Bleah. I just spent the last couple hours cleaning up some malware. Thanks to Gilrain for the heads-up on it. Browsers will probably bitch about me serving malware for a few days longer until their los

I was going to spend a few hours tonight working on the next page but then this came up. Feh. Not that I’ve been making that “twice weekly” promise anyway, despite my best intentions – blame low energy plus increasingly complicated backgrounds after a Moebius binge – but it would’ve been nice to have this page done tonight, or close to done tonight. Sigh.

Here’s a few questions and answers from the Ask Rita tumblr. Got questions about any of the four worlds? Ask ’em there and the appropriate character (usually blue Rita) will answer! Eventually.

Do you ever adjust your processors to experience time at a faster or slower rate (relative to local time)? It would seem to relieve a lot of the tedium of interstellar travel.

What’s it like to switch between chassis? Is it as simple as uploading to it, or is there a whole rigmarole?

Are you a teapot, or are you a teasmade?

Which Beatle would make the best robot?

Why gender?

CONGRATULATIONS!!! You have won a FREE TRIP to Happy Fun Land Amusement Park! Happy Fun Land Amusement Park! You will love our rides, shows, food, souvineers, and reprogramming sessions! In order to verify your win, please run the attached verification program! The verification program must be run with root administrator privledges in order to verify your FREE TRIP! Attendance is mandatory. The Penguins will make the neccesary alterations to your chassis immediately.

What do you experience on sync loss?

The general reaction to the weird-ass photographic cover I experimented with last week was “put down the crack pipe, Peggy”. Albiet much more politely. Im glad I decided to ASK people if “making it look like a novel” was a totally awesome idea or a stupid one; I was really unsure because I’m too close to it sometimes.

So I fooled around with the photo cover and the flier I’d made a little while ago and got this. Once I added the Panopticon, I knew I was done. I might fool around with new drawings specifically for the cover; I dunno.

A quick heads-up: I did some edits on the latest page. Go here and shift-reload to see them. They are minor but they are PRETTY IMPORTANT.

Here’s a comic I found that seems to be intending to go some of the places I explicitly decided to avoid going with Rita – it sounds like it’s going to play with the point in time where robots and uploads become seen as fully “human”.

Also it is rendered pretty much entirely in shades of blue and the ‘about’ page mentions some of the characters are queer, so, well, maybe I’m just biased what with doing a very blue comic about a kinda queer robot lady? Anyway, check out O Human Star. I can’t say too much about it since it’s just one chapter long so far, but I’ll be watching it to see where it goes.

Meanwhile, the Kickstarter went off pretty well. It ended up at about 250% of my original goal, only a few hundred bucks short of the threshold I set for getting spot gloss on the Panopticon. I’m going to run the numbers in the next couple days and decide if I’m going to throw in some of my own funds to make that happen, now that it’s so close. Thanks a ton to everyone who contributed!

I’m working on the next page of Rita; I suspect there’s only gonna be one page this week, due to me scrambling to finish off the art for Further Confusion 2013’s website (it should go live on the first; right now it’s their default skin), and for my contribution to “Feast Yer Eyes”, a free tabloid-sized anthology a friend in New Orleans does, whose deadline is the first. The next page of Rita’s about, ooh, 1/3 done. I really wish I could manage to work up a buffer but I think I’d require a time bubble to do so. Or at least better work habits. Le sigh.

Also, my art is going to be in Heavy Metal. Really. They’re doing a special SDCC issue this year, and this piece from 2005 will be one of three variant back covers. OMG I’M GONNA BE IN HEAVY METAL. KEVIN EASTMAN LEFT A GUSHING COMMENT ON MY DRAWING. SQUEEEE. *happy dance*

Here we go! Now’s your chance to sit down with a nice cup of Beverage and “Decrypting Rita”. Pledge your money for a copy, spread the word to make it more likely to actually happen!

(New pages should be showing up next week; my buffer got totally destroyed by being sick.)

Alright, so running around getting ready for pitching Decrypting Rita to some publishers at ECCC this coming weekend ate up all the time I had.

