Procuring the complete Tom Waits was a terrible mistake. It reveals what we already knew; he gets drunk and bangs on a piano, and then he deletes the bad songs. But when you have the complete works even the bad stuff is in there.
Archive for ‘fief’
I bought a bit of a pig in a poke. I got a couple USB block erupter ASIC cards in December. Yes, everything you hear about it being too late to get into bitcoin mining is true. I got them for practically nothing and it’ll take about a year to make that investment back — longer if I count the electricity I’m spending, and even longer if I worry too much about the difficulty going up.
But they’re fun to have, and they’re satisfyingly high tech, and now that I’ve gotten enough from the mining pool I joined to get my first payout, which took over a month to get by the way because that’s exactly how much mining is played out right now, I can take them to other pools and mine weirder, more esoteric coins that are equally fun as merged bitcoin/namecoin mining. Altcoins are some goofy nonsense, but I love them.
And I love having a chip that I plug into the computer that does nothing but difficult math problems, which it is paid to do. That is so cyberpunk, and I don’t mean the literary subgenre, I mean Cyberpunk 2020 the role-playing game by R. Talisorian, or maybe Shadowrun. Spending credits on a “math chip” which slots into my “deck” makes perfect sense to me. I learned the tiny bit of coding I needed to know like Pac Man eating pellets. This is hours of entertainment for me.
But anyway, I’m leaving btcguild.com and probably going to try multipool.us I may not be a hacker but I might be a decker. If they ever come up with a way to hack into computers that involves slowly piloting a small triangle past big glowing triangles I think I could do it.
At some point Cloudhopper became extremely difficult to draw. I fell prey to the same problem that happened with megaTexas — kept setting the bar higher and higher for the art until one day the average page took a month. In a 400 page book that’s a problem — even if you figure about half is finished that’s seventeen years until it’s done. I want it done in three! One year per book, and I’m already done with the first third of book three.
The problem, as I see it, was rendering project creep caused by the circumstances of my life. Cloudhopper began in San Diego, where I was about as lonely as I’ve ever been since my very early days in New Jersey — I made real friends in San Diego, and I truly love the people I lived with, but for the most part I was tooling around that town alone, going swimming alone, sitting in a coffee shop all day drawing and sitting in my garage apartment all night drinking energy drinks and drawing. I think the early pages of Cloudhopper reflect that, because I was in a hypercaffinated rage tearing off a page a day, and you read it now and you’re struck by the fact that not much happens. It happens in a cool and visually interesting way, but it’s about a guy looking at a cloud. Really looking at a cloud. Looking as hard as if his life depended on it.
Book two began in San Diego, and that’s where the project creep began. I was doing a page a day and I started slowing down and getting really involved in some pages. This was the first of the one-month pages:
Far from the last though! But it was here the pattern was established, and looking at it now I see my doom in this moment. Because now the art styles didn’t match. It was very easy to see which pages took a month and which took a day.
But I didn’t know this at the time, and I was unaware of just how much my figure drawing was going to improve in the five years to come. Yes, at this point it was only 2009.
Then I moved back to Austin, and kept putting the same amount of time into each page. Why not? I wasn’t dating anybody, wasn’t really doing anything but partying and swimming and drawing. I started to get precious about lighting and more interested in proper backgrounds at the time.
So each page was taking a week or two, but they looked pretty good. Figure drawing’s still a bit wonky and the background isn’t that great, but it’s starting to get interesting. At the time I thought it was pretty okay, now I see it as what came immediately before what came in late 2010. I was also doing a lot of redrawing of early pages by now.
Then I went to Europe, and this was my undoing. Suddenly I was surrounded by actually fascinating architecture, and I wanted to translate it into Cloudhopper. Since I literally wasn’t doing anything in Europe at all except for walking around and looking at things, I could put twenty hours of work into a page in the average two day period. Plus practically nobody had wireless, so I had no distractions. I would spend nearly every other day sitting in a cafe or a hostel drawing like crazy. I was in Europe nearly three months and may seriously have spent 800 hours drawing.
