Giant Killer Robots

Dom has been doing some drawing, and Nagging Adam to write some story, this devolved into the usual arguments about ... well almost anything.

Adam seems to have spent a little time writing a bit of the story involving evil nazi scientists, and Mad Jack Fuller's tomb in Brightlingsea...

I myself have forgotten all about story, and have been drawing giant killer robots.

Different strokes from incontinent pens

I've been playing with a variety of inks and pens.

My old trusty Rotring isograph 0.5mm gives good service, though like a small child it needs it's bottom wiped a fair bit, and causes a huge amount of mess in the process... I also have to cheat to get a variety of line weight when using it.

The same is true of the pigment fibre tips pens.. I have tried to get Pigma pens in the UK but no luck, the best I've found are PILOTs, the Edding ones are nice but run out too quickly ... they are also both complete buggers if I try to put a wash over the top, as they bleed.

My mixture of Manga inks seem to provide a solution, but are a bit gluey to put in the Rotring so I have to use a dip pen... The pic here is done with a DELTER SAJi nib, which doesn't quite give enough flex...and unfortunately seems to have a leaky bladder, causing ink blobs... sigh.

My old set of Waverley nibs (some inherited from the Victorian era and really quite ancient), give a good flex, but are hard to wield round the page.

So the experimentation continues, I've done 10 pages of the comic for the UK webcomix thing, and they'll all get tweaked through photoshop or mango studio...

part two

Muddy, muddy, muddy

The Joy of Comicpress

Squarespace looks lovely, like a thing knitted by Steve Jobs when whilst recovering from being poorly. It has lots of little widgetty things that slip and slide with attractive animation, and is as easy as pie to make look gorgeous, like a plate of polished rubies.... BUT, I can't get it to do what ComicPress does.

Comic Press is a theme for Wordpress, and makes managing a webcomic even easier than pie... but sadly it is as tricky as an oiled fox to get it to look right.

This is because of CSS, which snuck into the world while I wasn't looking years ago, and which I have obviously failed to grasp.

(except in a cheaty copying other peoples sorta way).

However because of the management stuff Comicpress will be the CMS for Strange Biros comic, and from the reviews I've seen, Laughing Squid will be the Host.

So sometime soon I'll stump up for the hosting.. I was going to run all the old 1991 Strange Biros comics on the site as a run up to the web comix thing, but looking at them now, I'm not sure the writing holds up... still better to have something than nothing.