are Someone Important in Front of a Medium-Sized Crowd is finally at hand, my recently arrived partner-in-crime and I make our way into the even more cavernous region where the Ceremonies are to take place.  After a series of horrible attempts at humor that are the reason my parents gave me up for adoption, Danny and I – fully convinced that no one knew who the heck we were – remove ourselves and head back over to “Con-Ops”, where we trade our silly old Guest badges for shinier and cooler “Neko Bazaar” badges.  With renewed vigor, we return to the first cavernous area of which I had already mentioned previously.  From there, we set up our table, and begin the attempt to peddle our wares for the rest of the evening.  And that, little Christopher, is how babies are born.

Saturday finds us arriving early, long before noon’s rising sun can greet us.  We have a panel to host and candy tied to strings so that we can lure entice the con masses to our little panel room.  We are able to capture accrue a respectable number of individuals despite our outlandish buffoonery on display.  In fact, I do believe that a couple of them even stop screaming long enough to ask us questions about our web comic.  I call that a success.  Then again, I call not getting maced in the face when I ask a woman the time a success.

From there, we return to our temporary abode in the Artists Alley for more shilling, more debauchery, more talky-talky…blah blah blah…  You’re already asleep, so we’ll skip ahead…

Two in the afternoon!  We have another panel!  But our princess is in another castle!  Dejected from finding yet another one of those stupid Toadstool weirdoes (where do they all come from?  Do they multiply like rabbits?), we make our way back to the same room our last panel was in.  In a strange case of déjà vu, the room looks exactly the same as the last time we were in it.  In fact, maybe this really is the first time we are in it, and the first time really wasn’t the first time, but instead a strange message from the future telling us what lie in store for our fates.

Nope, same room, different panel.

This time we are joined by real artists and writers as we try our best to sound like we know as much as they do about making web comics.  I think we have them fooled right up to the point where I mention something about the right amount of tension needed on a loom when interweaving the threads of a web comic.  I’m not sure where the audience got the pitch forks and torches, but it makes for an exciting conclusion to what I think was a successful panel.

As my counterpart and I make our escape back to the Caverns of AA, we easily slip back into our respective roles – he’s the DJ and I’m the rapper.  Sales seem to be going well on our new “Men of the Quadratic Equation” calendar, as well as a few other items we have somehow managed to fool the commonfolk into believing have magical powers – mainly some Shamwow!s, as well as a few pounds of Mighty Putty.  Throughout the afternoon and evening we get several con-goers who stop by claiming to be fans of our web comic.  But, I know the truth.  After being visited by them as often as I am, you tend to recognize evil spirits when they show up to haunt you and ask you for favors.

It is at this point that I also have a vision that my wife is in an 80s glam-pop band.  I shiver from the delusion, then down a couple burgers that are really cookies.  My life is strange.

The greatest highlight of Saturday has to be in the evening when we go to dinner.  It isn’t often when an evil spirit actually tries to get you drunk so that they can take advantage of you.  Joke’s on him, though.  I would have said yes sober.

Sunday seems to be a blur.  No, I mean every Sunday seems to be a blur.  I think my brain just hates living in my cranial cavity so much that it just decides to shut down every seventh day as a middle finger to me and my ancestors.  I can’t fathom why.  I mean, it isn’t my fault that the Waltons aren’t real.

Now that I think about it, I do seem to recall some events took place on Neko’s Day of Sun.  We have a final panel wherein we are usurped by dark forces who yank the proverbial rug out from under us by yanking the actual rug out from under us.  I think we still manage to do a fairly adequate job of teaching the wailing masses how not to create or develop characters.  At least, I pray to Bill Cosby that we did.

A few more hours of trying to prove to the con folk that we are not wax statues and the con is officially over.  As my main squeeze who is not my wife but is really the artist who draws the web comic I scribble words for and I break down and cry our set-up at the table in the AA Caverns, we say our goodbyes to a few of the fellow artists who were crazy enough to talk to us.  We make our way to the bar in the hotel that is across the way from the convention center.  I remark as we head over that a way looks an awful lot like grass and asphalt.  Once inside the bar, a friend buys me an apple pie – except that this pie is really liquid and I have to drink it instead of eat it.  But hey, in today’s economy everyone has to make sacrifices – even our American icons.  I heard that baseball is currently just gardening in order to save money.

