Comic for Monday, March 29th, 2021
Comic!
I’ve seen some comments about tags for characters; I’m looking into if there’s a way to do user generated tags, but I haven’t seen one yet. I’ve included them here, I don’t know if I will always do that going forward, but that’s simple enough to do, just not really something that occurred to me. That said, I suspect that the two characters featured on this page that weren’t on the last page are among the more well known… though I suppose sometimes Peter shows up less than one might might expect for being the essentially the main character of the comic. I suspect he has the highest page count, but I’m not actually sure… these are the things we could know if I’d diligently tagged all the characters the whole time.
Of course, tags only help so much, as different people call different people different names. Taki, for example, is what various Kepler’s call Miko. From what we saw previously, Mari didn’t see Miko particularly often, but probably more than most of the Keplers, as she originally suspected the Kyle wanted her to go tell Miko that Peter had gone missing… though we have reason to believe that Miko had been missing at that point for quite some time, she clearly Mari didn’t see Miko particularly frequently.
As we saw in the flashback, Mari hasn’t actually met Peter since he left Central originally to go work at Arron’s branch of the IDS, which was years ago at this point, and we’ve seen enough Peter from Minus Years to know that Peter has, in some ways, changed a fair bit since then, but that’s generally what Mari would think of Peter as.
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I retrieved a pen from across the room the other day.
It was a thorough pain in the derriere. I had to stand up, walk across the room, find a pen, sit back down, and write. At that point I discovered the pen was empty, and I had to repeat the whole thing, but adding a stop off to the trash in order to avoid retrying the dry pen at some later date.
Next time I’ll keep your drone and universe hopping ideas in mind. They sound simple.
Peter having a pen-like object probably something to do with the literacy that Peter has been previously demonstrated to possess. I mean, he wasn’t shown actually writing, as far as I can recall, but there was a white board that had writing on it that only he or PastUtopia could’ve possibly written. I’m sure Past had enough work to do with the art that he *had* to do; anything he could outsource, he did. Hence, Peter’s literate.
I suspect Miko wanted it because she may be literate also, but it could just be that she wanted what Peter had. Or maybe she was just futzing with magic because, you know, that’s what you do when you can do magic. I get that there’s a lot of people in a lot of different universes who rail against the frivolous use of magic. But the thing is, I guarantee you every one of them was either granted full competency with their magic or they have used magic frivolously. Most of them fall in the latter camp. All of the mages I’m sufficiently familiar with their history who were granted full competency with their magic have *also* used it frivolously, but they had an option to do magic without that.
Normally, I tend to consider ‘summoning’ to be getting it from a bit further away than across the room, unless it doesn’t traverse the space that’s obviously between the two points. (If I have a pen, you’re across the room, and you get it without you or the pen traversing that space, I’ll consider it a summons. Even if that acquisition was performed by you flying your drone out your window, around the building, in my window, had the drone pick the pen up, and return through the open windows. On the other hand, if the pen instead leaves our universe, re-enters our universe half way across the room, then slides the rest of the way to your waiting hand, that’s not a summons. Because, you know, logic, and sticking with ones definitions even in the face of absurdity.
my favorite part of this comic…the bap sound effect.
Um. Originally I thought Miko was trying to “Summon Comb” (because of the bit with her hands on her head). But on later inspection and consideration, I have realised Miko is perhaps “Summoning Pen” and has actually managed to knock herself over (hence the thump after “protect the head” (hands on head)) and then the pen has returned to its original coordinates. The later is immensely funny. The former… well it is funny too, but mostly because it seems to be an understandable misunderstanding (with the new hair, a comb seems to make sense; not why she wants a pen: wait why does Peter even have a pen!?!).
Oh dear, Miko using magic looks like a dangerous idea!
Hey, Utopians, does anyone have recommendations for affordable ways to get into digital drawing? I am starting to put a comic together, and I would like to learn digital drawing, as the style I want doesn’t suit my usual pencil or watercolour art. So if anybody has any ideas on what tablets/drawing pads/drawing programmes are good value for money, be interested to hear you thoughts.
I hope you don’t mind me asking a non-FSoU, Past.
Also, does anyone know any good platforms for displaying art and comics online? I think some people use Deviant Art or social media, but I haven’t looked into it much…
Thanks, Guys.
