T Campbell's Blog

So says Scott Kurtz, and he's right. Ethel Gibbs, the 100-year-old neighbor I've mentioned before, had a stroke Friday night. Her housekeeper Dora found her at the bottom of the stairs the next morning... and she hadn't pressed the "panic button" that was supposed to bring aid from neighbors and friends. Dora summoned her grandson, who is now a doctor, and they cleaned her up and called out the paramedics.

(Dora seems to have missed her calling as a forensic scientist. She reconstructed the accident that befell Ethel with the precision of CSI and the storytelling energy of that psychologist at the end of Psycho. She's nearing retirement age herself but as she says, "My husband says to me, maybe God meant for you to be around a 100-year-old woman. It'll give you wisdom, it'll make you strong." It's certainly made her strong-- stick of dynamite, that one.)

Ethel's doing pretty well right now... I'm visiting her this morning.

Daisy is also doing much better-- her appetite is back and she's excited to be going outside again. Taking her medicine is much easier for her when it's wrapped in little pieces of turkey.

Both of them have gotten through the scary part for now. But they're still older than they were yesterday.

I pet Daisy. I visit Ethel.

There is never enough time.

Okay, so it's just a new series on Clickwheel, but it's exciting to ME.

Clickwheel : Narbonic.

Read yourself 108 panels of romance, misery and heartbreak as only Shaenon can do it. Hilariously.

Yes, because THIS will simplfy EVERYTHING!

Well, it was my pleasure.

Although considering the body of research that this master's thesis joins, I don't think I provided any inspiration except in the sense that the monkeys inspired Jane Goodall. I woulda given my left forefinger to do these kinds of studies in college. Do us proud, Michelle.

Stuff happens to me sometimes that I can't blog about right then and there. This last week has been full of those kinds of things. Some have been really insanely good and others have been more difficult, but I think they'll work out for the best. I'll log them all, but only when the time is right.

Up for today: a few notes on something I'm calling "Clickwheel Labs" and the finishing moves on the scripts for Divalicious. And the delayed test of Balloonist. And one other thing. I'll show you later.

Clickwheel's privacy policy is in place. Written by William with edits by me. Pretty standard, really.

Clickwheel has a new homepage with, among other things, a "featured comic" section. Check it out and hit "refresh" a few times to see it in action!

The Fabjob Guide to Become a Cartoonist (whose title always seemed like improper grammar to me) is getting a divorce from my writing career.

When I wrote it, I was still fairly new at the whole webcomics thing, and the webcomics thing was still a fairly new business model. Comic-book sales had stabilized but the manga/bookstore market hadn't really taken off, and the perils of religious controversy hadn't gripped the market for editorial cartoons. In short, the business has changed, and the Guide hasn't. (I've also gotten smarter in the last five years, honestly... I understand markets better.) It's reached the point where both Fabjob and I feel the Guide's dangerously out of date.

I would like to revise or rewrite a Guide like this, but I simply don't have the time right now, and I definitely can't do it for the royalty share I accepted five years ago. For a while we thought Tyler Sticka and I would be able to rework the Guide together, but for various reasons that didn't pan out. So, after failing to fob it off and failing to take a jab at it myself, it's time to move on.

So Fabjob is buying out the rights to the Guide from me, and all in all I couldn't be happier... well, not without Fabjob deciding to offer me a fortune to update it instead. Let's keep it real, eh?

If you're interested in it as a historical curiosity, pick it up before FJ puts out a new edition. Otherwise, return to your lives!

The subject head above describes the sort-of-spec project I've been working on for most of the day (I'll tell you the title soon enough-- I let it slip at Ubercon, but I'd rather wait till we've got art here). Right now it has some good scenes, but there needs to be more dramatic tension, especially considering the subject matter. Hope to fix that.

Got a chance to beta-test Balloonist! I'll report back with results later tomorrow.

Off now to see The Pink Panther with Greg and Sara. Have a pleasant evening...

Seriously!

Try this quick, before the lawyers descend.

There's a line in the last few Rip & Teri strips about "accomplishing the impossible" which sure seemed appropriate this weekend as delay after delay struck my attempts to polish off the lettering. The copy of QuarkXPress that I've been using to letter comics since... goodness, since the first Fans lettering job, back in 1998... is finally glitching itself into non-functionality.

This last Rip & Teri lettering is also my last lettering for a while, which means I have time to step back and assess what tools to use in the future. I know a lot of my friends use Adobe Illustrator, and I've been looking with interest at the nascent lettering program Balloonist. (Still trying to find out exactly how "nascent" it is...)

