Death

Dear readers,

I thought I was getting better yesterday but I wasn't. I got worse. Now I am in bed all day. It is probably all over for me.

I am going towards the light now... goodbye... goodbye!!!

Sincerely,
John

PS The mini-market is only four doors down, am I allowed to go in my dressing gown and pyjamas?

Droplet infection

The blog is ill-tended this week as I have a particularly virulent cold. It is hard enough to draw when you are wracked by coughs, let alone string a sentence together. I am on the mend now I think but it may be too late for my body, which is wan and weak. I intend to travel into the city this afternoon and one whiff of diesel may end my days.

The best cold I ever had was when I got a sinus infection. Once the malaise had passed, I would blow my nose and about two minutes later warm, thin, bright custard yellow goo would gush forth from my nostrils and have to be staunched mid-flow. Yes ladies and gentlemen, it was my brains leaking out which is why I am not allowed to marry, vote or drive a car any more.

This particular malady occurred after I spent two weeks in Brooklyn, which says plenty about the fine air quality in that neck of the woods.

What's the worst thing that's ever come out of your nose?

Simultaneously bushy and sparse

If you'd said to me that this would actually work as a piece of graphic design, I would have said "you are crazy like a fox." But guess what? Another hot nugget that you voted for from the Carnival Of Ideas!

Crowy considers

Here is a sneak preview of a new print I'm working on. I haven't decided whether it will be a limited canvas for the UK webcomix thing, or a longer run poster, but it is another in my Oz series. I will post up a finished version once it is coloured in.

Fop Chaser Problem Time

Oh dear oh dear.

Red onions at the "folk art jumble sale"

I wanted to write and say that I am really moved by the comments on my "state of the onion" post. I didn't write it to fish for compliments or to tease you with impending doom.

I was also very impressed by the standard of grammar, spelling and punctuation in those comments. I didn't realise that I had cultivated such an audience of upright citizens. I have issued each of you with a gold star.

I tried to address any questions when they were asked but I will answer the most frequently asked ones again.

Q. Will you reprint books 1, 2 and 3? Or do PDF collections like Diesel Sweeties did?

A. I just can't afford to. I only print 1500-2000 of my books at at time and it takes three years to get through a run. This is as true of original stuff as the reprint books. I don't want to make PDFs when you can read the whole archive on the website anyway, it doesn't make any sense to me - plus the bandwidth consumed would be huge.

Q. What about print on demand?

A. Print-on-demand means very high book prices and/or next to no profit for me. I typed in the specifications for "Blame The Sky" into Lulu.com's price calculator. The manufacturing cost was a very reasonable £37. I would aim to have it retail at around £100. I take credit cards.

Q. How about a top publisher such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux reissuing the early volumes?

A. Publishers lose interest when they find out that my ouevre is as visually consistent as a folk art jumble sale.

Q. Why don't you offer premium content on the website and charge people for it?

A. I put the fullness of my faculties into the daily comic and have little left over to generate phantasmogorias of walled-off content. Every time I work out a nice little ensemble for Esther, that is your premium content.

Q. (This was more of an accusation and it was not all that frequently asked) You dump characters all the time and introduce new ones! This spoils my enjoyment.

A. Sorry.

Q. Is the end nigh?

A. No.

State of the onion

First the bad news: from next week there only be four comics a week (M-T-Th-F). I need a bit of breathing space to avoid burn-out. I'm sorry if anybody is disappointed.

Over the last few weeks I have been trying to make some decisions about Scary Go Round and where it is going. This is not meant to be some terribly dramatic news post where I bleat on about how hard it is to make a comic in the comfort of one's home day in day out.

I consider myself very lucky that tens of thousand of people read my comic every day. But it is a sad fact of long-form, story-based comics like mine that it is hard, after a certain point, to add new readers. The perception is that they carry a lot of history - even when like mine, the creator has been burning the history books every couple of years in order to survive.

In the last year or so I have tried to make the stories as stand-alone as I can, but the fact is that you lose readers over time and if you don't get new ones to replace them, slowly but surely you will go the way of all flesh! There are already a few webcomic ghost ships out there, long sunk by the weight of history. I am not keen to join them!

After 7 years it is probably time to replace Scary Go Round with something new. I have a pretty good idea about what to do next. But I still have a lot of SGR stories to tell and I don't really know what to do.

Raising your game

Yeah sure, Scary Go Round was all right, but I think this new project is the zenith of where I am going artistically.



Many thanks to "Pops" Alluvium.

Fop Chaser returns

Fop Chaser is still hunting fops. How sad that I cannot convert her antics into money. But you know, some genies are best left in the bottle I say.

Vest zest

I was testing drawing on a smaller screen today as one day I might have to make my comics on it, so I redrew an old comic at random. I post it here for fun. I have to practice practice on different devices as I get thrown really easily by change, leading to gangling arms, mad proportions and big nutty heads. Even the above is barely consistent, I will have to do a dozen or more before I am actually comfortable.

Also today, enjoy the fine stylings of Katie Hanratty and Chris Doherty. Talent in the community.

Pop Friday

There hasn't been a point in the last 17 years where this wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear but man, there really is nothing new under the sun is there?

EVERYTHING WITH YOU - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart



CRADLE - The Joy Formidable

Kitten Is King

I have designed a new print, it is just a fun thing in a run of ten.

Hourly

Yesterday was hourly comics day! I thought I would join in for once which is something I never do, unfortunately I spent the whole day gripped by a powerful ennui, some would say "Weltschmerz". Do not worry for me, I have a robust character, the problem with verité is that it is still open to interpretation.



I have omitted, for art's sake, a very pleasant conversation with my mother and father, and an hour I spent ironing while watching an excellent episode of Grand Designs. The cheering effect of these wore off around 5pm and, as depicted, I reassumed my Edvard Munch position until nightfall.

And I spelled "inexplicably" wrong.

In other news, my great ally Marlo Meekins has asked me to tell you she has a new print on sale. If not us, who will keep her in felt tip pens?

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!