Oy - Celebrating ONE YEAR on the web!

Tomorrow is May 5th! What’s that mean? Cinco de Mayo, right? Well, yeah… but it also happens to contain three comics related events all on the same day:

1. Free Comic Book Day

2. Cartoonist’s Day

3. Online Comics Day

Support one or all three! For me comics are comics no matter where they’re displayed. But some people get all technical about it, “Webcomics are bad because they’re not newspaper comics (or vice versa),” or, “Comic books are a whole separate animal then comic strips, therefore if I’m into comic strips I cannot read comic books (again, or vice versa),” or worst of all, “I see no value in comics of any form because they’re for kids (no comment.)” My personal advocacy for comics being online has more to do with progress than preference. Ultimately, I treat comic books and comic strips on equal terms: if I like the individual content then I like it. But I’m not gonna wash out the whole medium or segregated portions thereof from my list of things I like just because I didn’t care for last week’s Penny Arcade or Zits or Action Comics (I’m not dissing PA, Zits or Supes, they’re just examples.)

Which is why this Saturday is going to be an exciting day.
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This morning I had a pleasant surprise: Alan Gardner over at The Daily Cartoonist has summed up the last two years of the site and listed The top 10 commentators. Somehow, I squeaked past Norm Feuti of Retail to rank in at #9!

Now, to shoot for being #8 next year!

Taken from http://stereotypist.livejournal.com, this comic easily sums up how I feel sometimes while creating my own comics.

I just happened to pick up a newspaper this week to read a real, live comics section for the first time in about two years. Inside was a very strangely drawn Sally Forth which I suggested for Comics Coast to Coast’s “You Got Some ‘Splainin’ To Do” segment, and they actually used it! I also left them a message on the Comics Coast to Coast hot-line, which they unfortunately played on the air, lol, so you can hear how I sound.

In addition to all that, they interviewed Amy Lago, comics editor at the Washington Post Writers Group, which was incredibly awesome to listen to.

So take a listen (theblogComics.com mentions aren’t until the last portion, but I highly recommend listening to the Amy Lago interview regardless if you want to hear my stuff or not):

Comics Coast to Coast - #19 - The Amy Lago Show (also featuring, ME!)

Since every other comics site on the Internet is mentioning it, I guess I’ll mention it as well: If you go to this site: http://ignatz.brinkster.net/cbillart.html, you will find a treasure trove of Bill Watterson work created prior to and during his Calvin and Hobbes run, like the hilarious cartoon above. It’s really interesting to see how his style pretty much hadn’t changed over the years. And seeing non-strip Calvin and Hobbes artwork is like seeing the “lost episodes” of a sitcom.

So, check it out!

Here’s another very funny stereotypist comic:

How to Fail

Tuesday’s Sheldon comic (check out the last costume): http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/071030.html

Two updates to the site to report today due to my upgrade to a (finally) working 3-column ComicPress theme…

1) TAG CLOUD

Just below the Comic Title/Blog section is a new Flash-based Tag Cloud. You simply hold the mouse cursor above, below or to the sides of the box to rotate to the tag (or, “category”) you want to read. For example, click on “The Crow’s Nest (COMIC)” and you’ll be taken to the archives of The Crow’s Nest.

The reason for this isn’t just to be fancy. I generally don’t believe in being fancy at the sacrifice of function. The practical reason is simply that the default Tag Cloud in the old sidebar setup would trail off the edges of the background which, to me, looked sloppy. Then in this new setup, it would knock the right sidebar to the bottom; negating the purpose of even having a second sidebar. I couldn’t find a way to constrain the text version (if anyone knows of a way, let me know!), but ran across Tag Cumulus in my search for a solution.

The downside is I have to be really careful what tags I use, otherwise the rotating cloud gets cluttered. Fortunately, WordPress 2.5 is supposed to have tag management, so if use too many different tags, I should be able to easily condense them.

2) RSS Changes

For anyone subscribed to theblogComics.com RSS feed, you may have noticed that the comic itself no longer shows up in your reader and are met by this picture:

There is a threefold reason for this:

I - Technical: The new 3-column theme I’m using has the RSS comic blocking built-in. I’m not sure how to turn it off, but I was considering doing it anyway so I’m not going to worry about it for now.

II - Financial: I run this site and make these comics for free (less than free if you consider hosting costs). I will never forcibly charge you, the reader, for reading the comics themselves on this site (note: outside this site would be another matter). I hope to offer books and other interesting, viable merchandise in the future when I’m more established. In the meantime, to offset the costs I will need to implement some advertising options on this site. Many web advertising companies base how much your site it “worth” on your site visitor hit count. And if everyone is reading my comics via a reader, they are not visiting the site, which means a lower hit count.

