From: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org (alloy-digest) To: alloy-digest@smoe.org Subject: alloy-digest V6 #160 Reply-To: alloy@smoe.org Sender: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "alloy-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. alloy-digest Saturday, June 23 2001 Volume 06 : Number 160 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Alloy: Webcomics [Barbara Cohen ] Re: Alloy: Webcomics ["Chris & Beena Cracknell" ] Re: Alloy: The next episodes... ["Chris & Beena Cracknell" ] Re: Alloy: Webcomics ["Chris & Beena Cracknell" ] Re: Alloy: The next episodes... ["Robin Thurlow" Subject: Alloy: Webcomics Crackers, I read your Ghastly comic, I love it! Max Cannon is from Tucson and I met him once, he's a nice but very odd man, just as I imagine you! :) _____________________________________________________________ Dr. Barbara Cohen, lunatic bcohen@utk.edu Dept. of Geological Sciences http://web.utk.edu/~bcohen/ University of Tennessee phone (865) 974-6024 Knoxville, TN 37996 fax (865) 974-6022 The Truth is out there? Does anyone know the URL? _____________________________________________________________ ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 11:28:03 -0400 From: "Chris & Beena Cracknell" Subject: Re: Alloy: Webcomics - ----- Original Message ----- > Crackers, I read your Ghastly comic, I love it! Max Cannon is from > Tucson and I met him once, he's a nice but very odd man, just as I > imagine you! :) Wow, met the famous Max Cannon. For some reason I always picture him as looking like Bug Eyed Earl. He probably wouldn't appreciate that. ^_^ I'm glad you like my webcomic. I've been pretty pleased with the response it's been getting so far. I'm only getting around 50 hits a day though unlike the more popular comics that get around 50000 hits a day. But considering I haven't subscribed to any of those webcomic promotion site thingies and most of my new traffic comes in via word of mouth I guess I'm not doing to bad. If I can manage to keep it up for a year or so (no pun intended) then I think I might be able to run with the big boys. Of course it also helps too if you run a daily comic instead of a weekly comic, then you get a lot more hits. The only problem with that is the webcomic is a hobby which means I have to be able to take time out of my more important things in my life to do it which means it's hard enough to find the time to make one webcomic a week let alone one a day. I had no idea that it takes so much work to make a webcomic. The idea part is the easiest. It's the artwork that takes all the effort. First I do rough pencil sketches. Then I ink the sketches. Then I scan the sketched line art into the computer at a high resolution. Reduce the colour depth to 1 bit so I have just black and white pixels. Then I look for "holes" in the line art that will leak when I do a flood fill and then I plug them. When the holes are plugged I flood fill the line art with different shades of gray for the base colour. Then I flood fill the background with a flourescent green coloured background. Next I create a new, blank image (with transperant background) the same size as the scanned image, cut the scanned image and paste it as a transperant selection so the green bacground colour doesn't show. Once I got the new panel image I crop and reduce it to 975 x 570 (this antialiases the image to get rid of the "jaggies"). Then I shade the images adding the shadows first with the darken tool then the highlights with the lighten too. Paste this image onto a background image. Add speach ballooons and text then reduce the image to 500 x 292 lightly tint the images (makes them look a little more interesting than just leaving them in gray tones) and put all the pannels together in order on a single image. All that work takes a few hours to do. I could whip them off much faster by changing my art style to something a lot more simplistic but I really don't want to do that. I kinda like the unique appearance my method of shading gives my artwork. Makes it look different from the typical manga style so that my work has a distinctiveness to it. Lots of work but it really is lots of fun. Combines two things I really enjoy doing, drawing and writing. Now if only I could figure out a way to work music in there I'd be in heaven... well that and figure out a way to get paid for all this work. ^_^ Crackers (Labour of love from hell!!) