AWFW and CS Production Blog

Comics Updated! - CS

Not much to see here, really. But what I REALLY want to talk about was last week’s comic. The mostly silent one. That isn’t quite what I’d had in mind for it. In the original comic I had planned, Lindy simply pulled Carrie out of the tent while Carrie does the “I tucked badly” shuffle.

Had something change my mind, though, and while I tend not to use my characters as cyphers for real life events, I felt I needed to make an exception this time.

Site Updated!
CS - Wishworld

Wow, I totally haven’t kept up with this have I?

Closetspace - I’ve only had to wear a female swim suit once or twice in my life. As much as I love swimming, women’s swimsuits don’t leave much to the imagination, and show off much more than they hide, especially if you have stuff you’re not supposed to. Everything you see poor Carrie going through - I’ve gone through. I’ve tucked and tucked and tucked over the years - I never get it right and in up in a lot of pain, so I simply stopped swimming. Which is sad, cause I love it. althoguh now I have the added “can’t hide it” of being REALLY FREAKING FAT.

Wishworld - Well, there it is. Prologue and Chapter one updated. I had a lot of fun writing that chapter, and the words came right off the keyboard like nobody’s business (wish they came off for “The Chase” as easy, but the lack of sleep makes creativity hard). One of the funnier things about writing for Sylvia, was writing her “skull” scene. I realize having people write for a Skull In a Box can be ridiculous, but writing how she got there was even more so. Ah, well, ficition is the truth of a lie, so as long as you write was it true to the story, you should be fine. VERISIMILITUDE!

Comics Updated!
AWFW - CS

Let’s get some backstory about CS out of the way, cause there’s a lot ot talk about with AWFW.

CS: I promised funny, with little angst or drama in this storyline, so what do I do? Four episodes in, Carrie’s gotten mad at Allison twice and Lindy’s mom once. She’s gotten JUST a bit crabby, yes? So, to try and keep my promise for the funny, I have Lindy go for the “She knows what’s going on” joke. And I felt so so so so so dirty about that. A dirt that won’t go away anytime soon.

I actually screwed up the sequence from Panel 3, 4 and 5. You’ll notice Carrie points at the wrong time, and Allison scratches her head at the wrong time. Problem wa, Lindy was “hard coded” into the art, and the writing just warped in a way that the panels no longer match the actions. Boogers. I like the “light coming in from off camera” look, though.

AWFW: Yes, I had the Roman Household Slave make that tasty sponge bread from the Moviegasm. I also reprinted the recipe on the AWFW site for anyone who’d like to make it. If you look carefully, Servius, the slave, is the same guy from Laura Seabrook’s Tales of the Galli who introduces you to the Triclinium.  She’s the only other person I know doing a Roman story, although our stories are about 100 years apart and mine is a flashback.  Yes, that’s a screen grab of Doctor Who “Fires of Pompeii” in Panel 1.  And the comics are not finished up.  AND this is also the first AWFW comic in about a month or two.

About that….

The Problem with A Wish for Wings

Of the two comics I make, Closetspace is, by far, the most popular.  I’ve made a big deal about how when it comes down to comic crunch time, CS gets the lion’s share of my time (despite the fact that I think AWFW is the better story).  Not counting last week, where I was violently sick, my time for comics has been slashed dramatically.

I’m now working a 6 day week, on hours that aren’t exactly the best hours for creativity.  The number of hours in the week hasn’t changed, but the time in those hours has.  I’m most creative in the evening, now my evenings are spent getting groceries and keeping up the house.  By the time I’m feeling up to drawing, it’s time for bed.

The problem with AWFW is there’s very little time for it when this is all taken into account.  I really have ONE day to draw a comic, when I was taking two or three to do two.  And as the CS comic is more high profile and visible, my time goes to that.  AWFW’s audience is silent - I never hear from them good or bad, so I’m assuming it won’t be missed when it’s late or incomplete.  But at the same time, this “quick flashback” has been going on for almost six months in “real time”, and I want it over. Plus I like the AWFW universe.

My hours should be switching back to 5 days a week soon - once that happens,  both comics will be able have the time needed to finish, and when the AWFW book comes out sometime this millenia, I’ll go back and finish up those episodes.  Hope the AWFW readers, wherever they are, bear with me until then.

Comics Updated!
AWFW - CS

This episode of Closetspace is supposed to be a fun episode, with some cheap laughs and fun stuff to cleanse the palette and get ready for the next whack upside your head. So what do I do? I begin with it a pissed off Carrie. Well, for recent CS, this is pretty upbeat. Wow, remember when this series was upbeat and fun? Anyways, Beatrice wasn’t originally meant to be a recurring character, but ever since she told Carrie “It’s okay, I’ll keep your secret” and then tried to explain things to the folks at Milly’s funeral, she’s bubbled up in my head as a version of a friend of mine. Nearly every MTF transsexual has a friend like this - the one woman who is just totally fascinated by your decision to be a woman in a non-creepy way. Most of us have friends that joke “You’d never want to be a woman if you had a period.” However THIS friend is the one who actually goes out of her way to explain where it’s cramping, and what it feels like, not to complain, but to try and get you to “know” what that’s like. At the same time, this is the friend patient enough to show you how to do your make up or teach you how to dress. Heck my “friend like that” talked to me about hrt nether regions is a totally educational fashion that would make most people blush, throw up, or swear off women all together. And frankly, she’s a great friend, who I don’t talk to enough.

I doubt Beatrice will get that explicit, but she’ll be very curious and helpful, even if her husband tried to beat the tar out of Carrie.

