I heard that today’s Phil Foglio’s birthday. So I figured I’d draw one of the things he did that inspired me to make my own cartoony sci-fi comics! And if this drawing makes you curious, you can read all the Buck Godot stories online, or maybe buy ’em from the man. Oh and you might have heard of a little comic he does with his wife too.

“So as a transwoman, do you have a vagina?”

A. “Nope! I have a modest slit shaped like an inverted Y, which opens in three flaps to reveal a moist, hungry hole. It has teeth.”
B. “I do not! I have a small patch of sensitive, ever-waving cilicia, and two sharp tusks on either side that come out when I’m aroused.”
C. “Nah. I do, however, have smooth flesh with intricate phosphorescent patterns that can flash in such a way as to insert a Killing Word into your brain.”
D. “No. What I have is a colony of fire ants burrowed into the flesh between my legs. I have a symbiotic relationship with them; when they bite you, I get off.”

Not that anyone has ever been rude enough to actually ask me that question; my habit of sometimes putting “pricklady” into free-form gender fields makes it superfluous. But someday, as I work on spreading my fame, I will be asked this question. Probably by a male comics nerd. And I will be ready.

(And of course the real answer is “that’s a question that should really only matter if we are going to get into bed together, when you decide what to do with your mouth to get me to moan happily.”)

Tonight I read Unnatural Talent, a book on making and marketing comics on the web by Jason Brubaker, the cartoonist behind ReMind.

I was pretty pleased by it. A lot of the book felt like the exact same things I find myself typing on forums all the time, when people ask for advice on makin’ comics. It didn’t start to become anything new to me until the last couple of chapters, but there were some ideas in those that feel pretty valuable. I’ll be trying some of them out soon. Overall it felt like a pretty solid snapshot of what it takes to make and promote a comic in 2013.

It was kind of a nice feeling to read a book on this whole process and feel like most of it was stuff I already knew, and was either already doing, or had considered doing and consciously decided not to do. It tells me I’m doing pretty good here.

For instance, when he talks about his Kickstarter strategies, he discusses having a zillion stretch goals, with staged reveals; I’ve decided to make my campaigns really just focus on delivering the book and nothing else, without a ton of other stuff to source and ship. I may well be leaving money on the table by doing this, but I’m also saving myself a ton of stress and hassle. I can also afford to take this kind of slow route.

There was one thing I think he left out; in his chapter on getting your comics online via WordPress and Comic Easel, he listed six classes of plugins that are very worth having, but missed out one final important one: Security plugins. Trust me, if you’re running a self-hosted WP installation, you want to have something to make it a little harder to get 0wned; I learnt this the hard way. I currently use Better WP Security but do your own research and pick one.

Anyway. If you’re interested in making comics and getting people to read them, it’s probably worth grabbing.

(And speaking of making comics, I really have to start cracking the whip on myself on the next page of Rita. It’s another dense page, and I’ve been looking at it, wincing at the complexity, and switching back to the web browser or going to play Dark Souls or something instead of spending some time chipping away at it. Having complex pages come up while I was already stressed by dealing with my mistake in putting together book 2 didn’t help my motivation, either…)

I just had a crazy idea for packaging the Rita omnibus come to me in a dream.

Okay. Imagine you have a hardcover book, wider than it’s tall. Instead of showing page edges on he right side, the binding runs around this side too, with a split in the center. You open this up, and are presented with a wide, flat surface. The ends of the cover are in the center; you open them up, and get two books side by side.

You then go through these two books in sync, and see four pages of the story at once.

Maybe the quick doodles I drew after getting out of bed will explain it better…This is probably eminently impractical but oh man it could also be awesome.

It’s probably super expensive, tolerances on everything may be crazy tight, I may have to do some painful rearrangement of things to create surprises on page turns, the center hinge may be a giant weak point, and actually reading it may be stupidly impractical. But on the plus side, it will be able to present some upcoming scenes amazingly, and this really makes it An Artifact at a new level beyond “oh yeah here’s the hardcover omnibus”.

After coming up with this idea, dream me wanted to record it. I ended up at a shared studio space that used to be huge and empty, and now was full of lots of partitions creating rooms, including one for all of my stuff that I had never been involved in decorating. I couldn’t find a functioning pen, or a pencil sharpener that wouldn’t break pencils, and ended up scampering lost through the whole place carrying a roll of paper with some embarrassingly old art. While focused on finding my area again, I ran into a woman who was juggling; the woman asked if I knew what she was. My initial instinct was that she was definitely A Witch, but I didn’t want to get into a conversation here and talk about witchin’ because I was focused on putting this roll of paper where it belonged, then recording this idea. So I just said “You’re a juggler” and moved on; her response to this was definitely disappointed.

Anyway. Thanks for this idea, dream me. I dunno if I’m going to even begin to investigate whether this CAN be printed, much less how much it can cost, but it’s pretty interesting.

