Zwol.org

Jason Kottke: "It'll be all the rage with the kids in a few weeks. 'Your moms won't let you go to that party? That's thraxed, yo.'"

Though I visit his site regularly, I've never checked out Jason's bio page. If I had the motivation, I'd do one like that for myself. But I'd probably leave out all of the really good stuff.

Today Max Leibman passes the 4-week mark of his comic, Desiderata. Congratulations, Max!

"Let me repeat that: A local beauty contest at a hardware store in Secaucus New Jersey. Adam Curry and Boy George as judges. Showbizz can be so cruel."

I see that Kevin Pease is auctioning off original artwork the hard way (that is, independantly, not via eBay or some other service). I like the idea.

The open-to-all Reiterating Comics project reawakens with this installment from David Schumacher of ATP Productions.

A reminder: If you have anything to add to this conversation, please feel free to do so.

(Kevin Pease has also recently threatened to do some RC work, so that's good too.)

Because nobody demanded it, here's a photo of your humble Zwolthor with Scott McCloud. Ha.

The next two weeks are Guest artist weeks at Michael McKay-Fleming's Alice comic strip and I'm pleased as punch to be one of 'em. I'll be sure to mention my comic's appearance on the day it shows, but you may want to check in each day (if you don't already) to see some good work. As far as I know, Michael's kept the artist line-up to himself, but with Jamie "Clan of the Cats" Roberson leading off, it looks to be a quality selection.

In other comic stuff of note, Max Leibman of Desiderata has seen fit to feature Zwol in his e-comic spotlight this week. It's worth mentioning that I find his comic for today to be extremely propos to my own situation.

I also notice that today marks the start of Chapter Two of Jim Zubkavich's wonderful Makeshift Miracle. OK, not the start, actually, since it's just a title page for Chapter Two, but close enough.

In non-comic website linkage news, another Jim has posted some astoundingly attractive art over at ArtOfJim.com. It's a graphic-intensive site with lots of images, but you've not seen Photoshop filter art like this before. In Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud talks about going through the vortex of bad Photoshop art, and Jim long ago warped through that particular vortex. The best stuff's in the Recent Work galleries. Here are a couple thumbnails that each link to a full-size image:

Chris Baldwin has some thoughts on creating a syndicated comic strip. Though he hasn't been syndicated yet, he's made the attempt a couple times and is approaching it again, so it's interesting to read what he's got to say.

So far, expect comics on Tuesday and, um.... Let's say Thursday.

Doc points to this article by using this quote:

And it is still possible to feel unified and spiritually connected to all that is good and righteous about your generally nonviolent Americanism -- you know, wine and sex and good music, large dogs and literature and clean water and tongue kissing in the streets -- and still be depressed when our famously nonintellectual president talks to the country like we're all five years old and heavily dosed on Ritalin.

Wow. Ask Google "How do you hack into a web site" and you find Zwol. Honest- I have no clue.

As you can see, there isn't actually a new comic today, as I said yesterday there might be. This is at least as distressing to me as it is to you, because this would have been a great day to post something with the new visitors from "Alice" today, which makes that something of a lost opportunity. There just don't seem to be enough hours in the day to get everything done, especially when the comics that I'm trying to do are ones that I want to make sure are done as well as I can do them, and shouldn't be done in any slap-dash fashion. When I first started this silly comic-thing, I considered using a drawing style that was simpler, and would allow me to draw faster, but ultimately I decided just to draw in my "default" style, since it seemes more natural. I still tried to make some concessions to drawing simpler, but over time everything became more complex. I'm very pleased with the results, especially recently, but this means that it takes a significant portion of my time to do each comic. And the fact that I've recently started drawing the comics twice as large as before (though that's hardly a firm rule) doesn't help any. *sigh* I'll see what I can do.

I have also temporarily removed Jack Masters' latest No Contest comic from the archive because it was causing some problem with being able to advance to the next strip in the archive. You may find that comic HERE

As mentioned yesterday, Michael McKay-Fleming invited me to do a guest strip for his comic, "Alice", and he informs me that it's appearing at his site today. Go ahead and check it out, but don't forget to check his site all this week and next to see the other guest artists.

You can find Zwol by going to Yahoo! and searching for "Boy George thumbnails". True.

Steven Grant's bored this week and he reminds us that just because we would like our media to entertain us doesn't mean we want to be stupified by it.

Jason Alderman's (with Jeff Rowland and R. Stevens) Indie Rock Pete, a Diesel Sweeties spin-off has begun. I gather it's a finite series of strips rather than an ongoing thing, which should make it easier to commit to reading, since you know it's going to build to something.

I've also not yet plugged Frank "Damonk" Cormier's latest mad scheme, the one-word-per-panel-jam over at the Four Toon Tellers site, in which I've been invited to participate. Each panel is drawn by a different artist and contains one (only one- no more, no less) word.

Days like this make me want to just give up the whole comic thing altogether. I mention this, not because I'm actually going to do that, but because I really feel like that right now. I think I've come far enough and I've got too much left to finish to give it up now, but it would be so easy just to not pick up the pencil again. It would be nice if I was able to make a living from my comic such that I didn't have to trade in so much of my time and energy to a day job that is really pretty blah and it might be nice if I could employ cut & paste methods of creating the artwork so that I didn't have to draw everything anew each day, but I suspect it's simply a matter of discipline. Forcing myself to do it. Sorry, but sometimes the rest of the world just leeches out so much of my energy that there's nothing left over. Ordinarily, I would put this sentiment into a comic rather than typing it out, but I've got some other, story-related, comics to get through first before I can get back into that territory.