Yet Another Web Comic

I went back to my Pentel brush last night, and I should not have.  I can’t keep a flood of ink from pouring out of the brush, which is really counter-productive when I’m trying to do most of my line work.  It’s not the end of the world, of course, but it does cause inconsistency in my work.  Given I only update twice weekly as it is, that’s not a great thing.

Speaking of which, I’m watching my traffic numbers slowly die.  I never sallied forth to set the world on fire, but it’s pretty clear that this strip just isn’t catching on.  It’s a shame, because I know who my loyal readers are and I know you really dig it, but it’s just not going beyond that.  I have so many creative endeavors I wish to pursue,  and only so little time to do so.  I’m considering ending the strip as we know it today.  I’m not sure if I will continue, but with less spit and polish (perhaps rough pencils, maybe just black and white?), if it will go on a long hiatus or if I will just kill it off, but over the next month I’m going to seriously consider the future of this strip and what I could do with the free time (and there’d be a lot of it) if I were to cut back or cut it out entirely.

All comments are, as always, quite welcome.  If I didn’t want to hear from you, I wouldn’t put it up on the web in the first place.  That’s what sketchbooks are for.

For those who have followed the strip for  a while, you probably have the inkling that he’s not in to fishing and she’s not in to shopping.  I tried to structure the joke so it worked with the characters but at the same time stood alone, so anyone who came in with stereotypical roles would still find it funny.  I’m not sure how it worked, but this is what I have.

As far as the backgrounds go, I tried a new technique.  I set the background flats, then took a textured brush at 50% opacity and applied colors on either side of the flats (about 15% saturation either way).  The texture and the opacity kept a good bit of the background color showing through.  Then, I took the airbrush tool and blended it all together.  The airbrush tool is pretty cool, but it’s obvious it’s going to take me a while to get used to.  The biggest issue I’d like to solve is that it will blend with colors in other layers (or white, if there are no active colors).  For the background, I’d like to not have the edges bleed white.  The technique will take some time to get used to, but I hope you enjoy it.

I am certainly not intending to make light of alcoholism here.  This is a comic, and I am doing the reader a disservice if I don’t have a joke at hand.  It’s a balancing act, and we will go deeper into the rabbit hole together as this story plays out.  It is a tale of frustration in the face of honest effort told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

My original thought when I scripted this piece was that it was funny.  Then, I thought it through and decided that since lobsters lack a central nervous system they’re probably safe from most of the intoxicating effects of alcohol.  I did some “research”, but a simple Google search (and re-search) did not return any conclusive work on lobster drunkenness.

It turns out lobsters have opiate receptors, which are a critical piece of the puzzle in many addictive chemicals such as alcohol.  My limited understanding is that alcohol triggers other processes in humans which lead to opiate receptor activation, so lobsters may be able to exhibit some of the effects of alcohol we see in humans, especially dependence, but that’s for people smarter than me with huge government grants to determine.

If nobody’s on this, then I want all local, State and Federal government research grant organizations to know that I will gladly study the intoxicating effects of alcohol on lobsters and compare them to a control group of humans.  This will require research assistants, lab equipment, and tons of experimental ethanol, not to mention half of the take must go to bribing…er, “buying association with”…er, overhead at a research university.  As such, I expect the research to take at least three years, with two one-year extensions if the work shows promise, and cost a million dollars each year.  I am willing to forego university affiliation for 500 grand a year.

Please get in touch: These are answers the world needs to have to questions nobody has thought to ask.