But… on a whim, I replied to some of the comments on this LJ post of a spambot conversation with drawings of Rita answering them from her point of view. And it was fun!

So I’ve set up tumblr for that purpose. Go give her some better questions than the ones the Tumblr robot occasionally asks!

So this morning I ran into this site full of comics critique and thinking. One bit that stuck with me in random reading is the idea that a good logo reads at 100 pixels wide – that’s the size your book’s gonna be in a thumbnail on a web store.

I like the current logo I have but it does not pass that test. So I booted up Illustrator and started playing around with different fonts.

Logos! Click for full-size.

Ultimately I came back to a variant of the original logo – it’s the same font; I really think the “sixties Saul Bass movie poster” kind of font tells you something about the kind of visuals you’ll find within. The high-tech tilted font was obviously a contender, but it was just too damn fiddly and really didn’t read well at small sizes. But that one lead me to the conflicting arrows motif, which I think really works with the story on multiple levels – it creates a sensation of horizontal motion, which both hints at the high-speed acrobatics of Rita-1 and prepares you for the weird narrative games I’m playing. And setting “Rita” into the arrow pointing the other way suggests complexity.

With a revised logo at hand, I of course had to see how it would work in context! So I knocked out a couple of cover thumbnails. With the first two, I tried putting it on the top, where a traditional comic would put it for maximum visibility on the rack. But it really felt wrong there, so I moved it to the middle, and tried a variant on the “chord” panel from the middle of chapter 4, then just went for head-and-shoulders crops of the various Ritae doing characteristic things.

I’ll probably play with it some more, and I suspect I’ll keep the original variant for the title page – but I think this dual-arrow version is much more powerful than just the text floating around with a couple arrows going through it.

Hmm. Not sure if I’m gonna have a page today; I got distracted yesterday drawing an obscene Adventure Time fan-comic. And today my brain seems to want to work on writing out story – I’ve got two successive infodumps of backstory coming up now, with Elf-Barrett narrating his version of what just happened in parallel.

I thought I’d share a bit of the process here with a quick grab of the current page, sprawling way way out into the next 2-3 pages. Sometimes I do this with little thumbnails of the page and particular panels, as seen in the bottom photo of a sketchbook; other times it’s the dialogue that leads, like on the right. I’ve actually got like three pages of dense writing in my sketchbook that that the blue conversation is being distilled down from, including timelines of two variant versions of the story R1 ends up telling!

I’m fairly confident I’ll find a way to make this interesting and exciting to look at. Probably Dragon Rita’s story will drift out of focus while some wild physical thing happens to Skylands Rita… or maybe Normal Rita will perform the dance number she’s been mentioning wanting to do! Maybe both.

Site improvements continue – I just added a big banner that shows up on your first visit that tells you about the weird narrative tricks I’m playing, and pushes you towards the chapter archive pages if you’re a new reader. It’ll go away when you hit the hopefully-pretty-obvious close button. If it keeps on reappearing, please let me know!

With ECCC coming up, I decided to get off my ass and make that collection of the first three chapters of Rita happen! This is the cover; I should have a proof soon, and if all is well then I’ll order a few to pass out at the con. I won’t be tabling – this is just for trying to attract some publisher interest. But if you’ll have an awesome book at the con too I could certainly be persuaded to do a swap!

(And of course I’ll also have ’em at the next cons I do attend, plus summoning one via the Internet.)

My original designs for the cover were a LOT busier. I ended up pulling back to some of my simplest ideas, stripped back even further – the front and back of this were all originally intended as parts of the cover of an eventual collection of the whole thing, with Blue and Red Rita in matching poses on the front, and the eerie image of the Panopticon in UV or glow-in-the-dark ink on top of it. I figure these could work for a series of small books, with a different Rita in a similar pose on the back of each, and the colored text on the front done to match. Though I still totally want the glow-in-the-dark thing going on if I hook up with a Real Publisher.