Personally, I don’t like it, even I prefer reading webcomics directly in an RSS reader, but it’s the system that exists.

III - Artistic: I think the philosophy of “infinite canvas” is flawed. There, I said it, Scott McCloud… “Infinite Canvas” = “Infinite Scrolling” = “Infinitely Obnoxious”. Yes, you can make comics as big as you want on the web. The question is, should you? The answer is, no. If your story requires more panels than can comfortably fit on the screen at once (there’ll always be some overlap due to browser size, toolbars, etc.) then that’s what a NEXT button is for.

I don’t agree with their heavy handed contracts, but that’s one thing DC Comics’ Zuda Comics got right…

No matter how big someone’s monitor is, they still have a 4:3 or 16:9 box constraining their view. You go beyond those boundaries by too much, and your comic is not as enjoyable as it could be. Granted, comic nerds like me will read it if it’s good no matter the dimensions. But if a casual reader has to work too hard just to read it, they’ll probably tune out after the first strip.

That being said, there’s also no excuse for having tiny comics when you don’t have the dimensions of a newspaper page limiting you. I used to post my comics at 700dpi wide in order to cater to the the lowest common denominator of 800×600 monitors. I have upped my newest cartoons to 900dpi wide to make their new viewable standard minimum 1024×768 monitors; viewable on the site that is. Many RSS readers have sidebars and junk in the way, making the comic hard to read without scrolling sideways.

That, and you can’t see my spiffy new sky fade background in the reader! So, technical and financial reasons aside, the site itself is simply the best place to view the comics. And like a so-called “Fullscreen” (a.k.a. “Chop ‘ n Crop”) DVD, not giving you the best viewing option is more a disservice than anything.

I tried to add some better navigation to the site, and it messed something up big time! I had a backup of the 2-column version of the site, but not the 3-column version, but I think it looks good like this now, so we’ll leave it. And for those reading via an RSS reader, this is why the comics are suddenly showing up directly in your reader again.

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I signed up for Twitter a long time ago, but didn’t really “get it”. But I gave it a second chance and now I find it’s a fun way to keep up with other people, and people to keep up with me. It even lets me auto-post blog updates. Follow Me: http://twitter.com/theblogcomics

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For 24 Hour Comics Day 2007 I had hoped to provide a live stream of the comics being created. But the day came up and I hadn’t finished researching how to do it. Then I forgot about it. But yesterday, Scott “PvP” Kurtz mentioned in his blog that he was looking for a way to do it and asked readers for suggestions. So I ventured to try to figure it out… again, and settled on Ustream. I went to tell Kurtz, only to find he was using the same service! Now I’m setup to do the same…

If I remember to turn on the stream, I should be live most weekdays from approx. 5 AM - 8 AM PST (give or take half an hour, lol), and infrequently on the weekends. There’s even a one click Twitter update button that notifies anyone following me that I’m streaming. You can watch it right on the main page of theblogComics.com or go to the this link: http://www.ustream.tv/theblogComics. To participate in the chat, just go to that Ustream link, or click the word balloon on the video frame here on the site.

In case anyone’s wondering why there’s no comic today, here’s what’s going on: As you may know by now, I’m going daily with “Oy” on June 29th. To prevent confusion for anyone reading through the “Oy” archives in the future, I am moving the current weekly run of Retro Wednesdays and archive, plus, the BarnRats archive and the Zap the Zero archive, all to a separate site. I was going to move The Crow’s Nest along with them and end the series, but I came up with more stories for the characters that I don’t want to just throw away.

So, I will be building a third site for my comics and publishing The Crow’s Nest weekly on Mondays for the foreseeable future starting June 30th. That means 9 comics a week, people! Though they’re spread across three separate sites which may sound like a pain, centralizing my work like I have for the last year has ended up being MORE confusing. So, in the long run it will make navigation and branding easier.

Unfortunately, this means actually building a site for The Crow’s Nest, which takes time. This has resulted in the need to put The Crow’s Nest into a one month hiatus. But, Oy will continue three days a week (Monday-Wednesday-Friday for the first few weeks in June) until the new schedule kicks in.

Please bear with me as I make these changes, and look out for Oy to go daily starting June 29th, and The Crow’s Nest publishing weekly starting June 30th! Retro Wednesdays (currently running BarnRats Classics) will continue to run weekly as usual next Wednesday, but on the new site: theblogComics.com/oldies (site is still under construction, but the comics are already set to publish for awhile).