So naturally everything starts to look like Europe:
The lighting and characters are worked out to just a ludicrous and silly degree, I mean it’s a little crazy. The light in this scene is literally built up on nine different layers, each one of which represents the light from one candle in the chandelier. There is no point to working like that, I did it to satisfy my own mathematical curiosity and I didn’t do a very good job, but it was an interesting day that I spent, sitting in a hostel in France drawing those candles. A whole day. I made myself stop.
So now I’ve got the comic set to where I’m supposed to draw it ten hours a day every single day for months at a time.
And then I go home, get married, and have a kid. I also started Feef, which used to have a really long lead time until I lost my computer for six months. Cloudhopper has become my first alternate project, when I have a spare second I work on it. That means that a page that used to take three days now takes two weeks to a month. I don’t even know how long the pages that used to take a month will take now; probably years.
With Feef I’ve done a reasonably good job of keeping the art style consistent but I can already see myself getting precious and overcorrecting. Possibly because I’ve started to do some oil painting, but I’m getting much less interested in the multilayer extravaganzas that I used to do. I’m a lot more brave about working on the same layer and picking my own colors instead of trying to do some sort of synthetic system like I was before. I think my comics are getting somewhat more realistic and visually well constructed, which I guess makes sense if I really did plug in that sort of time.
Nevertheless, let this be a lesson to me. Keep the art style consistent or you won’t be able to finish the comic. I’ve had Cloudhopper written for five years now. It’s time to get it done so I can move on to other projects. Unfortunately that’s almost three years away.
Longer if I keep writing instead of drawing.
So I’ve been a bit depressed lately.
I couldn’t really tell you why. I honestly don’t think I have the “right” to be depressed. My life is going so amazingly well that I can’t think of any reasons why I should complain about anything, ever. My health is good, I’m very happily married, we have the most amazing baby and I love her more than anything.
I think what’s probably bothering me has to do with my habitual overcaffination, and that comes from the part of my life that maybe isn’t going as well.
As you may or may not know, I’m pretty much a total financial failure. It’s been getting better, but I’m by far the poorest person in my family, on either side, going back several generations. Part of it is because I’m lazy, and part of it is because I’m undisciplined, and part of it is because I spend too much time on the internet, and part of it is because I spend practically every waking moment writing or drawing stories.
The internet distracts me and diffuses my energies. But you’re reading this on the internet right now, so I can’t help noticing it’s a brilliant amplifier for what I do manage to produce. I’ve been on the internet practically all day every day for twenty+ years, the entire history of the internet more or less. I’m one of the millions who helped make this mess. Does it mean that I’ve spent my life indoors, in computer labs or hunched over tablets in coffee shops? Why yes, it certainly means that.
Does that mean I’ve wasted my life? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t, because I’m pretty sure the internet is important. But I’m not 100% sure.
It definitely means that I am getting pale and lacking in exercise. Probably just like you.
I’m not as successful as I want to be. My work doesn’t reach as far as I want it to work. I don’t earn enough from it. People do not have enough faith in me or my work to offer me the sort of opportunities that I so desperately long for.
This has nothing to do with my marriage or child. I’m as lucky as any man can be, and I know it. But I am still a man, and I need to succeed both inside and outside the home.
My daughter is the light of my life, but, even though she is very small, she has her own life to lead. I’m in charge of my own.
So I want my work to do better, but sometimes, lately, man. It’s hard to believe that it still could. I don’t seem to have any problems making the stuff, that’s second nature at this point. But promoting it, believing things could change; that’s the tough part.
Fortunately I’ve been at this long enough that I can go through the motions with some success. Go out and sell ads every Wednesday, every once in a while one will sell. Go to all the conventions that I can. Be nice to everybody. Buy ads.
It’s come to the point where I want people to read my comics and I’m willing to pay them to do it. I’m so willing that I’m willing to go out and earn money to pay them.