With the evening now upon us, we make our way to Olive Garden.  There, a free meal awaits all of us who were sneaky enough to convince the staff that we were Guests Neko Bazaar attendees.  But first we stand outside the restaurant to play a game called “Parking Lot-to”.  The object of the game is to stand out in the parking lot until the number of people in your party matches the number called.  Our group makes it to the bonus round, where we win some fabulous prizes – including our meals, as well as a copy of the home game.  I can’t speak for those who are still in the parking lot after we are seated, though I’m told that “manicotti formaggio” is Italian for “convention stragglers”.

I’m glad I ordered the chicken alfredo.

The Don would like to give his heartfelt thanks to everyone at Nekocon for their gracious generosity and hopes to be invited back next year!

Friends, if you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “I’d love to buy merchandise from my favourite webcomics, but I don’t want to pay shipping costs just to have to wait for my swag,” then have I got a solution for you! Have you ever considered…conventions?

….Okay, so the cost of a convention admission badge is considerably more than what you’d pay to ship a poster and a T-shirt to your home. Also, in order to attend a convention, you have to actually leave said home. But I’m here, fresh from Nekocon 2009, to show you the pros of allowing cons into your life! (So, how much are you hating me right now?)

With your keepsake convention membership badge, you’ll receive nigh-unlimited access to your favourite artists, courtesy of the Artists’ Alley! Hang around their tables breathing on them while you drop $20 on a T-shirt and calendar! Just imagine, you’ll finally be able to give that fifteen-minute presentation to the creators of The Draconia Chronicles about how their story’s world would be infinitely improved by a crossover with Harry Potter and a repeat appearance by Christopher Walken as a Twilight vampire. Don’t forget to bring your laptop with PowerPoint slideshow!

The best part about that picture is that I totally did not expect to find a Walken/Harry Potter pic when I Googled “Christopher Walken Sparkle.” Thanks, Totally Looks Like.com! Hopefully-humourous text is my addition.

But that’s not all–act now, and you’ll also receive PANELS. That’s right, long discussions and autograph sessions hosted by your beloved artists in which you discuss their works and ask them uncomfortable questions about their sex lives for one to two hours! You can’t get THAT experience from sitting at home reading webcomics!

No, guys, I will never stop channeling Billy Mays. Sorry.

But seriously, folks, if you want to show support for the artists you love and wish to know, you can do a lot worse than to come hang out at a fan convention. Nekocon is an anime-themed convention, but you can find artists of all types, at all types of cons. This weekend, I hobnobbed with and/or observed these rising stars of webcomics in their unnatural element:

–Danny Valentini and (Spwug’s own) Donnie Sturges of The Draconia Chronicles

–Jamie Sturges of Why So

–Chris Malone of Blue and Blond (Chris, if you’re reading this, I never did find out who the screamer in room 417 was to congratulate them.)

–Dave Lister of Paradox Lost

–Aja Moore of vantage/vantage (Currently on a semi-hiatus until the artist finds more reliable webhosting. She also has done other works as well–check out the rest of her DeviantArt page and website!)

Michael Terracciano of Dominic Deegan was sadly not at Nekocon this year, for which we all weep, but he’s yet another webcomic artist who does the con circuit. Speaking of the con circuit, thanks to these conventions, you’ll be able to meet the entire range, from “small business” comic artists to big-name ones whose works are published both online and in newspapers around the world.

C’mon…give conventions a try. Even if you leave traumatized by that Sailor Jupiter with the goatee and hairy legs, you’ll still have your webcomic swag and the beginnings of a bee-YOO-tee-fool friendship with the artists you love! (Sometimes a bit too much. Remember–if you have to ASK an artist to sign your underclothes, chances are, they don’t actually want to.)

The preceding article comes to you courtesy of the zombie plague, which the writer is still afflicted with. Spwug assumes no responsibility for opinions presented here, or undead uprisings that occur as a result of viewing this page.

… I’m gonna have to punk out on this week’s “Office” and give you a “Don Says…” instead.  It’s just as good as an “Office”… really it is.

