Fop Chaser

I think if all my comics were about Fop Chaser I would be incredibly rich. Fop Chaser loves fops and she will not rest until she has captured every last lavender-smelling one of them. Her tactics are underhanded!



Chaser, leave those fops alone.

KANADA

I am still in Canada. It is incredible. It is so cold. The Toronto public transport takes special coins. The coins are small. The cold has got into my bones. I cannot remember why I decided to come here in the coldest month of the year but it is certainly invigorating. And by invigorating I of course mean, cold.

You would not believe the people I have met and the times I have had but it has been star-studded. The glitterati! Below I will post some drawings which I cannot explain.





I return to the UK tomorrow to try and bring back some sanity but maybe the world will never be the same again!

Dearth

The site is down and I don't know why, maybe it will be back up again later today, or maybe it is all over for me on the internet and it is time to dedicate myself to public service.

Here is today's comic to remind you of what it was like when I had a web site.

Great white hope for the great white north

I will not be writing on the blog for the next week as I will be preparing for a trip to Canada the week after. I have to make sure that you are richly entertained in my absence, which means hard graft in the drawing area.

I'm excited about visiting Toronto (and points beyond), but of course there are fears too. Hopefully the diagram below will illustrate what is on my mind.

Carnival countdown

Thank you for all the posts in response to the carnival of ideas.

Here were the scores (nearly 100 people participated)

Nosferatu 28
What Me Pompous 16
Urchin 14
Jazz 11
Spanish Inquisition 8
1-800 Beard 8
------THE LINE OF CONSIDERATION------
Next Pope 7
Gin & Tonic Camel/Ship Of The Desert 7
Stephen Harper 7
Cat Person 7
Action Badger 7
Jelly Time 6
------ALL BELOW SHALL BURN------
Kerfuffle 5
Burgle My House 5
Whitey Sale 4
8-Bit Elvis 1
Bloody Hellfire 1

What does this mean? I don't know.

Dr T-shirt returns

I've given up complaining about how hard it is to design tshirts and how there are no ideas left. I've realised that at 32, despite a keen eye on the scene at all times, I've outgrown the innocent impulse that forged my early, still-popular designs of 5, 6 years ago. I'm just grateful that I came up with them at all. They have put new school coats on my (non-existent) kids for the greater part of the decade.

That is not to say that I don't still have ideas. In a controlled experiment last night I sat down for an hour and had some ideas. I've marked the good ones with green spots, the awful ones with orange spots, and the truly hideous ones with red. I actively invite your input as I take you through them page by page!



A man doesn't look quite right with a tote bag. But top left is something that could change all that. I have also acknowleged that Tiny Stephen Harper with his spatula has something about him. The rest of the page should be burned.



Things progress fast. "Whitey Sale" must surely have its followers, those in the know. "1-800 How's My Beard" made me laugh but I am no gauge of these things. "Jelly TIme" is far beyond the pale.



"What? Me? Pompous?" may be the single greatest image I have ever drawn: get behind this one. The little camel has "gin" and "tonic" written on his humps. I like the tiny Spanish Inquisition but they will require some time in the design lab.



Out of strength and ready to rest, the lower common denominator is taken outside and shot. I liked cats, but not dogs (too demented?)

A technical man

You may remember my wails of complaint a couple of weeks back about my tablet PC and the Manga Studio 4 ink blobs. I had the opportunity to try out a clean install of Windows Vista and it happened there too.

I did manage to make it stop though. If you switch Manga Studio to "Wintab" mode in the preferences from "Tablet PC", you don't get the 1 in 100 strokes that loses pressure sensitivity (though you can enjoy a great simulation of how you would draw if you were steaming drunk). I think it's a Wacom Penabled driver problem linked just to this one application. In any case, since this isn't the machine I draw the comic on (you may remember my ancient two-ton second-hand Cintiq) I will wail no more.

I would however feel a lot less mad if one other person on the internet reported having this problem. The problem being, apparently, a ludicrous executive toy for a computer and a nice piece of software the authors let you (me) have for free.

More digital art yarns later in the week!