That’s a problem, because right now my family and I need money. But I can see clearly that the need will just get worse and worse for the next seventeen years, so now is the time to think long term. I swear to you that if I can ever get this comic to the point where a couple thousand people glance at it a day then things might get rolling. Start getting invited to conventions, start getting decent commissions.
Maybe someday.
So either this is what’s bothering me, or my constant caffeine abuse as I try to remedy this. I’m not sure. I’ll just keep working and it’ll all be okay somehow I think.
I don’t know how much this comes across, but the next sequence has one of the strongest art-music relationships in my mind that I’ve ever experienced. As Leda moves down the hall to the cafeteria, the song that’s playing in my mind is definitely “Tuff Ghost” by the Unicorns.
White people aren’t white and black people aren’t black. You may have noticed this. We’re all actually a shade of desaturated orange, and when I say shade I mean it literally:
Apparently all human skin tones fall along that line, more or less. The hue and saturation are constant, the shade changes.
Obviously it’s infinitely more complicated, and there are every color of undertones in human skin, even green. But the whole point is that now you know that all human skin tone falls more or less along a single spectrum.
This puts you way ahead of everybody who was alive in 1860.
America, say what you will about it, has generally been pretty good about not leaving giant piles of corpses around. Ever since our proud inception in 17-whatever, and the occasional massacre of native tribes and their associates, it’s been rare to see a lot of dead bodies at one time. This was no different in 1860, when the Civil War started to flare up. As you may or may not know, America didn’t leap into the Civil War with both feet — it started small, and kept getting worse and worse until it got very bad indeed, and then it got worse than that. Soon enough, people were leaving big heaping mounds of bodies all over the place, sometimes for weeks. Sometimes you’d find bodies that had been left there a year.
There’s a phenomenon called post-mortem lividity, in which the dead blood in the body pools and darkens. Changes shade. It causes the human skin to get darker.
In many cases, with close-cropped hair, it can cause a person who was once “white” to look “black” in death.
This is especially common when people died and came to rest lying on their faces.
But this was not at all common in civilian life!
Before the Civil War about 85% of people died at home, and very few of them were left resting on their faces for weeks after death. Not unless they were witches or something.
An intriguing curiosity to us, but that’s only because we’re not fighting a life-or-death struggle to enslave people based on the shade of their skin. Suddenly southern soldiers (and northern too, who were scarcely less racist) were faced with apparent evidence that, after death, they became “black.” This was a serious, serious problem for the South. Dead is supposed to be the great revealer of truth. Dead is forever, and at the time they really did believe that it was their physical bodies that would be called out of the ground when the last trump was trumped, that they would be spending eternity in this physical form.
So all these soldiers were looking at all these corpses and wondering if they would spend the afterlife as black people. This was disturbing to them. It was disturbing to them to see that the color lines could be crossed and that “white” people could become “black.”
It is no surprise to me that the Civil War was the Renaissance of embalming. Ads for embalmers mention prominently that it prevents the blackening of corpses.
I’ve been trying desperately to avoid meta-commentary right now because I’m terribly worried that there is nothing in this world more boring than an artist talking about a story that nobody’s reading. BUT, every once in a while my work is interesting to me, so I’m gonna talk about it for a second.
This is the end of book #2 of Feef, which is one of the weirder stories I’ve ever written. I’m not really sure how the story worked — it hasn’t “found its audience yet,” to put it mildly. That makes me sad, but let’s face it, if audience disinterest could stop me from making comics it would have made me stop a long time ago.
I hope it does find its audience — don’t get me wrong, I hope you read this and think about what a self-pitying jerk I am, but trust me, I read these words before anybody else, and at the time of writing, there are not as many people reading this comic as I would like.
The story’s been going a little more than a year now. One of the most eventful years of my life, but that’s not the point. The story itself has already gone places that I haven’t expected, moved faster than I thought it would. I hope we’d agree that a lot has happened in the last 109 frames.