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 11:43:58 -0400 From: "Chris & Beena Cracknell" Subject: Re: Alloy: The next episodes... - ----- Original Message ----- > When you mentioned it I thought it *had* to be a joke, but no one knows > better than me how quickly a joke can get out of hand and really end up > cocking things up for people (har har har) Of course, you know, if Thomas was down with it I'd be on it in a flash with "The Erotic Intersellar Adventures Of Captain Franzie and Europa". Of all the characters I interjected into The Emeritus Professor story, Captain Franzie, Europa, and the crew of Carolines were my favorite (hence the H.M.S.S. Pirate Twins comic book cover for the Alloy Calendar). Infact, if I had the time I'd probably create an H.M.S.S. Pirate Twins manga-styled web comicbook with full, serialized stories. But considering that it takes a team of writers and artists 2 months of full time work to produce your average comicbook, I just don't think I'd have the time to tackle such a project. But who knows, maybe I'll win the lottery some day. > Besides, I have a feeling you might just enjoy stirring things up a bit, > dear crackers. You and your Organ... L'il ol' mysanthropic me. ^_^ Hey I impressed the heck out of a group of lesbians with my organ last weekend. If you can make a group of lesbians gaze in awe at your organ you can do anything. Crackers (Wow! All that for only $30 from hell!!!!) CrAB - http://www.hwcn.org/~ad329/crab.html The Official Bira Bira Webpage - http://birabira.chaosmagic.com Ghastly's Ghastly Comic - http://ghastly.keenspace.com ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 15:48:51 -0400 From: "Mary A. Brown" Subject: Alloy: Lene in porn movie? Hi Chris and everyone else, The story I've heard TMDR tell about New Toy is that after hearing Lene perform every night while he was part of the Camera Club, he was inspired to write that song for her. So I think it's safe to assume he was there in New Haven. I also feel pretty naive since it was only a couple of years ago when I saw a special on Betty Page that I found out the meaning of "camera clubs". All those years I thought it was just a group of people trying to emulate Ansel Adams or something... I went through all my ticket stubs, trying to find dates for the two Lene gigs I saw but no luck. Most of those small clubs just used to confiscate the entire ticket, damn it! Maybe now that I've got some spare time, I'll try looking for newspaper reviews since I think I can piece together a reasonable time frame. Seeing as how you're the resident expert, Chris, maybe you could answer something I've wondered about for a long time. None of my copies of New Toy give credit for who's playing on the tracks. I know Thomas is in the video and - now this is incredibly iffy - I think Justin Hildreth is but who is really performing on the studio version besides Lene and Les? And is Thomas on the rest of the EP? Obviously, I survived my surgery and I'd really like to thank all of you who sent me good wishes. That meant a lot to me and made me feel less alone. Your thoughts must have helped because I'm doing a lot better than I expected, though I have felt compelled to "monitor the crunching sound" in my shoulder. I figure it's probably more disconcerting than anything. Hey, Keith, maybe I could attach my surgery photos as a companion piece to your ugly knee page! Europa ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 20:45:49 -0400 From: "Chris & Beena Cracknell" Subject: Re: Alloy: Webcomics Want to be a webcomic cartoonist but can't draw? I've been checking out the Sluggy Freelance archives when I ran across this. http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=010423 It's the start of a week of "MadLibs" comics. Each page asks you for different verbs, nouns, names, adjectives, etc and then they're put together in the captions of different Sluggy Freelance comics (which you don't see until after you give it the words). One of them asked for a Celebrity name... I entered the first one I could think of. Sorry Thomas. ^_^ http://ghastly.keenspace.com/images/madlib325.gif Give it a spin... it's lots of fun. Crackers (What WAS he doing with them from hell!!!) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 20:10:42 -0400 From: "Robin Thurlow" Subject: Re: Alloy: The next episodes... - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris & Beena Cracknell" > Of course, you know, if Thomas was down with it I'd be on it in a flash with > "The Erotic Intersellar Adventures Of Captain Franzie and Europa". Of all > the characters I interjected into The Emeritus Professor story, Captain > Franzie, Europa, and the crew of Carolines were my favorite (hence the > H.M.S.S. Pirate Twins comic book cover for the Alloy Calendar). Infact, if I > had the time I'd probably create an H.M.S.S. Pirate Twins manga-styled web > comicbook with full, serialized stories. But considering that it takes a > team of writers and artists 2 months of full time work to produce your > average comicbook, I just don't think I'd have the time to tackle such a > project. But who knows, maybe I'll win the lottery some day. You should apply for a grant! There are many out there... if you spend a little time checking it out on line there's no telling what you'll find. You have to write up a proposal detailing exactly what you want to do. Dave is applying for some right now to help finance his distribution and publicity on the west coast (US), Europe and Japan. you should consider it... who knows? xxxx Robin T ------------------------------ End of alloy-digest V6 #160 ***************************