The snazzy donations-with-goals plugin I had here just never worked right. So for now I’ve killed it, and replaced it with a simpler one that just says “here is where you can give me the earth moneys” over there on the right side of the site. If you give me some bucks you’ll get a link to a copy of the first three chapters as a CBZ. Hopefully it will actually WORK now.

If there’s anything else you’d like to see as a donation thank-you, let me know!

ALSO I’ve been receiving some reports of problems leaving comments- if you’ve been having those, please let me know over on LJ and I’ll try to deal with it.

Rita has many bodies. This is her ponysona!

She probably had a different name when she first wore it.

(click for full image)

After Sigil tweeted about wanting to hunt for drawings of Rita to make some fan-art, I finally decided to update Rita1’s model sheet to reflect the body she’s using now, and added some general notes on what I’m thinking when I draw her.

No idea when the next page will be up; I’m kinda still recovering from FC. I did just send off a Flash file full of game art; while there’s some things I still want to do for that, it’s out of my way for a while now!

One week of other projects distracting me. One and a half weeks of planned vacation where I ended up getting absolutely no work done. And during that vacation, a direly unwanted mark on the “I’m an adult now” chart: a friend who’s a little younger than me is dead now. So after I got back from vacation, I got right back on a plane and went down to LA for his funeral.

Six airplane flights in five days. That takes a lot out of you.

Yesterday was the first day home; I spent it basically staring off into the nether reaches of the Internet. Today I read the first volume of Suicide Squad (yo ho). It was pretty good, one of the best pieces of “realistic” superhero stuff I’ve read in a long time. Well, except for the five or six issues where they get caught up in one of those company-spanning megaplots and half the story’s told in other comics.

Also I drank a heck of a lot of water. I think I’m almost adequately hydrated again.

I also finally upgraded WordPress here. Had to pretty much reinstall it from scratch because what I did to harden WP against hacks also hardened it against, um, upgrades. Sigh. You can have utility, or you can have security, but you can’t have ’em both. But at least that means when I say “hey it’s time to get some work done on Rita” I don’t have “upgrade WP” as one of the things “working on Rita” means; I just couldn’t sit down and turn my roughs into final panels with that hanging over my head.

But now the timer’s back on the desk, and “working on Rita” is the clearly-scoped problem of just standing in front of Illustrator slashing out paths. Expect a page or two soon!

Sorry to vanish for a few weeks. Things have been… complicated. Another project demanded all my time for a week, then I went down to New Orleans to visit my mom for a week and a half. While I was there I had less room to work than I was expecting to… and more disruptively, I got the news that an old friend in the animation industry died abruptly.

I’m back in Seattle right now, but only for a day – I’m going down to LA for the funeral this weekend.

There’s been progress on Rita but it’s all been behind the scenes. I’m really not a fan of putting up “sorry no comic today” updates, especially ones with art – those tend to take the limited time and energy one has available to allocate to the comic and spend it on a blind alley. I’ve got the next several pages of Dragon Rita’s story scripted and partially roughed out, and am filling in the other narratives in fits and starts. The next page is about 1/3 done.

I’m really looking forwards to getting back into the studio and resuming this story. Barring any other crises, the only real distraction I have planned is maybe throwing a modest new year’s or solstice party; I’m getting close to wrapping up one of the other projects that’s been fighting Rita for my time. I know where I’m going on this comic, and I’m really looking forwards to taking all of you along for the ride again!

click for full size

Today I went to catch up on the stuff at Dumm Comics, a comics collective consisting of some folks I knew in the Hollywood animation scene and their friends. And I got a surprise: Ricky Garduno’s comic 1930 Nightmare Theatre has ended, due to an impending bout of heavy soul-searching.

I met Ricky in animation school. He, my roomie Gabe, and myself, bonded over a love of… anarchy, I suppose. Everyone else in school was aiming for Disney. We were more down with WB, UPA, and Fleischer stuff. When one of us got in trouble, we all got in trouble, because we were always hanging out doing crazy drawings. We were also the ones who stayed late working like crazy on our projects; funny how that happened. I got kicked out of school near the end, Gabe left when his Spümcø internship turned serious. Ricky stuck it out, but barely. I think.