As I work on this story and get little bits further ahead I’ll speed up the comic. For example, I have a two month lead right now. This is after losing my computer for nearly six months and only getting it back a month ago, so the lead is rapidly increasing. Every time I get a year lead, I add another day a week to the production schedule. If things keep going the way they’re going, we’ll be at three times a week around…May 30th of this year. I’m very curious, let’s see if I hit that target.
Other than that, I don’t know what to do except to pay for advertising and keep telling the story as best as I can.
So far we’ve seen a terrifying but somewhat cliche story about a home invasion and kidnapping, some very odd comics about language and anger, and a quick trip to an alternate reality where things are murky, desaturated, brutish, and short. What does it mean? I promise that I know and have no intention of telling you any time soon. I hope you’re enjoying the comic. I’d love to hear from you if that’s the case.
In the next comic we go to school with Leda.
Lately I’ve been musing on the importance of anger in literature. It began when I read a curiously soulless piece of comics called Scarlet, which is a Bendis/Maleev attempt to get Big Readership by doing a comic about Big Ideas. It’s made by two consumate professionals who are trying hard, but for some reason it felt as slick and cold as a refrigerator door.
I was also thinking of something Gewel said about a story I wrote, that the problem with the story was that the main character never got angry about how they were being treated, they were just bemused.
Gewel feels that anger is an “umbrella emotion,” which I guess means that it is a complex emotional response that’s connected to many other responses, concealing and protecting them.
Anger is important in fictional characters. It reassures us that they are reacting to their environment, to the terrible things that are happening to them. It leads us to infer at the vast continents of emotion that must surely lie behind their titanic ires and piques. Characters that don’t get angry, we assume, must not have anything very important happening to them. They are sleepwalking through the machinations of the plot.
Characters that calmly and cleverly monologue about how angry they should be are just the worst.
I’ve never been a big fan of characters who were too cool to act like their stories were real. Meta characters annoy me terribly, it’s like having a good story read to you by Norm MacDonald. Yeah, maybe stories are stupid, but that’s up to me to decide for myself. I know one way to make sure stories are stupid, and that’s to have some sarcastic ass like Norm MacDonald read them to you in the snidest sneer.
Now, anger isn’t snide. Anger is a honest reaction from a character who, essentially, lives in a world with an evil god sadistically planning to tear their lives apart for fun and perhaps, if you’re lucky, the dubious illustration of some obscure moral purpose. If a character is not angry at what is happening to them then, in some way, the story isn’t real.
The fact that it’s all a story should not be a comfort to the characters in the story, any more than it would be a comfort to you to find out that your life was being directed by omnipotent but bored artists. What if you found out that the worst tragedy in your life, up to and including your death, was staged to entertain somebody? That’s how your fictional characters should feel about being fictional, so unless you want to stop the story to talk about that for a long time then it’s best not to raise the issue. Slick meta-commentary raises the issue quite accidentally, but then asks us all to ignore the elephant in the room. “None of this is real,” they say, as they go through the paces of action movies with blank faces.
I have a friend who is angry right now because he thinks somebody stole some things from him. His place is such a mess that it’s impossible for anyone besides him to be sure; all these things that are missing could very easily be in the piles of junk, they might well have disappeared years ago and he only noticed now. But his anger, his hurt are very real. He’s losing sleep. He’s randomly suspecting people in Wal-Mart of being one of the thieves.
He’d be happier if he thought that it wasn’t real. He’d be healthier.
But then it wouldn’t be as good of a story.
Fictional characters get a raw deal. They should be angry.
I always thought that the “rise of the nuclear family” sounded cool and “space age,” but it turns out that it’s a description of a process by which, for reasons unknown, people just stopped giving a shit about their cousins.
Tiger versus gorilla. You gotta admit it’s a good question.
They’re about the same size. Gorillas got reach, tigers got pointy bits.
I think one gorilla (average) could take out one tiger (average) but the gorilla would lose its arm in the process.