I’ve been slowly working on the next page of Rita, which is a huge complicated cityscape. It’s taking a while. Maybe I should also start working on a few pages near the climax, that are… even crazier. Because otherwise the comic will just grind to a total halt for a month.
I mean not like it isn’t slow and sporadic anyway. But it’d be nice to have that like half done by the time I get to it.
While I was at the store grabbing those little notebooks, I also got a cheap portfolio to finally put a loose pile of old art into the closet instead of having it kicking around the living room.
College stuff. Cut paper on the left, ink and colored film on the right. I feel like the Thoth poster (assignment: ‘do a cut paper poster for a Mardi Gras krewe’, I chose the one that let me get away with TEH FURREH) may have been one of my first attempts at my current Illustrator style, perpetrated in the unforgiving medium of cut paper. And oh man I was such a Matt Howarth fanboy when I did the one on the right.
Text: “Miss July, 1990 Paul Trauth”. I think it was not insignificant that I allocated this ‘centerfold’ to my birth month. I was still a guy at this point – but the gender stuff was definitely an undercurrent, I think.
There’s like three more pages of this but they really look like I was sick of the story and just wanted to finish it. I really love the way I was so consistent with the Cubist nature of that treasure chest.
Guess what? I didn’t quit drawing her. Didn’t get a sex life, either. From a college-era sketchbook in the same pile. Which is completely full of hesitant pencils and overly-precious inking like this. I stuck this sketchbook on the shelf where all the sketchbooks go – mostly the ones I’ve filled since Katrina, but there’s a few early ones in there as well that I chose as representative of a giant box of the things my mom still had.
There was some other stuff in this pile too – a scratchboard drawing of a lamia in front of a full moon, an ad layout pasted up for an already-obsolete-as-I-was-taking-it graphic design class, other college stuff. Maybe I’ll photograph some of it the next time this portfolio surfaces.
I stuck all the flat stuff in the portfolio, then grabbed a marker and drew this on the outside, and stuffed it into the deepest recesses of my living room closet. I’ll find it in another few years when I move out, giggle at it, possibly post some of it again (I know I’ve posted some of this shit before), then stuff it in the new place’s closet until the next move.
Always label your storage, even if it’s just to calligraph an elegant “WTF?” on the side of a box filled with miscellaneous stuff.
I went out to mail a thing. On the way back I stopped at the bookstore and got a four-pack of little softcover sketchbooks.
Now who am I gonna mail this one to…
I was going through a box of stuff that’s been cluttering up the living room since I moved here. Notebooks, a pretty box, tiny sample prints… and an tiny little empty notebook with Mickey on the cover.
It ain’t empty no more.
When I got bored with drawing DIZNEES, I turned to Brian Harp, who I was IMing at the time. And I said “what’s your snailmail would you like to join in a stupid project”. He said yes. So now it’s on the way to him, with the intent that he’ll draw some more DIZNEES in it and send it on. Perhaps eventually it will get back to me, perhaps not. I’m fine with it either way.
I’m going through the unshipped orders in my online store and packing the ones I can actually ship.
Which is to say, I’m packing one Tarot deck. Because every other order involved a copy of Rita book 2, which is still at the printers. That should be getting shipped later this week, so I’ll finally have a timeline on fulfilling all these other orders, and the Kickstarter stuff!
I also poked my publisher about getting another lot of my deck again, and signed the contract to print the second edition of Rita 1, so my store should actually be, you know. Open. In a month or two.
Man I am gonna be so damn happy when I get to the point where I can seduce someone else into handling this end of things.
Today I spent a lot of time wrestling with the Kindle Comics Creator, trying to pour Rita into a format that could be sold on the world’s largest bookstore. It was a lengthy process, full of terrible image overcompression, bloated output files, manual twiddling of command-line programs, and annoyance.
This was the best I managed. At that point I’d been fucking with it for about three hours; I threw up my hands and went to sprawl in the living room and read some of the stuff I got at Emerald City Comic-Con.
