Waffle

Yello 'flu alert!

I seem to be coming down with a cold or 'flu. So far, I've only got the sore throat but it could get worse, and I've been stocking up on the 'flu survival materials (orange juice, licorice and soup) just in case.

I'm staying at home tonight. Monday's update is not in danger, but I'm not getting ahead and may need to skip Wednesday's to work on other, better-paid stuff. Also that longer article I promised about recent developments in webcomics may be delayed.

Newspaper editors are pantywaists, film at 11

(via The comics Journal forums, where the poster's choice of a subject line completely mischaracterises the content of the article)

Long article about the state of newspaper strips, the pernicious influence of the cowardice of newpaper editors, and how webcomics may come to realise Bill Watterson's artistic vision.

Trade unions and emerging democracy in Iraq

[Note: I have a long-ish piece about webcomics in the works. While assembling my thoughts on that, I'm doing some linking to political stuff that I happen to find interesting]
[Note no. 2: if I was female and Johann Hari wasn't gay, I'd very much want to have his baby]
Johann Hari talks of the need to avoid despairing for the future of democracy in Iraq, and discusses some encouraging signs, focusing specifically on the heroic role that trade unions are playing in the process:

Here is a small illustration: two months ago Moqtada Sadr, the de facto leader of the Shia uprising, was leading his Army of Mehdi towards Nasiriyah . They stumbled across an aluminium plant and ordered the staff to evacuate, but the workers would not leave. Their trade union, the Federation of Workers' Councils and Unions in Iraq, issued a statement saying their workers "refuse to evacuate their workplaces and turn them into battlefields".

The union rejected "the two poles of terrorism in Iraq" - the armed militias and the occupying forces - and insisted on a transition to a democratic Iraq. Here we have ordinary Iraqis refusing to allow yet another war to disrupt their lives, and they are greeted with total silence from progressive Brits.

(note: In Europe, trade unions typically are reduced to bickering about whether wages should go up 1 or 2 percentage points. In the US, as I understand it, they are discounted entirely, presumably because no one remembers what life was like a hundred years ago. This example shows what unions can be.)

Hrm, interesting

A good article by Frans Groenendijk (who posted in the comments here a week or so ago! Hi Frans!) about the success of Paul van Buitenen's Europe Transparent party in the European Elections. He calls it "the best thing that happened in Dutch politics in many many years" and he's right. Would that the British had had a candidate of van Buitenen's caliber to vote for, to channel their quite legitimate distrust of the EU-as-it-is-now into something constructive instead of having to vote for a bunch of dweebs whom Paul Schroeder described to me as "one evolutionary rung removed from the BNP" - and I'm not sure if he meant that UKIP were one rung above the BNP.

If I have one criticism of van Buitenen, it's that I think his portrayal of himself as an anti-politician looks disingenuous to me. I refuse to believe, for instance, that he didn't have a suit to wear on TV during the election night, and that he would have naively chosen to wear a hideous neon-green tie over his green lumberjack shirt, thinking that that would do. I think that was a deliberate act of political portrayal. But that's a minor grumble when I think of what he may be able to accomplish, and what his (and one of his comrades, writer Els de Groen)getting elected in the first place signifies. Let's wait and see.

(Update: I was right: van Buitenen does have a suit.)

Mental note: Pen nibs

I should replace my pen nibs more often. When I did so today, the difference in comfort level and control over the line width was noticeable. Problem is, I have about a quarter left of the 144 nibs that Sven van der Hart purchased from the manufacturer several years ago, and I fear running out and not finding a source for replacement. A year ago I googled for the brand and type, and didn't find any leads worth pursuing.

The pens are HIRO Leonardt 111 EF, and although it's theoretically possible to get them from local art stores, my experiences with them can best be summed up as 'pot luck'.

Obligatory comic link, but man does that scan look terrible. One to remaster sooner, rather than later.

Deleria!

I got the Scare-O-Deleria book in the mail from Scary Go Round the other day. It's nothing that's gonna change the world, but it's a fun, lightweight little story in black and white featuring John Allison's trademark humour and the wonderful scrawl of his hand-drawn art, which is very different from his computer art, but at least as nice to look at. I'd subscribe to this if it was a series, and so should you!