Sorry about the AWFW repeats. This is pretty much all I had planned for this episode, but I’d hoped for more than just showing 4 repeated panels and 2 recycled ones. The new schedule is kicking my ass, and AWFW (the not-so-popular one) is paying for it.

Comics Updated - CS - Or here if the RSS feed hasn’t caught up.

This comic is simply one panel, with pieces moves around, cut out, faded and what not. I like these little things, not only because they’re easy to draw (They are!) but because I think subtlety is a good thing. A lot of comics are “over acted” which is good because you’re working in a “slideshow” kinda medium, and it helps “connect the dots” between the frames. But “sometimes” I just like “subtlety” to get an “emotion” “across,” “or” to “show” two people just having a “conversation,” like “here”. “   “”    “   “”"” ” “  ”

One of my favorite Closetspace strips has no dialog, just the same panel repeated 3 times with a few changes to show Carrie “Steeling” herself up to go to her mothers funeral as a woman: http://www.dolari.org/cs/157.htm

Comics Updated!
AWFW
CS
Or here if the RSS feed hasn’t caught up.

One of the things that I hope has been coming across in AWFW is that the Angels have odder priorities than what we would expect. Hanna has a stoicism to her, brought about from the environment she was born in, but Michael is stoic to the point of being somewhat psychopathic. The reasons for that is that he (and his fellow angels) aren’t from around here. Stealing a page from Mormonism, they’re not human. Something I’m slowly beginning to feed in here.

CS is more of just moving the plot along, getting Carrie back home and ending the story. The next two storylines, which mark the halfway point of CS is going to be tough. Considering they’re called in my notes from 1998 “Gethsemane” and “Enlightenment” you can imagine what they’re about. Gethsemane will be very short. Enlightenment will be longer, and will involve most of the whole cast on some way or another…and possibly involve one of the best switcheroos I’ve ever seen in a script involving…well, I can’t get into that now, can I?  Not without spoiling.

Comics Updated!
CS
Or here if the RSS feed hasn’t caught up.

Unfortunately I didn’t get AWFW done, so it’s been pushed up a week to the 8th.   I think AWFW has got to become a secondary priority to Closetspace.  As much as I don’t want to do that to my first comic, very few people read it, and I’m tired of going to bed at 8AM on Monday mornings.  I’ll do both comics, yes…but AWFW will be done AFTER CS is.  If it makes the deadline of 4AM, great.  If not, it gets pushed off till next week.

Thanks for your patience while I got my act together. Ain’t Carrie pretty?

Comics Updated!
AWFW
CS
Or here if the RSS feed hasn’t caught up.

CS: this week is a little 200 episode celebratory poster. It’s actually part of a bigger print I’m putting together - but I simply ran out of time, which is they the art is great, but the colors and letters…eh, not so good. I’ll put the full version up soon. The actual 200th episode will be this week’s comic.

AWFW: I’d been wanting to do this episode for a while now. I love writing for Morningstar because he’s such an ass, and knows exactly how to get under your skin, or, even better, seduce yuo to his thinking. The story of Manwaz isn’t over - we’ll probably see him one more time before the series ends - and now we know why Hanna will just not kill Morningstar everytime he gets near her. On top of that, we now know she couldn’t get out of the deal she made with Morningstar before the series began (with a little help from Soviet Style Revisionism to change one word of a previous episode to make it fit the story better)…whatever that was. ::cough:: As to wether Hanna is ALSO housing a soul or not, well…::cough:: I would ::cough cough cough:: the truth is ::cough cough cough:: and then ::cough::.

And now you know!

My birthday is Thursday - wanna help celebrate? http://tinyurl.com/37l4vo

Comics Updated!
AWFW
CS
Or here if the RSS feed hasn’t caught up.

The comics have been really really really late lately because of a problem I’m having with color shifting in CS. It came to a head a few weeks ago with the snapping fingers episode of AWFW. When I do comics, I use a typesetting program to get it all working. When I first started, I used Pagemaker, which allowed me to make up a comic perfectly. I upgraded to Quark Xpress, and that’s where the problem first started. RGB color is “projected light.” The light you use for a monitor. CMYK color is “reflected light.” The light you see coming from a magazine or other printed matter. The color schemes are very different, and any RGB colors would get converted to CMYK color, which changes the colors very subtly. Sometimes not so subtly. But in Quark you simply told it STOP USING CMYK AND USE RGB, DAMMIT. I’ve moved to Adobe inDesign, which seems to be insisting that it was going to convert to CMYK period. The first problems popped up during the Super High Impact episodes. If you watch Carrie, her skin tone gets greener and greener and grayer. The problem was, I was using a RGB color which would get retranslated to a CMYK color. I’d end up using that CMYK value as the RGB color for the next episode, which would get translated to yet ANOTHER CMYK, eventually greening her tint. After some serious fiddling and poking and prodding over the weeks, I thought I had it, until the snapping fingers episode where Andrea’s blue magic refused to save as blue, but was saving as purple. Even turning off the color conversion engine was STILL causing colors to mutate. Last week, I finally gave up, and now only use the typesetting program for just that, typesetting. I insert the pictures in Paint Shop Pro, where no color conversion ever happens and everything works just fine. Which is great considering there are about 1000 colors in Carrie’s face alone this week that could have gone horribly horribly wrong.

People wanted to see Carrie’s full outfit…I tried to oblige, but the episode just didn’t call for it. So use the previous episode, Panel 1 of this week’s episode and your imaginations for the rest of the horror.

Comics Updated!
CS
Or here if the RSS feed hasn’t caught up.

There’s no AWFW this week, even though it’s about 75% done, because if I don’t go to bed in the next five minutes, there will be no reason to go to bed at all.