(And. Hmm. Looking at all the pages, chapters 2 and 3 begin on what would be leftmost pages, and so does book 2… if I can stretch the backgrounds on the first two pages of book 2 into two more pages total, then I get things lining up nicely there as well. A 2-page pause at the end of IX could be used for another gloss hint of What’s Outside like the one near the end of VIII, which then syncs up the rest of book 2 with 4-page boundaries, and one page of blackness at the end of book 2 will nicely sync up the beginning of book 3 with a page turn. That’s five pages added throughout 128 so far to synch it up, with fairly simple art additions. So the “painful rearrangement” thing is not really a problem. Especially given that I’ll probably be touching every page to move stuff back from what was a side and is now an inner margin even if I do 2 pages per spread. I… think this could happen.)

Hmm. What if instead it was two separate books? Decrypting Rita, Left Side and Decrypting Rita, Right Side. Put them side by side on a table and read? That’s pretty awkward too. I need to find two suitably-sized books (Battlepug 1/2 HCs?) and see how that feels to read.

Also I could just do one super-wide book but then it’s gonna be like two feet wide by ten inches high when closed and on the shelf and people will kinda hate me for that. I mean I have a Krazy Kat collection that’s 15×11″ and that ends up being hard to read, and lives on the Oversize Shelving. Which is actually “some big books standing on the floor leaning against the side of the book shelves”. God I’m going into fucking Chris Ware territory here with the packaging. But fuck it. Collapsar is an eccentric vanity press whose mission statement involves “making cool artifacts” and I can do this.

I guess this adds the additional question of: are there softcover and hardcover versions of the omnibus? Or just awesome hardcover? In the long run I do want to only have to worry about restocking two books, instead of four (3 sc volumes + 1 hc). And I suspect things are gonna be a lot cheaper if I can use the same interior pages for both – but a 2’x10″ softcover just seems insane, I’ve never seen a book in that kind of form factor.

Anyway. I think I’m about to start thinking in circles here. Time to go out to the farmer’s market and see if the tomatoes are back yet.

Discussion today with some friends about maybe renting a shared studio/merch storage space downtown. Topics included: the importance of making a chore rota, followed by horror stories about roomies with looser approaches to kitchen hygiene, technical solutions for finding an equitable mix of music, and pitching in to get a giant hookah to smoke weed out of.

How much will actually materialize, who knows. But it sure would be nice to have a place that is not my apartment to go get work done in.

Woo. Check out this fragment from a 1992 sketchbook. I think it was in a magical college kind of continuity? Also note horrible sketchy lines and utter failure at gently suggesting arm anatomy, sheesh.

Same sketchbook, dunno if he was in Magical College continuity or not. I think I still kinda like him, the idea of an utterly reserved, deadpan nihilist with a magic sword is kinda fun. Also any excuse to draw a sword with black flames. His name sucks though.

Also geeze uploading pictures from the iOS wordpress app blows, ugh. Actually in general the picture uploading experience from any app kinda sucks, none of them seem to be able to properly deal with putting a sanely-sized image in the post that links to a full size.

Hmm. I just discovered that I need to push my glasses out about an ENTIRE INCH to get my right eye comfortably focused on the screen. I think it may be time for new glasses. Given that my current glasses were purchased around 2006, I feel like I’m doing pretty good here.

I think it may be time to try contacts again, too. Especially if I can get extended-wear contacts; the combination of my much more nearsighted vision as a kid and 1970s/80s technology meant they were just not happening for me. Now that my eyes aren’t as far off from 20/20 as they used to be, I figure thirty years of people experimenting with new materials should have filled the gap.

And you can bet I will be asking the optometrist about cosmetic contacts.

I spent a few hours this morning poking at the Quest For Surgeons. The ten or so browser tabs I’ve had open for a couple months from the last time I did this have now expanded to like two dozen, and I feel no closer to a decision. I really need to poll my friends and acquaintances who have had it done for who and how they feel about their bits, and actually write that down somewhere I can find it again instead of trusting it to my fallible memory. (Feel free to drop me some e-mail if you are one of those friends.)

Because somewhere near the end of last year, I realized that my internal state had shifted from “happily no-op” to “pre-op”, and resolved that I’d have a choice made and a surgery date scheduled by the end of 2014.

This quest is kinda frustrating because if there’s any kind of central place to go compare these things, I sure haven’t found it. Well, I’ve found a few, but they’re all out of date, or scarily amateur web design that triggers warning signs, or both. (It may be superficial, but the overall feel of a web site is something I can’t help but gauge; IMHO this is a basic survival skill of the modern Internet.)

Anyway. Gonna exercise, then grit my teeth and finish these last tweaks for the second attempt at printing Rita book 2. And maybe work on that drawing I’ve been playing with of Blue Rita getting it on with Carol, too; this mood definitely suits drawing a few interchangeable genitals lying around.