Which reminds me... I have nothing new to report on the series of minis that I proposed on the Reinder Dijkhuis forum back in February. I suppose I still want to do this, but I'm just so pessimistic about having enough of a reader base to make them a success even by the very modest standards of minicomicking. Even the Eye of The Underworld mini-comic only got a handful of buyers! Perhaps I should have pushed it more, but unless that is pretty much guaranteed to make sales jump up by several orders of magnitude, it's discouragingly un-lucrative. A guy like John Allison with many thousands of readers who are known to enjoy buying his products, on the other hand, can use minis to keep people interested, even if they're not directly profitable.

Gosh, my reviews of other people's comics all end up being about me, don't they? John's one of my favorite webcartoonists. I wish he'd stuck around on Modern Tales, but if he had, he probably wouldn't have graced us with so much stuff in hardcopy (his T-shirts are also something to behold, and wear).

Writing the Trial, part, uh, 5, I think: Don't do what I did.

Contrary to what I wrote earlier, I'm not quite done mapping out the events that will take place at the Trial. The problem is this:
When I started work on The Rite of Serfdom, I estimated that I could tell the whole story, including the improvised bits I like to do, in 60 to 100 episodes. Within that framework, the trial would be merely the aftermath of the big important things that happened earlier in the story - to wit, the double quest. The way it actually turned out,though, is that the story is now edging towards the 250-mark, the two climaxes of the double quest came out at a 60-episode distance from one another, and there's already been quite a long ebb since the second of those climaxes. So the rhythm dictates that the Trial becomes a climactic event in its own right. And that means that it should become more dangerous than the two preceding high points, which, as the astute ROCR reader will remember, were when Jodoque got his head chopped off and when Ottar was killed in a magical battle (he got better). That's ... hard to follow.
I've been talking this over with Geir, who has bailed me out before, and we're working towards a solution.

(spoilers below the fold - scroll past the image to read on)

Heavenly creatures: Cerebus and Bone

Salon (day-pass, or, better yet, subscription required) has a combined write-up of Cerebus and Bone, two long-running comics which both ended this year. It's not very in-depth but for those of you who have sort of heard of these series and wonder what the fuss was about, it's a good summary.

"Bone" and "Cerebus" share superficial similarities. They're both drawn in black-and-white and self-published by their creators. In both, quirky, anthropomorphic beings shed light on mankind's foibles and virtues. Both books extend their lives outside the comic shops through hefty, trade-paperback reprint volumes available at bookstore super chains. The 16th and last "Cerebus" collection, "The Last Day," chronicles the aardvark's final hours and publishes this month, while Smith will sandwich all 1,300 pages of "Bone" between two covers in a volume due to publish in July.

But beneath the surface, "Bone" and "Cerebus" prove to be so different, they're almost like photographic negatives of each other. "Bone" celebrates optimism and narrative simplicity, while "Cerebus" embraces cynicism and experimentation worthy of a mad scientist. Sim and Smith started as comrades in arms, yet their relationship soured into one of the industry's strangest feuds. "Bone" and "Cerebus" mark opposite ends of the comic-book spectrum in tone and complexity. Their heroes aren't technically human, but you can place virtually all modern graphic novels somewhere between them.

There's more. Read it. Don't fear the Day Pass.

Feeling better

My three-paracetamol headache is over, I'm well-rested, fully functional and enthusiastic about my work. Let's rock'n'roll.

Ignore the whinyness in that earlier post.

Changes to the blog

I've added the sidebar from the front page (this one, if you read the weblog through the inlined pages on the ROCR site) to the archive and category pages. Reasons:
1. I want to ease navigation from archived pages to the rest of the blog;
2. I like reading the blog better if the text is in a narrower column, and I expect that most of you feel the same.

The downside is that the archives are heavier now and will take a bit longer to load. When ROCR was still fully hosted at a free keespace site, I liked to keep the archive pages leaner than the front page, but in a weblog, people are much more likely to come in through other pages, and I'd like to give newcomers a full-featured webpage to explore. I'll probably slim the sidebar on the archive pages down a bit in a few days though.