Okay, it’s almost as valuable as a “Meeting”, at least.  Listen, you can’t use any of these as legal tender (or even chicken tenders) anyway, so what’s the big deal?

Anyhoo, the reason I committed such a heinous act and punked out on a full “Office” article this week is because Nekocon is this weekend.  As we all know, Nekocon is that magical place where dreams come true and wine flows from the highest mountaintops in cascading waterfalls.  It’s where River Phoenix is still alive and continually successful in film and Tom Green didn’t survive putting his bum on a rhino.

Okay, it’s really an anime convention in my backyard of Hampton, Virginia.

But, the best news is that 2wcOnline, that awesome website that is the home of that awesome web comic called The Draconia Chronicles that I’m the writer for – you know, the one that has links to it on the right side of this here Spwug site?  Do you even know where you are right now?  Maybe you should lay down…

Lost my thought of trains…

Oh yeah – 2wcOnline will be there as web comic guests again this weekend!  My partner-in-crime Danny Valentini and I will be there all weekend pimping out our new Draconia Chronicles 2010 Calendar, as well as the rest of our stuff.  We will also be heading up several panels throughout the weekend.  Grab your peepers and check out the sched:2wcOnline

2wcOnline presents The Draconia Chronicles:   SAT 10a – 11a  in Panel 3

2wcOnline State of Webcomics:   SAT 2p – 3p in  Panel 3

2wcOnline Character Creation and Development:   SUN 1p – 2p in  Panel 3

So, if any of you happen to be going to Neko and want to come by and pay your resident Spwugnerian as well as both 2wcOnline Chuckleheads, feel free!  And next week, I will return to my regular programming with a rundown of the con.

I’m The Don and I approve this massage.

Andrew Dobson, skilled artist and Nintendo fan of old, gives his take on Project Natal and the Sony Wand in “Danny and Spot” (I’m showing you two comics that were uploaded together, but it’s the second comic that’s relevant here.) Check out his amazing work at the link above!

Fall has, uh, fallen upon us here at the Casa de Marlink, according to the bright red tree outside our door. Halloween rushed in and blew out with the speed and force of six three-year-olds on a sugar high, leaving us with just the leftovers of candy for trick-or-treaters, decorations to be taken down*, and some form of minor plague that some generous soul donated to the big Halloween party.

*Decorations were left up into November to ensure we did not incur the wrath of Sam by taking them down too early.

While I soothe my aching head and raw throat with honeyed ginseng tea, let’s get down to brass tacks. Or thumbtacks. Who even uses brass tacks anymore?

You might notice this isn’t the monthly webcomic review I’ve normally been doing the first Tuesday of the month, although a comic on the Web still makes a feature here. I’m switching up the way things are done, but since how a writer works is only of interest to the writer, I’ll spare you the details and get to the topic at hand. Well, topics. I’m gonna get random and complain about a few things here. This post was inspired by the Dobson comics you see here and the gripes they reminded me of.

This isn’t NEW-news; we’ve all heard that the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 are keen on adding motion controls to their systems. The response from the gaming community so far has largely been a big yawning “Meh.” My, the enthusiasm of disapproval sure has fallen since Nintendo announced the Wii Remote a few years back! (Read the “2006″ panel of the above comic to see the reaction I got a few years ago, when I expressed delight at the proposed Nintendo motion controls that have since come to rule the world.)

But, even though I posted a comic here that’s mocking the Wiimote-mockers, I’m not going to tread…too much…into that old territory of how it’s “cool” to hate the big N because they always seem to come out on top (funny, I would think that would be a reason to LIKE them. We’re supposed to like winners who provide quality products for the consumer, right? Or maybe I’m the only one who still values substance over style. Wait. Said I wasn’t gonna go there. I also said I’d call you after last night. Get used to disappointment, kids.) No, my problem with the gamer-dubbed “copycat” motion technology announced by Sony and Microsoft isn’t relevant to the “copycat” part.