Of course, folks like Ryan North and R. Stevens have their own solutions specific to the nature of their comics, but I wonder what the best system might be for the rest of us.

Still musing that, right now. No hard answers yet. Might be one for a roundtable, might be one for interviews, might require trial and error. Your thoughts are always appreciated.

Meantime, here's a page as I lettered it, prior to David Willis' colors. (I never said I was a GREAT letterer, by the way. In fact I see about three flaws now, and I'm wondering if a more advanced tool might help with those. Font is CCAstroCity, by Starkings and Comicraft.)

There's a new poll concerning stemming in OhNoRobot.

Didn't get as much done yesterday as I'd've liked. First a quick errand to my next-door neighbor turned into a lengthy conversation. She was very interested in what I was up to and I always enjoy talking to her, and before I realized it three hours had flown by. That would be remarkable with anyone, but this was Ethel Gibbs, my 100-year-old neighbor.

After that, Daddy's PT Cruiser overheated, so he needed a pickup, and the usually well-oiled machine that is our family had a few glitches. Little Brother Graham called just after I left, so I couldn't reach Mom on my cell phone, and Dad didn't have his with him, and it turns out that Mom's directions weren't perfect... that ended up being another two hours or so.

I did get the ONR jobs more or less done, though, although it'll take time to see results on some of 'em. Right now, burning thru e-mails.

Spent most of yesterday on cleaning, which means the R&T and ONR chores have been moved to today. It's a surprising amount of work just moving things around.

Daisy seems to be doing better with medication. I carried her down to the beach today and she explored enthusiastically for about twenty minutes where before she could barely stand up for two or three.

Oh, and I've been meaning to tell you: Clickwheel is going to be commissioning work at an average rate of $5 a panel. Sometimes less and sometimes more depending on mitigating circumstances, but $5 is now officially our "standard rate." Where relevant, the "standard royalty" is 25%.

This is not a replacement for what Clickwheel's already doing, nor will it ever be one. This is an expansion. The company's always going to serve adapted, creator-owned webcomics, but for some of our upcoming plans, it needs a few properties we can call our own. Clickwheel's already taken steps to commission a few pieces which I'll tell you about in the coming weeks.

If this kind of thing interests you, well... you know how to find me!

Comixpedia links this extremely interesting set of unusually-structured comics. If you're interested in such work, I'd also recommend looking at My Life with Pets.

Got the Divalicious songs done last night, though the last one, a Christian-pop ballad, gave me quite the time. The challenge is to come up with something that's over the top, but not TOO over the top: you want 'em to snicker but then you want 'em to think of the singer as a person you laugh at, not an ambulatory joke book. The old Jesus-as-romantic-lead theme seemed just cliche enough...

My love is a pure love
My love is the One
His arms as strong as a raging waterfall
His touch as gentle as the wings of a swan
He's as bright as a Hawking and sharp as a hawk
And He'll follow his lady wherever she runs
And He loves me with the fire of fifty thousand suns

MasterWriter's growing on me, I have to admit, but I'm still thinking a lot about how to improve the rhyming dictionary. There are over seven million words in our language, and sure, some of them don't rhyme with anything, but I think 100,000 is a pretty small sample in that context (especially since some of them are phrases).

Lots to do today, including Rip & Teri lettering, OhNoRobot chores and early spring cleaning. We'll see how much gets done, eh?

And working on a laptop that I actually know how to start. Thanks to Michelle Calka for her heroic efforts diagnosing the problem with it, during the writing exercise.

Thanks also to Michelle for preserving this Super Scrabble game. Lee had a lead for most of the game, but I finally got lucky with two triple word scores and "VIDIOTIC."

Had a lengthy-- even for me-- chat with Bryan Prindiville about his work and Clickwheel and the possible intersect of the two.

Spent the last two days blazing through Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (not his best, though there were a lot of neat ideas and he writes about Web connectivity the way Melville writes about whaling) driving down to D.C. and thence to Virginia Beach (where I'm staying with my folks for a few months).

Got to see Ashby Gunter, an old college chum who seems to have found his niche in bookstore management. The last time I saw him was just after his marriage when his wife was already quite heavy with child; that was a year ago, where does the time go? Shbee had been holding an Ultimate Spider-Man hardcover for me since then, along with the change from the money I gave him to buy it from his bookstore. Knowing Shbee, this'll probably be the last time we talk to each other for another year. It's not just me: he's a really nice guy but if you can't hunt him down in person, don't wait for him to return your calls.