ShinyDisk watch: The Beastie Boys

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing reports that the new Beastie Boys record has copy protection, and responds to it in the same way that everyone else does when confronted with this technology:

... If the Beasties wanna treat me like a crook, I don't want to be their customer.

Note that the only thing that this DRM is doing here is pissing off the honest fans who want open CDs; the DRM on the CD didn't stop my source from making me a set of MP3s. In other words, if you plan on listening to the new disc on your iPod or laptop, you're better off downloading a copy made by a cracker and posted on Kazaa -- if you buy it in a shop, you're going to have to go through the lawbreaking rigamarole of breaking the DRM yourself.

In an update, Cory passes along a comment:

Update: Ian sez, "Hi, I'm not sure who posted re: Beastie Boys copy protection, but I just spoke with Mike D and their management and they wanted me to pass along that a) This is all territories except the US and UK -- US and UK discs do not have this protection on them; b) All EMI CDs are treated this way, theirs isn't receiving special treatment; c) They would have preferred not to have the copy protection, but weren't allowed to differ from EMI policy."

I'm pretty sure that c) is bunk. The copy protection has been the norm for EMI since the second half of 2003, but I recently bought the European edition of the remastered version of Pink Floyd's The Final Cut with a copyright date of 2004, and it's unprotected. Apparently, the guys from Pink Floyd, even now that Roger Waters is no longer talking to the others, still have enough clout to prevent Copy Control technology that, in addition to the concerns Cory raises, also harms playability and degrade the sound. Over at Virgin records, Peter Gabriel also succesfully resisted the use of Copy Control on his remaster series, so it can be done.

Beastie Boys fans on the European continent are well advised to get the UK edition from a mail order supplier (so that if it turns out to be a ShinyDisk after all, they can return it as defective).

(Just by way of a reminder: the UK-based Campaign for Digital Rights have all the info on what Copy Control technologies actually do, and it's from a reference in one of their articles (can't remember which though) that I got the idea of calling CCT "CD"s ShinyDisks.)

Cluster headaches and pessimism

A nasty cluster headache ganged up on me today and I got little work done. This may or may not affect Friday's update; there is still time to catch up. Still, it's unwelcome at a time when I'm doing some really difficult writing.

Just as I was about to write about this, a reader asked me why there was an Iframe with this blog on it in an old ROCR archive page at Modern Tales. The answer is simple: because the current Modern Tales system does not allow artists to add a blog (or anything else) to the template for any page, the only way to add a blog is to peg it manually to an episode, at or near update time. If you forget to remove it from the old episode, you get it in the middle of an archive. It's removed now.

Uhm, it's been in that archive location for about three months. I've said this before: I make mistakes. That is annoying but I can live with it. I'll even admit that I sometimes react crabbily when they're pointed out. That depends partly on my mood and partly on the nature of the correction. "You substituted 'different' for 'difficult' in your latest blog entry" is more likely to be accepted with gratitude than "typo in your blog". But even an unspecific heads-up is better than none at all, and if a large Iframe with text is interposed in a continuous archive for no apparent reason, and just sits there for three months like a big elephant in a small room without anyone saying "Hey, what's this? Why is it there?", then it gets unbelievably demotivating when it finally is pointed out. Right now, in my cluster-headache-induced mental haze, I'm wondering who even reads those archives and why I even bother to go on.

I don't ask much from my readers. I don't call on them to buy merchandise or donate anymore, not since I joined Modern Tales. I don't ask readers to shill for the comic on their websites, and I've even given up on expecting feedback on the forum.

But just every once in a while I need some sign that people care. It doesn't hurt my feelings when people point out a typo in the comic or take me to task for some other screwup on the website or in the archives - what hurts my feelings is that they don't ever do. Even when I unexpectedly stopped updating for weeks because I couldn't get into my ftp accounts, it took weeks for people to start asking me if I was still alive. I'm creating in a vacuum and I don't like it a bit.

I'll move the contact link on the front page up a bit so it's more visible. But I think I moved it down in the fairly recent past precisely because no one used it anyway.