Ramblings and webcomics from LeEMS
Have you ever noticed the hive-mind? You know, when you were just talking about some celebrity who’d been out of the news or some fictional character and suddenly the same name is mentioned on a talk show. When five different movies are released based on the same premise of a long dead volcano bringing catastrophe to the country as we know it. When your friends have just been saying that you should consider having a book made of your comics and then you read a news article about Print On Demand: Major Announcement Could Change How You Buy Books.
So instead of hiring a printing service where you are restricted to a batch no smaller than 50 at the cost of $200, there will be machines that you can take your print ready PDF to, or select a book from a list of available titles, and the machine will make a book for you. This is some cool news. I imagine it will be much easier than trying to exacto and glue bind your pages!
I said it was going to happen and now it is! My comic version of Grimm’s Wolf and 7 Kids, originally drawn as a submission to a fairy tale anthology, is posting on my site. Go read it!
I didn’t know what to draw one night so I asked my husband for advice. We were watching Keeping Up Appearances at the time during one of Onslo and Daisy’s morning in bed scenes, so he suggested I draw them young. This is it.
I have been officially silently unaccepted for the fairytale anthology. Maybe it was because I tried computer aided lettering for the first time, but I’m only guessing. But good for ya’ll ’cause now I’ll post the thing here. Starting with the art I submitted for the anthology cover.
He wants to suck your intestines out. He’s hungry, can you tell?
I had this sketch sitting around doing nothing for a very very long time, so I threw some shrubs over top it and have removed it from my working folder. This is Snow White and Rose Red. Gustaf Tenggren’s illustrated version used to be my favorite story book when I was little. Only I think Snow White is actually supposed to be platinum haired – I must be mixing up my fairy tales.
First conception of Misa, now fully introduced in Levi Levi.
I’m trying some new stuff because I had an idea that ‘The Brain’ would be good for encapsulating and displaying a concept that is as web like as I have found interlibrary loan to be (yeah, this is library stuff). But ‘The Brain’ is not so accessible when you’re traveling from computer to computer. So, I wanted to scope out some other ways of concept mapping. I found bubbl.us. It’s pretty good and a free account gets three maps worth of storage that you can share and link to. (Yes, this is all about Interlibrary Loan – it’s what I do)
What I’m really after, now that I’ve been shopping around, is a way to insert the finished mind map into my web site. There I could host and share it forever (even password protect it if I wanted). Unfortunately bubbl.us ‘s HTML export just looks like a colorful list with anchor tags:
So I am still looking. Though, to be completely on the up and up I have to admit that a pro version of the brain offers an HTML export that creates a working online brain when loaded into a web server. It might very well be what I am looking for if I could just be satisfied with what I’ve already found.
You see, I was thinking of ways to make all my running comics more visible. I know the RSS feeds of blog and webcomics are combined, but site visitors are not seeing recent comic postings unless they visit the individual comics. So what about doing short linking posts like what I just did with the song comic. RSS feeders are gonna get double notification, but hopefully it won’t be too annoying.
Or maybe I’m gonna play around with having the most recent comic page of whatever comic post at the top and keep all the blog posts below. What d’ya think of that?
Do you ever find that when you are waiting for an airplane all you have to do with yourself is try desperately not to stare at other people. Sometimes I fail, if only because sometimes people in airports are crazy interesting.