A Joke About Abecedarii

This might only be funny to you if you share Mike's sense of humor, but I cooked up a funny little device that I'm planning to run (at very small size) on the frontispiece and the corresponding blank page at the back ("backispiece"?) of the micro-mini ABC that I'm preparing for the MoCCA Festival.

Basically, it relies on a few of the most hackneyed connections in the "A is for Apple" genre...


Then, when the images reappear (after the actual meat of the book), new labels give the images new names and assign them to new letters of the alphabet.

I imagine it would be fun to put one of these together for the whole alphabet, coming up with three or four different solutions that relied on different levels of the lexicon, different degrees of specificity, or different languages. But I have two micro-minis to prepare, plus the next Matteu strip, so I don't think I'm going to engage in any more elaborate wordgames today.

Matteu (13-15)

For the next Matteu strips, Mike took advantage of the page break to move the story forward by a few minutes without showing them to us. (This is obviously something we're going to have to do from time to time, so we won't have to be drawing this story for twenty years.) I think the transition has done a lot to increase the tension of the story, even if the central conflict still hasn't really emerged.

Here's this week's installment of Matteu's story:



(As usual, I hope you'll click to enlarge and read.)

As you might be able to guess by looking at the last date (which seems to be Mike's date of composition, since he emailed the final copy to me just a few days ago), this brings us to the end of the three-strip pages. Now it's my challenge, I guess, to get another strip of this story done before this time next week, to keep up the regular updates.

Now's a great time for you lurking readers to pitch in and kibbitz a bit. Ask something about where the story is going: we may not know the answer until you pose the question.

Fun Color Cartoons for Stickers

Okay, so I wasn't done with Photoshop. When we publish "Stepan Crick and the Chart of the Possible" as postcards, it'll be available bundled up in an envelope, and we're thinking that we'll want some images to make the envelope look more like the cover of a comic.

...So we're going to take advantage of the cute little vinyl stickers that Moo.com makes, and put a few flashes of color there.

With that in mind, and realizing that Moo has to ship to me from England before MoCCA, I spent some time yesterday working up color images from Mike's "Forty-Nine Fantasy Folk" images (not all of them).

A few of them turned out pretty nicely. Here's a little gallery:


A SARACEN



A WODEWOSE



A STRANGE VISITOR FROM A SHADOW REALM



A CUTE LITTLE CYNOCEPHALOUS GUY

I might be getting the hang of this Photoshop business, I tell you...

Matteu (10-12)

I'm done coloring the images for the postcard version of our Elfworld submission. Once I get them back from the printer, I'll set up a post to sell them through the website; they'll also debut at MoCCA next month.

And, in what I hope will be my final wrangle with Photoshop for the week, I've put together the next page of the Matteu story. Things are starting to get tense, now, with a real conflict emerging, sort of...



(Please do click the image so you can read it.)

You may notice the cameo Mike and I are making in that first panel. Two free sets of the Stepan postcards for the first person who can identify our clan costumes! (Use the comments section and your knowledge of the comics Mike and I grew up reading.)

This is around the time when the chronological gaps between tiers started to get kind of long. I think more than a year passed between my two strips on this page. This is what you get when you mix comics with academia, I'm afraid.

I Wandered Lonely as a Crowd

I'm still coloring that Elfworld story, but I'm finally working on the last page, which is also the first page. You may remember that the first page is set in a bazaar. There's quite a crowd there.



This makes the job of coloring the thing very complicated. I wish I could say that I'd picked up enough facility with Photoshop to make this sort of thing quick and easy; alas, it looks like this page is going to take me about an hour per panel.

Why, a marketplace like this is enough to give a person agoraphobia! (Sorry. I'm sure Mike would have said it if I hadn't.)

I'll post more of the Matteu story tomorrow, by which time I should actually be finished with these postcards.

Comes the Apocalypse

Why does this exist?



And why, Lord, why does it feature Ozzy Osbourne?

The wretched details are found here.

If Sauron had won...

It's all on!