Erin the Destroyer Munny doll progress
on October 18, 2010 at 11:20 amPosted In: Keith's Thoughts, Keith\'s Thoughts
Check out the latest stage of my latest Munny creation! 
Comment
In case you missed it, a new site launched the other day, the Webcomic Alliance, it’s goal is to provide a place for Webcomic creators to find information on everything related to webcomics. This seems like a broad goal, but I think maybe they might actually have a shot at it.
Thus far, they have some great articles. Including this one about the Pro’s and Con’s of Digital drawing methods vs Traditional drawing methods. Heck, there was even a great tip about this SmudgeGuard from a poster, I might have to look into one of these.
I’d love to see this succeed, mostly for selfish reasons. I hope it creates a sense of community, a place to go to talk to fellow comic creators. I have been missing that recently, to the point where I haven’t been doing much art (At least cartoons, I have been creating Munny’s). There needs to be a place that welcomes everyone, where people share tips and ideas. Where every skill level is in exhibit among it’s members, novice straight on up to expert. I have yet to find such a place, but I have high hopes for the Webcomic Alliance.
Now naturally it can’t be all flowery and fun, here comes my gripe with the site.
The double right side bar with the founders ads for their comics are too large. Why do I say this?
Do I think the founders don’t deserve ad space?
Do I think they shouldn’t see their traffic grow from this?
Am I a commie, do I not want them to make any money??
Nope, it’s very simple. Go to any article that has nested comments, watch what happens as more replies are added to an original comment. Like here for instance, see how the nested space gets VERY narrow, if someone replies to that comment it might be one word per line. Which by the way does not make for a great reading experience. If the reading experience is bad, fewer and fewer people will go there, and then the discussion dries up and after that it becomes yet another site filled with decent articles but no overall sense of community.
Have you noticed the value I place on creating a sense of community? Maybe later I’ll talk about why I think it’s important. Not necessarily how to create it, but why I think it’s important.
That is all for now, go on over and check out the Webcomic Alliance.
Munny Dolls (Yet again)
on October 16, 2010 at 4:52 pmPosted In: Keith's Thoughts, Keith\'s Thoughts
This is the latest Munny Doll I am working on. As you can see it, like all the others started out as a sketch.
I changed up the sketch a bit and added the idea for the base.
I happened to really like the way the sketches came out so I made a full color version.
This is the first stage of sculpting, at some point I will stop drawing on the Munnys with Sharpie, because it bleeds. But everything else I have tried so far has smudged.
I kind of fell off the face of the earth…
There has been a bunch of stuff going on to distract me from working on L.O.S.T. including Custom Munny Dolls as well as an idea I had kicking around, a Kindle comic as you can see I have actually managed to create a comic for the Kindle. It is an older story that I have reworked to be better suited to a Kindle screen. I’m in the process of writing an entirely new comic in the eBook format, to me this is an interesting new format to explore and it seems a tad less crowded than the world of webcomics has become.
This whole new format has me excited and a tad nervous about doing comics again. The excitement in making comics had kind of been missing for awhile and several things (including the death of my dad) took the wind out of my sails, creatively speaking. But the idea of taking on something that is still relatively new and unspoiled is starting to light a creative fire under my ass. Yay for Kindle Comics!
Now onto other things, we went to MoCA this week and all I can say is…
You folks need to step down from that rather lofty pedestal of pretentiousness, seriously. Naming everything “Untitled (Insert pretentious title here)” is not deep, it’s not some statement about the art, it’s some bullshit idea you were sold in art school that naming things like that was what serious artists did. Oh it’s also not untitled or you wouldn’t have felt the need to add anything in the parenthesis now would you. The folks who name things Untitled #36 (or what ever number they use) are a bit better, at least they can say they use the numbering system if they need to refer back to a work later. I mean if you have 80 paintings called Untitled it must be a bitch to catalog them.
/rant
I feel much better now.
Webcomic Collectives, are they doomed to self destruct?
on July 14, 2010 at 5:23 amPosted In: Keith's Thoughts, Keith\'s Thoughts
I’ve talked about Webcomic Collectives before, but this is in response to the seeming death of The Webcomic Planet Collective.
I believe the WPC, was slowly suffocated by the same thing that kills a good portion of the online communities out there; Lack of participation of its members. (And yes I include myself in that). Everyone thinks “Ohhhh, it would be great if we did this!” or “Hey, why don’t we do that!!” but when it comes down to the actual doing, they are no where to be found. Expecting a few people to do all the work involved in running any sort of community is the surest way to kill said community. I am sure there are a few internal reasons for the death of the WPC but I still believe the biggest reason it collapsed is we, it’s members, stood by and let it happen. It’s a shame really because it was a great group of creators, and the sense of community when I first joined was really strong. Maybe that is what killed it, me joining?
This (along with the slowness I have seen in other communities) leaves me wondering if the idea of a Webcomic Collective can survive in these days of Facebook, Twitter, RSS Feeds and the like. Nearly every webcomic in existence has a Facebook fan page, so if I “like” a certain comic I can get updates about it pretty easily. It sort of equates to a one stop shopping experience, why go to 8 different places to see your favorite webcomics when you can just go to Facebook? One thing that can make a collective thrive is dialogue and discourse between it’s members, but a good portion of this is achieved through Twitter nowadays. As a matter of fact a good deal of fan interactions happen via Facebook and Twitter now. (I have no hard facts on this, it’s more of a personal observation) So what exactly can a collective offer than?
- Cross promotion of a group of creators? Again this is done just as effectively through Twitter, say through “Follow Friday” or the more obscure “Webcomic Wednesday”.
- A place to springboard ideas into the real world, such as Collective Anthology, calenders etc. This is one place where collectives could be effective. The trouble being that for all the enthusiasm usually exhibited for participating in this sort of thing, it rarely comes to fruition.
The one thing I think a collective could still do rather effectively is provide a centralized place to see webcomics. (Think Comicspace but on a smaller and more manageable scale). A reader would have one place to have access to all the collective comics and their creators. Imagine this collectives webpage to be similar to the Facebook live feed page, with all the updates of various comics and the tweets from the collectives creators. This to me is where a collective could truly shine…. alas it is a mere pipe dream.
Perhaps the age of the Webcomic Collective is behind us, and we just need to move on and not look back.