-SneakyBex
As for tablets; I’ve only used a cintiq, which is nice, but not really affordable in the slightest, so not a super useful recommendation. You can probably find a used one midsized one cheaper, but they aren’t super cheap in general. Something like a Surface I’ve heard of folks using which is also not cheap, but is a computer, so I guess its a consideration if you can knock out multiple birds with one stone when upgrading a tablet or computer somewhere along the line. That said, as someone that briefly drew on a Surface years back updating the comic on a trip… I didn’t love it, but that was probably mostly just me not being used to it.
You can get drawing tablets that aren’t screens much cheaper, but I don’t know how hard to learn those are, as I haven’t used them much. There’s also cheaper knock off cintiqs these days that are reviewed decently.
For drawing program, I’d recommend Clip Studio Paint, though I’ve had my gripes with it and considered switching off over the years but have mostly stuck with it since I swapped to it from photoshop in the very early days, it’s a lot cheaper than modern Photoshop and their monthly shenanigans. There are free options that might be better, but I prefer to draw in Clip Studio Pro over Photoshop or Illustrator, and it’s cheaper than those (though I also use photoshop, an ancient version from the pre-monthly bleed-you-for-money-days). While its fairly cheap, if cost is a major concern, maybe look at the free ones first, as I think there’s some solid options out there, but I’d recommend CSP over Photoshop when it comes to spending month, if only because Photoshop is a large monthly fee forever.
There’s plenty of places you can host for free – some of them will have some small built in audience/community and pretty easy set up tools. I think Comic Fury is one option? I haven’t gone there in years but I assume it’s still up and around – some of the readers can probably give better ideas than me as they probably read a lot more webcomics. I don’t think Deviant Art has great webcomic tools for archives and things, but have never tried to follow a comic there.
Just a wordpress site like this is… pretty cheap, by default, until you start getting into more traffic and security stuff. I pay a good bit of a premium to get the blokes that run it to help with security scans, back ups, and unborking it when it gets hacked, but I didn’t have to worry about those things for years when I got started. The default domain name + site is fairly cheap in the grand scheme of things, though all things are relative.
Thank you, Past, for the info, your recommendations have been very helpful for giving me a direction. I like the look of clip studio paint a lot and I noticed it has a free trial, so I can give it ago once I work out what to do for the drawing-pad-side-of-things… The Cintiq is temping (even one of smaller ones…) however, I like the portability of the SurfacePro and I’ve heard a few favourable reviews on them for drawing… I guess I will have to figure out exactly how much I am willing to spend on an hobby.
Thanks, again, I have lots to research and think about now!
-SneakyBex
I got a Lenova Yoga 730, which cost something between those two options. I have to recommend avoiding it. At least, my Yoga 730 has an issue which starts out as an annoying screen flicker, but eventually degrades to the screen completely not working. It’s common to the line. While there’s a simple repair that probably voids the warranty, that repair is not a permanent fix; it just restores the laptop to no better than the original condition, so the flicker will return. Each time the repair is done, it lasts for less time.
Despite this being a common problem with the line, and despite my registering the laptop, I haven’t gotten a recall notice or anything. I’ve not gotten any indication that Lenovo has acknowledged the existence of the design flaw that causes it. Searching for `lenovo yoga 730 screen flicker`, at least for me, mostly returns links about that simple mechanical temporary fix, people complaining about the issue and recommending not buying it, but there is a link from lenovo which claims the issues are due to software issues. But they aren’t; if it was software, that hardware work would not have an effect.
It’s sad. Apart from this one issue, it’s an excellent laptop. But because of it, I have to recommend against getting one, and I will not be buying another Lenovo product until they fix this one. (And I do mean the one I physically have. Sure, I’ve opened it up multiple times to address their shoddy wiring layout, but only because searching online about the issue returned dozens of stories of people going to them and getting the runaround, and wanting to get some more value out of my money than 3 months of laptop use.)
I know Lenovo makes a lot of stuff, but I can’t recall if I’ve ever had one of their products I was happy with. Maybe a chromebook.
I’ve tried a number of the entry level drawing options. Like sub $100 options. I can tell you that every single one was worse than printer paper, colored pencils, and a cheap scanner.
I get the idea of saving images for later work, and how that doesn’t scale with what I just described. I’ll also say that my favorite image editor is Gimp. I don’t necessarily like it, but the price is right and it mostly works. Mostly I mention Gimp so that those listening know where I’m coming from, ie not an artsy background.
Anyway, cheap scanner, printer paper paper, colored pencils. Not great, yet still WAY better than the cheap drawing devices I’ve tried. As in you can produce an image with the colored pencils, paper, scanner. Usually the cheap devices I’ve tried so not result in even a single image before I give up.