Dave Belmore and I met up in the evening and recorded another podcast after spending about an hour debating the merits of 'casting about the Denmark controversy. I lost. Dave maintains that it's the same kind of censorship we've protested on smaller scales before, and what he had to say then hasn't changed. On the other hand, I think I won the debate about Smallville, which you'll get to hear fairly soon. Lest this seem too much like a competition, I've got to say that the idea behind the latest 'cast online is awesome and pretty much all Dave's.

We need to do a bit of catch-up with both Meanwhile and Rip & Teri, and I anticipate the usual confab with William Simons, but most of today's reserved for songwriting. Divalicious needs about six more sets of lyrics. Time to see if MasterWriter justifies its price tag at all...

Trapped at Ubercon with Phil and his buddies, Lee Cherolis, Michelle Calka and Alishia Cameron. It's been an enjoyable con despite getting eighteen million tons of snow dumped onto us starting late Saturday and continuing into this afternoon. The roads should be passable by tomorrow and I should get home on Tuesday.

Ubercon has been earning a rep for treating its guests well-- which is quite a turnaround, because two conventions ago it had been earning a rep for treating its guests poorly, including some pretty high-profile webcartoonists. The turnaround, I should stress, is a really complete one. I have never been so well-fed away from home before.

The writing exercise was a partial success: it didn't really draw the curious spectators I was hoping for, but I learned I can write in public and write off the cuff when I have to. This turned out to be a Penny and Aggie piece that I wasn't expecting-- about getting snowed in, of all things. I'll discuss it with Gisele but probably refine it into a longer piece for late this year or next. We have some burning questions to resolve in that series, first...

I've finished dialoguing Divalicious except for the song lyrics. Still six songs to go.

To that end, I'm trying out MasterWriter and so far I'm not all that impressed. Its rhyming dictionary itself is excellent, way better than RhymeZone or Rhymer, and there's not much wrong with its dictionary proper, but the thesaurus is a half-assed affair and the other features are either hackneyed or seem to have nothing to do with songwriting. Allegedly this is a top-of-the-line product, used by songwriters like Rob Thomas and Trent Reznor; certainly the competitors don't look any better. So why is its tech so lame?

I don't care what O'Reilly says: it doesn't flow. You keep losing visual contact with the song you're composing, which should be central to the experience at all times. The rival program Rhyme & Verse has a much better interface, but makes up for it by having no dictionary or thesaurus at all.

Both of these programs are little more than their rhyming dictionaries, and sorry, but that's just not good enough. Would it really be that difficult to set up a "Rhythm Finder" that automatically counted and bolded the syllables of lines as you wrote them, so you could keep a poem in iambic pentameter or a song in whatever rhythm you had chosen?

Then there's the ease with which I stump them just by mentioning "Shanna." Like you and I can't figure out any words that rhyme with THAT. Would it be SO hard to work up a little A.I. intuition to help the program along when it encounters such words? (Of course it would be stumped occasionally-- English has at least seven different pronunciations for words that end in the string "ough"-- but for something like "Shanna" it's a simple question: does it rhyme with "banana" or "botswana?" And other words like "Jay-Z" are even more obvious.)

For that matter, why can't we add our own words to this rhyming dictionary? If we could, we users could refine it over a period of years into the kind of tool that we'd just have to upgrade instead of replacing with a competitor's model. This makes commercial sense, right? And if we ruin the dictionary, that's our lookout.

And good as MasterWriter's rhyming dictionary is, do you know what would be even better? A macro that fastened onto the dictionaries in OneLook that had pronunciation guides, converted all words into their raw pronunciations (you know, with schwas and emphasis marks), grouped them by rhymes and then converted them back. If you could apply such a macro to a large collection of words like the dictionary in Microsoft Word (a dictionary that you *can* add words to, if you so choose) then hey presto, INSTANT rhyming dictionary. Or if you applied the macro to sort by sentences instead of words, then you could do cool things like this with all kinds of digital text, including OhNoRobot data. Why hasn't anyone done this yet?

(And if they have, why don't I know about it?)

Come on! It's 2006! The future is now! Chop, chop!

More! Better!

I'll be following the example of Harlan Ellison and doing an open-ended public writing exercise at Ubercon this weekend, as well as playing Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary, fielding questions on webcomics, eating ice cream and generally looking smug.

Let's see what light OhNoRobot can shed on cartoonists' perspectives on Islam, which is something of a hot-button topic right now and one of my long-standing interests.

Beyond the Punchline summarizes the current mess.

Indie Rock Pete reminds us that for some Americans, all "Muslim" is is the new "Asian chick."

Contrariwise, Wondermark catches a holy Muslim in an unguarded moment.