These are a couple of books by my animation school buddy Gabe, collecting stories from his strip/series Life In The Analog Age. It’s about growing up as a nerdy kid in the seventies.
When I was done with that, I’d destressed from all that swearing at the computer I’d done earlier. And I finally got off my butt and threw book 1 of Rita into Comixology Submit, as well as checked out how it looks on ComicsFix, a new online comics retailer I’ve been invited to be on.
I am pretty sure I will feel like I “didn’t get anything done” when I look back on today, but honestly? I got some stuff done. It’s just that it wasn’t drawing the next page of Rita. And I might get some of that done tonight while at SICAGA, too.
I dunno. Still a bit cranky and out of sorts. Well, going outside and having some beer and socialization will probably help a lot.
Oh yeah. I can feel my body getting back into shape. Having the chin-up bar over the bathroom door has been great; after doing a few attempts every day for a month or so I can now actually get myself off the ground more than once when I try. Many casual repetitions and not giving a fuck when I fail is a good thing. And off course there’s pole class. I just finished the once-a-week intro class, and now I’m starting to hit the drop-in classes twice a week, which is going to definitely DO SOMETHING to my body. I will be perpetually aching a little bit for the next few months, but I will welcome it because it’s the kind of aching that says I’m becoming more flexible and stronger.
And I will be especially glad when all this work means that I can put on a skin-tight light-up dragon costume and dance all night every night at this year’s Rainfurrest.
A quick snapshot of my current stats, as reported by Jetpack. Green notes about how many people read a decent chunk come from Google Analytics.
Over the past few weeks, I experimented with running a broad ad campaign, looking at what Google Analytics told me about how people were behaving, and then narrowing my focus to a couple sites that were standing way out ahead of the pack in terms of how many people actually sat there and read a bunch of the comic. I’m down to about $10 in my Project Wonderful account, so this is still not a self-sustaining thing yet, never mind a profitable thing. (I have PW set to just pour any ad revenue I get back into the bin for buying more ads.)
All advertising was on various webcomics via Project Wonderful, an ad network primarily used on webcomics. Which narrows my focus to “people who are already interested in reading comics on the web”. I need to find places to advertise to “people interested in science fiction” as well.
I think my next step is probably to finally get around to making an ad or two with that quote from Phil Foglio, then buy the top banner on Girl Genius for a while. That’s definitely a place to find people who are interested in lady-focused cartoony SF. After that, I’ll probably grit my teeth and do a bigger ad buy (low four digits) that actually grabs the top banner on some of the bigger comics of today.
I mean I could also just not spend money and focus on crafting my art into perfect little ultra-sharable nuggets of tumblr/reddit-friendly viral content, but let’s be honest, that is not a place I want to go with my work. That way lies the Oatmeal and Zen Pencils, neither of which I want to be.
After about a decade of using “Lackwit gadabout. Unnaturally-colored hair. Draws.” as my short bio around the web, I now pretty much completely own a Google search for this term.
I should just go all the way someday, buy “lackwitgadabout.com” and point it to my server. I’m pretty proud of this utterly meaningless achievement I didn’t even know I was striving for.
(I always said I got the term from a sample on an Orbital track – ‘Are We Here?’ on ‘Snivilisation’ – but upon checking it turns out the dialogue in question has an old man talking about a “disgusting, long-haired, work shy, dirty lay-about who ought to be in the bloody army!”. I suppose I got the term out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel instead or somesuch. Either that or the world has altered around me just to annoy me. Again. Occam’s Razor suggests that I’m probably just misremembering though. At any rate, I have always thought that living the sort of life to have an old man say that about you is the RIGHT THING and I heartily recommend it if you can manage it.)
I keep on coming back to these two panels from McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Especially that footnote.
I’ve got the respect of a small group of my peers, and some of that small group have shiny shiny awards on their mantlepieces. And I got financially lucky. I don’t fear the footnote as much as I used to. But it’s still there in the back of my head.
And I just realized I’m seven or eight years older than Scott was when he drew this.