Gabe’s a bigshot show-runner now, Ricky’s doing boards on “Family Guy” last I heard. I kinda lost touch with ’em both when I burnt out on Flash 5 and left Hollywood. I keep on intending to make a visit down that way sometime now that I’m on the West Coast again and catch up in person; until then we just send random bits of e-mail every year or so.

Good luck sorting out what needs sorting out, dude. Here’s hoping I see you doing something new and cheerier soon.

Tonight I was looking at the Piperka page for Decrypting Rita. And noticed the “related” links on the right side. The highest score was to a cut-n-paste comic about guinea pigs, the second highest score lead to a domain squatter. “A Distant Soil”, okay now we’re getting somewhere, I never tried reading it but I’ve heard good things about it, Amara’s sister Raina’s “SMILE”, then something called “Spacetrawler“.

Which I just read. In its entirety. All 178 pages. And stuck in my LJ friends list (<lj-user=”spacetrawler”> for those of you who are also still using LJ as their main feed consumption method). So much for trying to get to sleep at a reasonable time. If you haven’t discovered it yet, then go check it out – it’s a pretty nice piece of smart, comedic SF.

(Spacetrawler‘s not the reason you’re reading this instead of seeing a new page of Rita; I decided that I needed a vacation, and didn’t touch a pen, stylus, or brush at all today. It is however the reason I’m going to bed at 2AM instead of midnightish…)

Here’s a nice little take on some of the same themes as Rita.

I drew a possible cover for the eventual collected volume.

The idea is to use UV-reactive or phosphorescent ink; in the dark or under black light you’d see the mostly-black image. If you think that’s not related to the story so far then I urge you to go back to the beginning and look more closely.

(click on thumbnail for full image)

This came from two things. Well, three.

First off, a little while ago Brandon Graham did a riff on a Moebius drawing and was all “it would be totally cool if this became a redraw meme”. I thought it sounded like a good idea but I was super-busy with the kidney stone and the burlesque routine.

Then some dude declared that this week should be NO FAN-ART WEEK. Me, well, I think I’ve drawn maybe six pieces of fan-art in my entire adult life, if that, so I figured it would be a good time to bump that up a little.

And finally of course this is me trying to get back in the swing of drawing after a couple weeks of not having the time to draw anything. I need to ponder the story a bit, I’m aiming for resuming Rita’s usual unofficial twice-weekly schedule next week.

Sorry to leave y’all hanging like this, folks. The kidney stone ate all the slack I had in my schedule for the dance number, so everything else has been put on hold. I hope to resume Rita’s regular, albiet unofficial, schedule of Tues/Thurs after I get up on stage and shake my robot booty this Saturday!

I’m standing here fiddling with the layout on my local copy of the comic’s site. It’s only got a few early pages in it so I found myself staring at page four. And I realized: In the pages I’m scripting right now, I’m intimating that Rita (one, or the other, possibly both, let’s keep some suspense here!) is queer. Guess who has a BIG TRIANGLE on her shoulder? I swear this was not intentional! I just drew a triangle there because I needed a graphic element to help define her arm against a white background, and a triangle was quick and easy.

(Defining the shape against a same-color bg is also why Barrett’s octopus tattoo has tentacles curling around his shoulder, by the way.)

Remember the square captions with a “>” in the beginning of their text from the first few pages? I figure we’ll be meeting their source soon, so I’m trying to decide what that person looks like. The only thing I’m really sure of is that she has long wavy white/blonde hair, the rest is obviously being played with. I’m not even entirely certain this should be a she, but I think I do kinda prefer that to male or other.

If you watched “Max Headroom” on a regular basis then you know what I mean when I say “she’s Rita’s Theora”. Although hopefully the dialogue so far conveyed pretty much the same job – she sits offsite, marshalling all the data she can get ahold of to help Rita get her job done.

Hello, people coming in from Scott McCloud’s link! If you like this you might also like my crazy sci-fi tarot deck, which is now up for preorders (US, Europe).

Let’s get this thing started.