Monkey Law has a couple perspectives on the Jerusalem issue.

Still pretty much "outside looking in," but it's a start.

Got to see the Super Bowl commercials with my retired ad-executive father last night. Several had us in stitches, but I think this uproarious 1-minute spot for Lost takes the prize.

I'm still puzzling over exactly WHY it works so well. I mean, it could be construed as disrespectful both to late singers and to dead and dying and doomed TV characters. And yet I just could not stop laughing! Perhaps it's because the piece cuts right to the dirty little secret of horror... the fact that horror is actually fun.

Purists may prefer the three-minute version, which I thought diluted the impact just a bit, especially with its minor-key ending. But both of these are great examples of how to reinforce your position when you're at the top of your game.

Kristofer Straub has asked me to be a little more clear in my statements about Clickwheel, so I'm gonna do that this time. And maybe it'll make up in some small measure for not having what I expected to have.

We've been workin' on a "download all comics" button, and a secondary "download multiple comics" button. I think this'll be a first step toward addressing the concerns raised in Fleen, because what's a lot of trouble to go to for four panels is considerably less trouble to go to for collections of 60 to 2,000 panels.

Meanwhile, Kenny Grant and I looked at it Monday and yesterday, and we came up with a couple of ideas that would make this "download multiple comics/download all comics" feature even better...

...at the expense of blowing the original deadline all to heck.

Really, it's more important that we make Clickwheel as good as possible than that Clickwheel always aligns with my statements about how things are gonna be. But I still feel guilty for that "48 hours" promise, which it now becomes clear I shouldn't have made. I keep trying not to make promises until I know they're gonna be kept, but I guess I have to accept that occasionally, something shows up you didn't expect. Software development is a new field for me, too, and I'm still learning the factors that go into a release.

So, let's revise this:

Kenny Grant is hard at work on "download all" and "download multiple" features for all Clickwheel comics. It now looks like these will be released in a week or so, but no guarantees. :-) Once we're done with that, we're going to turn our attention to the download process itself and how to streamline that. Howard Tayler had some penetrating insights, I thought, which we'll have to address directly.

There's a lot else we're working on. I'll be pulling back the veil of secrecy on much of it, one inch at a time.

The latest Webcomics Examiner features a roundtable discussion on experimentation in webcomics with me, Cat Garza, Eric Burns, Eric Millikin, Tim Godek, Bob Stevenson, Alexander Danner and Philip Sandifer. Neal Von Flue moderates. It's a contentious discussion: Neal smartly assembled some people with widely diverging perspectives on a controversial issue, and that makes it more of an interesting read.

I don't have as many insights as some of these guys and I tend to clam up at the middle of the discussion. My personal highlight:

Scientists talk about the "observer effect" diluting the purity of their results (the most famous example being Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle). Comics are all "observer effect." No observer, nothing worth discussing. Making yourself happy is not enough.

Thanks to Eric Millikin for the portrait (at right). "Primordial soup." Hee hee.

Here.

Some productive chatter in the Clickwheel forums right now, particularly a poll to help decide our image file format.

"Jainaway Pain-Away." I remember that.

Thanks to William G for pointing out this latest exercise in pay-per-download. I wonder: now that the CDs are going off the market, would this be a viable business move for Fans?

You'll probably like this blog.

Daisy is not in pain, but is still quite feeble. I just helped Daddy get her into the car so he can take her to the vet. We'll see.

Perhaps it's a job requirement of mine to be an optimist, but when even your most vocal critics say things like "I think Clickwheel is going to blossom," (check the comments section) then even in the midst of our biggest negative press to date, I feel pretty good. Of course, having the ace in the hole I referred to in the last post helps.

What Jeff and Kris is doing is cool. Clickwheel's real enemies are people like the script kiddie who tried to use our support form to bring down the site. He failed, as all evil eventually must.

Boy, Fleen has sure shown me. Less than a month after I took it to task for inaccuracies in its coverage of OhNoRobot and Clickwheel, Gary Tyrrell and Jeff Lowrey seem to have taken this as a challenge and greatly improved.

I do feel like I owe Fleen's founder Jonathan Rosenberg a bit, considering he caught me in not one but three embarassing gaffes in the last few weeks (one involving Lowrey, the other two inaccuracies in the History manuscript, a manuscript I've shared with him and a few select others). But this isn't about debt, and unless he's more involved than is my understanding, it's not really Rosenberg I'm praising.

The fact is that with Nathaniel Payne distracted with family matters, Eric and (by extension) Wednesday distracted with a new job, and Phil distracted by school, the Fleensters are in a pole position to own the webcomics blogging scene in '06, and I'm beginning to think they've got the ability.

