Aftermath - Part 2

It's fun, sometimes, when dialogue isn't necessary.

Back when I used to party (and when I had friends), usually I was the one who woke up around dawn on the bathroom floor.  It's just so nice and cold there, you know?

There's a trend in comics (and sometimes even webcomics) to have superheroes that are outside of the social "norm" (and I use that term as loosely as possible), and by that I mean Muslim superheroes, gay superheroes and so on.  The part that amuses me is, generally, when a gay superhero shows up in comics, she's a lesbian.  Right, because we're supposed to believe that you're featuring a lesbian superhero because you're standing up for the rights of lesbians, and not at all because you're catering to your male-dominated audience who wants to see pictures of girls kissing.  Compare the ratio of gay female characters to gay male characters.

What's more, generally when a male superhero comes out, it tends to be a character most readers could care less about.  Northstar, anybody?

I'm not claiming to be breaking any new ground here, of course.  Just an observation.  There are a few exceptions, of course.  And, to be fair, especially in the past year or two, comic writers finally seem to be getting wise to the lopsided representation of homosexual supers, and we're starting to see a lot more male couples.  I just read that, in X-Factor, Shatterstar and Rictor have gotten together.  Coincidentally, I also heard the title was cancelled this year.

I have / had a homophobic friend who's favorite character was Shatterstar.  I wonder if I should tell him? :-)

To Revel

I had to fight my way through this one, and I think it shows.  I came down with a bad cold the night before last, and all I wanted to do all day yesterday was curl up in a ball and sleep like the dead for a day or two.  I made a lot of stupid mistakes, most especially I had almost fully drawn Hydro standing behind Mr. Smith in the middle panel lighting up a bong, but I somehow managed to delete it and not realize this until I was well beyond the point where I could get him back.

Also, I just realized the irony of a character named Hydro smoking a bong. That wasn't even intentional.

Anyway, this comic is the first of... I don't know, ten strips?  Let's call it ten.  There'll be action.  There'll be drama.  There'll be inappropriate use of gardening equipment.

The Walters Files: Mr. Smith / Warmonger

Here's a weird thing: I started the Walter's Files at number 69 (Aiden's) just as a dumb joke, but it just so happens that now I've hit number 92 directly following the publishing of the strip of the same number.

I haven't used Mr. Smith too much.  He's a lot of fun.  I used aspects of the original Iron Man, and a dash of Robert Downey Jr., and a helping of what Jason cooked up, mixed it in a bowl and sprinkled generously with a helping of some kind of aging Latin Casanova character archetype, which seemed appropriate for Warmonger for some reason.

One of the main things that separates Smith from Iron Man is Jason and I never made any plans to have him injured as part of his origin  the way Stark was.  Without a life-threatening shard of metal having to be perpetually kept away from his heart, I think Stark would be a lot less grounded as a character, and the result would be something like Smith.

Gadgets are an integral part of many characters' repertoires, enough so that I felt there needed to be a class just about gadget-making.  Who better to be the instructor than the ultimate gadget-maker?  Plus, there are so many scientist superheroes in comics, many of whom are represented as parodies in Super U., only one of them can be the straight-up Science teacher.  My Mr. Fantastic parody, Spectacular, is better-suited for that role.  Warmonger is one of those many scientists, but his areas of expertise boil down into a niche much more conveniently.  Mr. Walters, of course, would have made an ideal Gadgetry teacher as well, but he was equally suited to be the kick-assery teacher.

Hypomania

No time for blog today, Dr. Jones!  I just finished this one up; spent some time last night hanging with the wiz on her birthday instead of working on the comic.  Now I gotta take off again and go and pick up the shorty from school.

Don't forget that today's the last day you can vote for your favorite character on the poll at the bottom of the site!

Thanks for reading, and remember, sharing is caring!

Super U. Strip #64: Effigy

Effigy

After spending a week on Twitter, I can honestly say I have no idea why it's so popular.  I see what about it makes it more useful and effective than Facebook, but how does one look at their Twitter feed for more than a few moments without one's eyes glazing over?  It all devolves into a bunch of links preceded by @'s and #'s for me.  I guess it's fun if you want to be bombarded by the random musings of celebrities instead of being bombarded by descriptions of what your family members ate for dinner and pictures of cats.  

Honestly, I think it has only increased my desire to abandon smart phones, the majority of my internet activity and computers altogether.  Has anyone seen the stuff on Google Glass?  Am I the only one who's terrified by it?  Haven't people seen Wall-E?  Doesn't anyone see that, in conjunction with fatty-mobiles, we're very nearly already there?!

That said, thanks for using your computer or smartphone to come to my website on the internet, which features a comic strip created digitally on my computer!

I cheated on the third panel of today's strip, and by cheating I mean Photoshop.  Photoshop is a tool non-artists use to convince people they're artistic.  It was extremely easy to make that panel look like that.  It didn't even take me very long, and I hardly know what I'm doing.

It did turn out pretty cool, though.  I'm a very conflicted person.

Intro to Gadgetry with Mr. Smith

So, it wasn't easy getting a strip done this week.  There's been a war going on over here, fought on three fronts; I , on one side, my computer on another, and my ego on the last front, who allied itself at the last minute in a surprise move with  my lack of flesh tone colored pencils.


Let me explain.  I've been fighting digital art for a long time.  I have strong opinions against it, and I often find myself arguing with fellow artists, and "artists," over the validity of digital art.  As you may have noticed, the comic is all digital.  I do this because I save time in the coloring process, but I don't necessarily like it.
I draw the strip in Adobe Illustrator.  I still draw every line, even though I draw it on a graphics tablet instead of on paper with a pencil.  I don't feel one can argue this doesn't take at least some talent to do.  What I have a big problem with is people who just trace something and auto-fill color, or worse, in Photoshop actually just take an image, adjust color levels, apply a snazzy filter, and put it out there as "art."  You're not an artist, you're a manipulator.  You're a technician.


The argument has been made to me that, yes, people can do some impressive things in programs like Photoshop without having an ounce of talent, but artists who use Photoshop can blow those people away.  To that I say, yes, that is true, but to a general audience, they can't tell the difference between someone who creates something amazing and someone who fakes it.  


I feel that digital art is sucking the very soul out of art culture, and is taking respect and admiration away from artists. If fifteen years ago, an employer told an artist to "make me a fully-rendered illustration of whatever, and I want it in four hours," the artist could have laughed at him.  Nowadays, they'd be expected to give them just that, with additional images in a range of various colors and perspectives in multiple file-types, because if they didn't there'd be a slew of artists and "artists" just waiting to take that person's position, all for an insultingly-low wage.


By the way, I do realize that I'm no fine artist.  I'm a cartoonist, and that perhaps makes this more infuriating.


But anyway.  So I finally ended up downloading the trial version of Illustrator off the Adobe website, only to come to realize that my grand scheme of drawing the entire strip by hand and then converting it into vector art in Illustrator was going to be incredibly time-consuming.  In a fit of rage, I decided the night before last just to give a big middle finger to digital art and start doing this stuff on paper and in colored pencil, because I like colored pencils.  
Then I realized I was out of flesh-tone colored pencils.


So, after much muttering and cursing under my breath, I accepted defeat and drew the strip in Illustrator, and I have to say... I like the way it looks.  


Dammit.

Click to Enlargificate.