We don’t have a 360 in this house, due to there being nothing we wanted to play on it. We do have a PS3, which I pretty much only use as a DVD/Blu-Ray player. I spend basically all of my gaming time on the PC, the Wii, or my older Nintendo systems (and much of my PC gaming is playing Nintendo ROM’s when I’m not playing Oblivion). It’s not that I’m just obsessed with everything Nintendo does to the point that I won’t touch the competition. It’s that I’m obsessed with Nintendo BECAUSE they produce the games I actually like to play and replay, an area in which both Sony and Microsoft have been severely lacking for me. Let’s have another set of Dobson comics to illustrate:

Before anyone says anything, A Boy and His Blob falls under the “third-party” category, not the “new intellectual property” one.

Yeah, I’m not a big first-person shooter fan, nor am I diggin’ the dull “realistic” brown graphics that make backgrounds and items largely indistinguishable and have become the gaming norm. Don’t think I’m ignoring that Nintendo has been known to fall into this trap too (Twilight Princess, why you gotta hurt me so bad with your muted colours? Can’t we go back to the vibrant pallets of your NES and SNES glory days when I could tell one object from another? Even your N64 forays were more vivid!) And many of the PS3 FPS offerings are pretty much all the same thing, graphics-/gameplay-wise. Even the rare stand-out FPS games like Call of Duty: World at War and Battlefield: Bad Company tend to look alike…and play alike in a bad way, which I’ll get into and ties into the motion-control thing….

I can’t comment on the 360’s proposed motion controls beyond quoting a few gamer responses of “Way to do what Nintendo already did!” since I’ve never played a 360, but I’ve got a big problem with Sony’s take. Which is, how can PS3 developers be looking at new types of controls when the ones they’ve been working with for years are still so loose and unresponsive?

There aren’t that many PS3 games I’ve been excited for and actually played. There was Metal Gear Solid 4 (more brown futuristic FPS with a scruffy hero!), Eden, LittleBigPlanet, and the minigame LocoRoco Cocoreccho!, and that’s pretty much it. And I probably would have liked those games a whole lot more, had the controls actually freakin’ worked.

The battle against Vamp in MGS4, for example, took about five times as long as it should have because the CQC maneuver to put someone in a lock-hold only works when it wants to. And let’s not forget the other times during the game that Snake wouldn’t grab what he was supposed to or go where he was told. (Cranky old man.)

In Eden, the controls work like you’re playing underwater with slow response time, which leaves your little character missing easy grab-jumps and constantly falling to the beginning of the level while the timer ticks down. I can generally only play one level at a time, before getting so frustrated at the controls that I quit playing it for the next two months.

LittleBigPlanet…do I even need to get into the controls and hit detection that are so sloppy, even the game’s designers admit there’s something amiss–and then completely reneged on their promise to repair the broken controls by Christmas 2008? I have tried so hard to love this game with all my heart because it’s extremely unique and obviously a labour of love (see also: Stephen Fry narrating), but it’s another one that leads to migraines. I still recommend to friends that they play this game–but as a rental. I can’t justify buying it until you’ve seen if you can love it despite the crappy controls.

LocoRoco…another game that would be so creative and so much fun, if only the damn LocoRocos actually did what they were told, instead of bouncing in place and ogling the pretty butterfly that is clearly telling them to jump on each other and form a stack. Many friends have seen this game on the PS3 and wanted to try it, only to give up after ten minutes of yelling at the screen and shaking the controller.

Ever since the PS3 entered my home, I’ve had this theory that game developers aren’t making games harder–they’re making games harder to play. (Or perhaps making the games themselves “stupider” so that they don’t recognize what you, the player, are trying to do with that weird little alien “controller” thing your PS3 has heard so much about.) And there’s a big difference between the two. People like a challenge. People don’t like watching themselves fail even though they hit the right button at the right time. If developers can’t get regular old button-dominated controls to work as they should, how can they expect to re-revolutionize gaming with a new(ish, *ahem* Nintendo) type of control? Do me a favour, Sony. Get the old right before you move on to the new. Make me love you, as Nintendo made me love them over two decades ago, and continues to make me love them, by getting it right the first time. And Microsoft? At least try to catch my interest next time, okay?

I now end this largely nonsensical ventilation to pop pills for the headache and more tea for the throatache. Catch you on the flip–or catch you at Nekocon this weekend for those who are going, provided I’m not dying of the zombie plague by then!