Of course, it's not a competition, riiiight? :-) :-) :-) :-) OMG J/K LOL

All I know is, it made my bookmark list last Saturday... just before Lowrey's latest comments on Clickwheel. And this time, Fleen really proved the value of its concept. Fleen, in case you forgot, is the blog that's NOT written by cartoonists or aspiring cartoonists. It's written by readers. And the reader's perspective that Jeff brings to the process is exactly what Clickwheel needs in order to grow.

Of course I like my public praise effusive and my critical assessments private, but we don't always get to choose such things. It heartens me to know that the issues Jeff raises are things that we've raised among ourselves at Clickwheel, and are preparing to address.

In some cases... address them quite soon.

Like, within 48 hours soon.

Watch this space.

Posted a self-evaluation and call for advice on the topic of promoting OhNoRobot. If you like the engine, head on over and add your thoughts.

This is a strange mention. The Spanish quote means "to live on in the hearts of those left behind is not to die," which is a sentiment I'm pretty sure didn't originate with me-- and I can't remember ever writing something like that, although I suppose it's possible. But if you're going to get misquoted, get misquoted along with the best. Confucius! Napoleon! Shakespeare! Can't argue with THAT company...

(Update: Apparently it's a quotation by Thomas Campbell, like I don't get confused with "Tom Campbell" often enough. Awwww. I'll leave you to reflect on the irony of a 19th-century poet who speaks about immortality having his words misattributed to a 21st-century comics scribe.)

Researching Farris Hassan (the "American teenager in Iraq") for a short Penny and Aggie piece. This interview is utterly fascinating to me, as it really paints a picture of the person-- not yet a man, not quite a boy-- who captivated the world for a few brief days with acts that were equally brave and foolish, unquestionably conscientious but not as reasoned as he occasionally insists. Aggie-watchers can see why I'd be interested.

My favorite part of the story, though, has to be the mistake that Hassan's best friends made when they tried to stop him. I won't spoil it for you now, but that's very likely to inspire a gag in the strip.

83ish trial strips for the comic strip Unfit, currently written and drawn by Mike Belkin, whom some suspect of actually being Scott Adams.

This article (registration required) *should* inspire me to be thinking about audio and comics, since audio's what the iPod does, but instead I find myself thinking about smell and comics. The piece says that while hearing can most effectively change your mood, your existing mood is usually more influenced by smell. And I'll buy that...

The first issue of Faans arrived on my doorstep when I was living in a ramshackle rooming house in Savannah, Georgia. Over 1,000 personal copies, not counting the ones that went straight to the direct market... I was ambitious. I opened up a box, pulled out the book, read it and SMELLED that newly-printed ink on the pages.

The rush of accomplishment mixed with the rush of discovery-- I had never smelled comics like that before! Everything was so fresh, sharp, NEW! The aroma filled the room. The characters seemed to harden and widen on the page, as if I could reach out and touch them.

I don't do drugs, but that morning, I was high.

(Of course the first convention I attended with those comics in tow brought me back down to Earth nicely, but that's another story.)

But the relationship between comics is more of a series of casual flings-- it's hard to place any constraints upon it. You can hardly count on being able to sell a comic "hot off the press" when you write one. Smell isn't an easy sense even to influence: if you wanted to do a smell-based comic you'd either have to perfume the pages a la Cosmopolitan, do a "scratch-and-sniff" children's book or control the environment in which the comics are read (not an option for most comics, but an interesting possibility for the Cartoon Art Museum, eh?)

There are always environmental factors at play in the enjoyment of art, and not all of them are within the artist's control. Bill Watterson had no idea that my girlfriend was going to give me The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book on a riverboat cruise, the salt and mud (and her perfume) wafting into my face as I opened it, making me feel outdoorsy, manly, and elevating Watterson's celebration of immaturity to the status of something that a man would read. Mixing with her validation and making me feel as though I could pick and mix the best parts of childhood and adulthood.

Watterson couldn't have planned that. But it's worth thinking about this for podcartoonists as well as comic-book artists, since iPods and comic books can go almost anywhere now. Where would you like to be read? What would you like your readers to be doing as they read?

What would you like them to be putting up their noses?

Looks like Dave and I are pretty close to outlasting the rest of the Comics Podcasts Network, but if Meanwhile just doesn't come out often enough, check out the other casts listed there...

Archie Comics comparisons abound. I guess we knew what we were getting into there...

And man, Betty can never catch a break. Even in capsule reviews, she's just "that other chick."