Sunday, November 23, 2008

What's the best way to know what's going on inside the earth?!




One of the benefits of having a website is looking at the keyword hits you get off of Google. The above illustration conveys the worries expounded in the title of this post. While a lot are funny I also feel some sort of obligation to answer these queries since they landed someone here:

Sad Robot Boy - you're in the right place dude.
Steve Vahaviolos - Oh god I'm so sorry!
Three letter greek word for love - ΓΠΩ!
Ferrero rocher commercial greek gods - Oh man, that guy
How to get into the Royal Ballet School - Lots of practise and some innate talent I'd guess :/
Explain Europe After the Rain - This dude stayed around on the blog for 3 minutes so I guess some explanation did occur.
Meaning of Regional Dimensions - Still unnamed, sorry.
Octopus Puns - At least I can say I delivered on that front.

So yes, this is a stopgap post. I've been busy doing a very ambitious page for this year's Vavel festival and it'll be a week or so until I'm done. I will resume posting after that, but I should also let you know (since I gathered all of you here so we could laugh at google results) that the material from the paper has all but exhausted itself (last page left). I do not intend to stop the blog here, so we'll readily go into 'b sides' material. Most of it is not single-page comics but rather 3-5 pager stories I was doing before around and after my time at the paper. This is good because some material is absurdly old and you'll get to see really how less of a fuck I gave about my comics being understandable by third parties in the beginning. Also it's nice because I'll get to post more recent comics which I personally feel look better because I'm a better draftsman now that I was 2 years ago, heh.

The question I want to put to you dear readers and humans is this: should I post more infrequently but with the whole story at a time, or should I post every 2-3 days with a single page from an ongoing story? This is pretty important because for example I have an 18 page 24hr comic with lots of WORDS WORDS WORDS and it really might take a while to translate such a thing. Looking at the google results it seems some 40-50 hits a day occur and I'd hate to have built up that loyalty in some of you and then just come up and switch my posting habits from eight times a month to twice a month. I know first-hand that there occurs some feeling of betrayal when an artist just stops updating their blog frequently. Regardless of the inherent pathology in that sort of consumerist mindset (shame on all of us!), I'd hate to upset anyone like that!

Keep in mind when answering - for I do want you dear readers and humans, to answer me - that if I post bigger stories page-by-page then I will also have the chance to wax theoretical on them a lot more than I would if I posted them all together, where final remarks would have to be condensed to the issues of the story as a whole. So according to your tastes for theory this should factor in.

Also after Vavel I might post the comic I'm making now and all the preparation I did for it for another process post which will go into finer details on why and how I make my artistic choices and how exactly my subconscious undermines me constantly.

-Helm

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I personally like to read your thoughts and theories on the comics, so more regularly but with less pictures would be fine for me. ;)

Otto Mustermann said...

I'm with that anonymous dude. Give us the benefit of guessing-assuming-waiting, pretty boy.

Helm said...

What lore what beautiful antiquity the time you come from must be for waiting to be considered a benefit there, german.

Anonymous said...

Well I always liked Paco Vink's Monkey Island 1 comic (http://www.worldofmi.com/features/comics/vink/) even when he started it 2001 and is still working on it :) So I'd prefer to see a page at a time, it builds up the excitement and makes me wait for another page.

Lackey said...

I don't mind the slow approach especially if it lets you write more on the process and everything.

BUT it would be nice if they were batched a bit, at least because comics are meant to be taken as a whole and not a piece at a time, right?

Anonymous said...

I'd like to read the whole stories at once, but you should write longer theory comments anyway.

Helm said...

Alright so what I'll do is post pages as they're made along with the theorytalk below as per usual, and when a comic is done I'll make a final post with the pages in a row in some friendly format and post final thoughts below. That's what I'll do.

Today I did one panel out of 12 left for the page I'm doing for vavel. It's going good, I am proud of it already. I need to reign in the manga studio nitpickery though, I spent 4 hours on this panel today. Granted it's an establishing shot and it has a background and what the hell, but... 4 hours!!