Miko might present a bigger recognition problem for long time readers here. We saw her with long hair starting from chapter 13, page 30. But she’s only been in 12 updates since then before today, Two had her hair covered enough it wasn’t so obvious it was long, and the last six were her avatar, not her, and we’re used to her avatar having long hair. She’s been in 51 total updates. Seven of those were entirely virtual, so they don’t really count. So we’ve seen her with long hair in 6 out of 44 appearances, and we last saw her something like 8 months ago, or actual her about 11 months ago.
Except if you archive dive like me, you’ve seen her a lot more recently, and all of that’s been with short hair. Sigh.
I like the idea of character tags. The achieved purpose of the database I maintain for this comic is to provide me with the equivalent of character tags. I had other purposes when I started that project, but success on those has been partial at best.
Audience maintained tags have an issue of not being able to know who is worthwhile to track, and not necessarily knowing who is who, especially the SC grunts in their situation armor. Though, to be fair, a lot of times, the artist doesn’t want to reveal identities immediately, and there are times when characters intended to be incredibly minor throw-away characters have become someone important.
My biggest concern about audience maintained tags is the artist time taken in setting them up, and seconded by just the general uncertainty of them. A proper system would only let us put text strings on comics, which then get linked to all matching strings on other comics. But I could still see a spammer choosing to tag particular old comics with their product name, just to get the name out there. Admittedly, they could do the same with comments, as they demonstrate too frequently. At least with comments, they’re given the bait of being able to include hyperlinks that flags them for moderation and they get removed before anyone besides the artist sees them.
I could see a system thwarting spammers by restricting the tags to the known characters, but that becomes very frustrating when a new character’s introduced, and the artist doesn’t remember to add the new character’s name to the list. Also, it precludes providing additional tags, such as ‘SC’ for containing members of situation containment, ‘magic’ for having a shown magic effect, as well as tracking background characters to see if maybe they’ll become someone important some day.
That said, tracking background characters to see if maybe they’ll become someone important some day is probably best left to personal databases, as I could see a lot of disagreement about things, for example, whether either of the bureau officers from chapter 0 page 23 have reappeared anywhere in the background. I mean, they’ve been characters who *could* make a reappearance for something close to 570 pages now. That’s a lot of opportunity. The artwork’s changed enough that they’d be drawn very differently now, so they’d be hard to recognize. There’s been a lot of vaguely drawn characters on a lot of pages, as many have background characters intentionally drawn to be nigh impossible to recognize.
I will attempt to make this comment as opaque as possible.
2nd Panel, Kyle speaking, 3rd bubble.
The “but” after “secrets” can be an interjection, as opposed to a conjunction. It makes the sentences smaller and less confusing.
The “for” after “telling” is a conjunction for a subordinate clause. Coincidentally, “telling” could be the verb of the subordinate clause. But since it falls outside the subordinate clause, probably not.
I truly enjoy reading your work. The conversations are so natural and flowing, while being informative and progressing the story; they are a delight to read. The comic format allows the audience to observe the scenery and characters without having to read all of that, so their focus can remain on the story.
Grammar, for your comic, is mostly superfluous nonverbal indications of meaning. My two thoughts on this page are:
A comma should be a period.
And two words have been reversed.
That is, you’re saying the second panel, last bubble should possibly state
“You’ve never been much for telling Peter’s secrets. But can you at least tell me if you’ve talked to Taki? Is she safe?”
Oh, wait I may have caught one you didn’t.
It’s pretty impressive how well these come out when trying to type up a transcript of the comic. Pity I don’t have time to do those anymore. :/
You did. I missed that “t” on “at”.
I’m a really big proponent of reading things aloud for catching stuff lIke that. Your mouth slows your brain down enough that your eyes actually ‘see’ all of the words.
Oh, if only that were the case for me.
What happens instead of my brain slowing down is I think about other things and forget what I’m saying. I get to say however much will fit in my buffer on a particular topic, and then it’s anybody’s guess whether my brain will be back on topic in time to pick up the thread again.
I’m thus far better with conversing through text, as I can remind myself about what I’ve been saying. Also, I think I do get some actual brain slowdown effect with that.
In the corner of the room, a figure stands, robed in strange garments; and, from his mouth, concealed in the shadow of a deep hood, come the words “well done little sister. Welcome, to the way”
Tags would be nice, but not necessary