TWCL

[MyopicProphet]

Your use of negative space is masterful. Well done.

[smbhax.com]

Thanks! Yeah usually when I try to add more stuff it comes out worse. ;)
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[smbhax.com]

I've been hand-painting the comics in ink wash for a while now, and it's been pretty fun! I've also been uploading them in optional high-def--I think once I get the technical side worked out, I'll have these available ad-free for a yearly subscription fee. But it'll take me a while to get around to implementing that so for now and a while they're freely available in ad-free, super-large size ("Subscription mode preview"), like this latest one:

http://smbhax.com/cgi-bin/d.pl?e=0015&d=0008&s=1 (you'll need like a 1080p or bigger screen for this)

(Here's what the tiny regular version looks like:

)
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[rocketpig]

I always find your compositions so interesting. In a good way, of course.
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[Gual-kun]

Your work is amazing, you know. And the part of some of them made in traditional way is the best part. Da Vinci Maestro did a great work . I like traditional but I'm sorta clumsy handling "real material"

Also, there is a comment section in your sites?

[iaviv]

Haven't read the last two chapters until now.
I see you're going for a cinematic wide screen panels. That's pretty effective.

[smbhax.com]

Thanks rp!

Gual-kun wrote:

Your work is amazing, you know. And the part of some of them made in traditional way is the best part. Da Vinci Maestro did a great work :D. I like traditional but I'm sorta clumsy handling "real material" :P Also, there is a comment section in your sites?

Yay glad you like the traditional stuff--it's a lot more fun to do. :) I feel clumsy at it too! Working large (these are about 17" wide) helps though, I think.

Da Vinci's Maestro brushes are pretty good, but if you can spare the dough (I can't really but nevermind :P), I've found the Winsor & Newton Series 7 brush even nicer!

I don't have a standard comments section... But I do have a forum! If was starting the site over I might not do that 'cause forums don't really get used much on most webcomic sites, but oh well I have fun talking to myself on it, and it's handy for posting non-news articles and such.

Most of my feedback these days (not that I get tons, but I get some! :) comes on like Twitter or Google+ or Facebook, which are fun things.

iaviv wrote:

Haven't read the last two chapters until now. I see you're going for a cinematic wide screen panels. That's pretty effective.

Oh good! Yeah it's always been eh whatsitcalled anamorphic cinema format (2.39 aspect ratio)--'cause originally it was just animations, no static comic at all.
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[CannibalJesse]

Have you spoken to enough fans, readers, and most importantly, former readers, to find out if releasing single panels in a format like yours might hurt your readership?

See, I found SMBHAX late enough in the game where it already had many complete chapters to read. Like most people, I was impressed and pored over it. Now that I'm caught up, though, and am stuck reading daily updates, I find that I no longer have any connection to the story line or any enthusiasm in reading it. It seems quite unlikely that the quality has gone down. In fact, my best efforts to separate myself from the situation for analysis seem to indicate that the quality is only continuing to grow.

Somehow I can't feel narrative momentum reading a story that updates like you do. And I fear that if I try to walk away (unsubscribe or something) and only read it in bigger pieces, I may forget about you entirely (and certainly won't be giving you your deserved daily page hits). I know I lost Dr. McNinja when I had the same problem with it, and that has more sizable and stand alone releases.

Have you studied the issue?

[Gual-kun]

smbhax.com wrote:

Most of my feedback these days (not that I get tons, but I get some! comes on like Twitter or Google+ or Facebook, which are fun things.

I see, ok!

[vulpeslibertas]

CannibalJesse wrote:

releasing single panels in a format like yours might hurt your readership? ...Somehow I can't feel narrative momentum reading a story that updates like you do. And I fear that if I try to walk away (unsubscribe or something) and only read it in bigger pieces, I may forget about you entirely

What about maintaining two RSS feeds, an "Every update" and an "Every 10 updates"?
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[CannibalJesse]

That's a great idea Vulpes. I'd sign up for that most definitely.

[dpat57]

Yes indeedy, good idea, that could be an elegant solution (I've had the same problem, and have to go back and read swathes at a time when I remember to... at which time I've forgotten what I'd read up to!). As could, dare I suggest, in purely "trying to be helpful" mode, putting up a weekly page with the last 7 panels to scroll down through. Too bizarre/impractical? Maybe. Just an idea.
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[smbhax.com]

Well, for that matter someone could just put me in say their "updates Mondays" bookmark category, and thus catch up five pages at a time once a week that way. Or I wonder if some people just sort of ignore my daily RSS updates until their A* RSS folder thingy fills up to a sufficiently large number for them to plung in and catch up in one go.

The per-10 RSS suggestion is interesting, but I don't feel *too* tempted to complicate the RSS situation for that. Come to think of it, I also had someone suggest recently that I make an RSS feed specific to the "episodes" page, ie one that would update on a per-episode basis.

To the original question, if you mean would my comic be more popular if I updated in any kind of more normal format, I tend to assume it would. I think I would also get far more comments (on the mirror sites with comment boxes, anyway) per panel that way, since I think people often find it difficult to come up with something to say about just one panel. And it isn't uncommon for me to think of other ways I could compile pages; yesterday for instance it occurred to me that in the upcoming subscription mode (ad-free, 1080p-sized panels, basically) I could include an option for viewing pages in chunks of say five at once.

But I like it this way. ;)

Basically I want people to see each panel on its own. This challenges me to try to make each one interesting in its own right. It also gives me more allowance, I think, for altering style and aesthetic details from panel to panel, which is just something I like doing--or rather, I like not feeling like I have to be extremely consistent in those areas from drawing to drawing.

It *does* make it harder to keep up with the narrative flow, and I'm glad you guys have reminded me of that with your comments here. And I can't say that I don't for instance once in a while scroll through the RSS feed rather than the individual pages in order to feel how the flow goes that way. And I'm *constantly* clicking through my own pages, particularly whichever constitute the most recent handful, to grab that narrative flow again.

Somehow I haven't gotten tired of sticking to my guns on this topic yet, though--maybe just because I *like* clicking through pages. One thing that will be interesting will be to see if altering the pacing of the writing changes reader perception of this issue: up until this episode (15), the episode scripts were all written under the often-delusional idea that I would be able to generate at least two pages a day, but with 15 and onward I am facing the fact that I will only ever get one page/panel done a day now, and sort of concentrating the pace of the script accordingly--not trying to jam more words or characters into each page, but just being a little more direct in what I am presenting, I think. It will be a fairly subtle difference at best, but I'll be trying to gauge if it has any effect on this.

As you will notice from the latest page, however, this new resolution hasn't prevented me from indulging my liking for wordless, low-action updates from time to time. Foolish? Probably; this type of page is pretty much as anti-momentum as could be, but reading through in an archive dive, you'd probably click through it without a blink--or would you? Would someone trying to follow daily be frustrated by this page? I think some will. Hopefully some will pause a second or two to appreciate the mood it is trying to convey on its own.

As for forgetting about me entirely, my incessant and widespread ad campaigns--pretty much paid for by ad revenue coming from people bombing through thousands of A* pages at a time, as it happens--will be doing their best to make that difficult.
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[smbhax.com]

For about the last month and a half I've been doing this nutty thing of just going in with ink right on a blank page--no pencil! Kind of tricky but also way more fun.

Here's the current page--been ages since I've had an actual fight scene!



Sometimes, as in this case, I waste at least one side of the paper in false starts. Here's the flip side of that page, where the first try was kind of the wrong angle--then I used the space around it to practice a few alternatives:



I've been reading this pretty interesting book, Gary Martin's The Art of Comic-Book Inking. It's funny because his base credo is "preserve the pencils as closely as possible" which is...well I don't even have pencils anymore. But it's fun to find out all the things I'm doing wrong. :D It's particularly neat because the second half of the book is full-page examples of various inkers having a go at inking a full-size penciled comic page, then spending a full page talking about what they did, the tools they used, etc.
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[dpat57]

Eeenteresting. It certainly makes the characters look more solid.

Question about your RSS feed -- is there a way to just view the comic updates, without the (sometimes lengthy) blog/diary entries?
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