#so im off to write my webcomic script instead

[chikinan]

writing fanfiction is so fucking stupid. why do I have a file titled source material notes.

[oddmerit]

heres a few links from my bookmarks folder full of HTML and CSS resources that i used when first making my neocities website because i want other people to make their own sites as well because its fun :)

how to actually do html and css

web design in 4 minutes - this is the site that really made HTML and CSS click for me, following along as the author describes what’s he’s doing to the webpage and showing how it changes the presentation (you don’t need the book he shills at the end. i did without)

w3schools introduction to html - takes you through the very basics of creating a website, lesson-by-lesson. big goldmine for code to grab and scaffold off of once you have some basic skills

mozilla’s html guide - also a great beginner’s guide by the people who made mozilla, although i didnt use it as much as w3 schools

brackets.io - this is the program i use to write the files i use for my website. lets you do splitscreen to work with two files at once, gives you a breakdown of all the files in your website’s folder, and will let you autofill commonly-used tags and files in the code. supposedly has a live preview function but it doesnt work that well for me when i’m using a second monitor, which i normally do when coding. just save the file and refresh the page instead. 

(side note: i work in a software external to neocities instead of directly in the neocities editor because 1. local files update with a refresh and neocities has to update the cookies AND download all the website info again once you update, and 2. it effectively gives you a mass undo button if you fuck up because you have your files hosted in multiple places (local and online). yes its kinda annoying to have to manually upload all my files especially bc you cant upload whole folders AND you cant move their locations once uploaded but i prefer it to working directly on the site. if you have a neocities pro subscription ($5/month) you can mount your website directly on your machine as opposed to the neocities dashboard, which basically means you dont have to manually upload the code every time you change something -- it’ll update automatically)

codepen - if you prefer something browser-based to work in then try codepen, i used it a little bit at the beginning when trying to troubleshoot some code i didn’t quite understand. you need an account to actually save your work and im not sure if it actually lets you upload folders bc i never signed up lol

premade engines/sites/themes/etc etc

neothemes or eggramen or templaterr - if you wanna get a quick start on a neocities site, you CAN use a theme generator/premade theme. if you go this route i would still heavily recommend trying to learn HTML and CSS, and then go into the guts of your own website to try and pick it apart and change it to your liking

zonelets - a static blogging engine that uses HTML, CSS, and javascript. made for use on neocities but theoretically useable elsewhere. takes about 15 minutes to set up (if you use a default theme, but its pretty customizable if you know what you’re doing) and requires you to 1. write blog posts in html and 2. modify some code in a script file every time you want to upload a post, but it will automatically let you browse posts in order once you get everything uploaded

rarebit - a neocities webcomic template — havent used it yet but looks cool, and seems to operate off of the same principles as zonelets. 

glightbox - this is the lightbox javascript code i use when i want to display a lot of images on one page. i found this code via clicking “inspect element” on a neocities fanpage that the webmaster drew a lot of fanart for. you should click inspect element on neocities pages that you like so you can understand how they do what you like (you can even look at their css by clicking the style.css link you have to include at the top of your page)

plus a couple masterlists/directories:

yesterlinks

sadgrl.online’s webmastery directory

[zekeyspaceylizard]

inktober #19

todays theme was “scorched” which is the same as roasted so im not bothering taxing my brain over it

so instead i drew the cast for the first 1/3 or so of the Profiteer scripts ive been writing. im at about 36 of these at the moment. im still not sure what i want to do with them. a webcomic is a pretty huge endeavor, but at the same time its not like im up to much these days

anyway

from left to right

vahista, the little blue fellow. a sea monster musician with a gambling problem. hires zeke (the green reptile) to be his bodyguard. they become partners for a bit, doing odd jobs and small time crime to pay off their debts. as time goes on, vahista grows disgusted at zeke and the work they do. vanishes mysteriously later on.

thrist, the black gooey thing. she hails from a dimension where light does not exist. has a tendency to live inside of people. also has a tendency to slowly devour them. she doesnt remember who she used to be for much of the story. which is a good thing. because who she used to be is someone quite dangerous.

harla, the yellow one. a religious zealot and fanatic. she and zeke meet when she is exiled for burning heretics. they bond over a love for recreational substances. she later becomes a despot of her world. things seem pretty good until thrist’s people invade and begin to devour the populace. she is willing to do anything to save them. anything.

komkros, the grey thing in the back. his body is made of data. his people are living concepts, from a dimension where only thought exists. he quite enjoys hacking and stealing data to add to himself. he later becomes a space cop, working for kosiv, the red fellow on the right. they condemn harla’s world when a plague breaks out. they dont know its an invasion until its much too late.

zeke, the green main character of the story. from a slave to a mechanic to a soldier and finally winding up as a war profiteer, zeke has done a lot of questionable things in life. the last of a dying race, theres little he wont do to make a quick buck. he assembles a crew of folks as odd as he is, in the hopes they can get everything they ever wanted. sadly this leads to tragedy for a great many people.

beek, the little purple space crab, smiling, which she doesnt do often. she always had a knack for putting things together and taking them apart. but while trying to build an infinite energy source she accidentally creates something much more precious: a soul. now a parent to a being neither flesh or machine, she wants a life free of chop shops and gunsmithing. but life doesnt always work out the way you want it to.

kosiv, the red nasty looking fellow. an utter bastard. abusive. petty. arrogant. and zeke’s commanding officer and longtime nemesis. zeke gets the upper hand and kills him early on in the story. but his death causes quite a snowball effect as the system begins to unravel both politically and socially. because even a bastard can have very powerful friends.

i really gotta do something with these.

[comicteaparty]

September 28th-October 4th, 2019 Creator Babble Archive

The archive for the Creator Babble chat that occurred from September 28th, 2019 to October 4th, 2019.  The chat focused on the following question:

What is a part of your comic you don’t particular like right now, and how are you trying to improve it?

Kay Rose

Something in my current comic that I dont like is how my characters look inconsistent, to fix it, when im back drawing hopefully next week, I'd like to change my webtoon release time to every other week So i can spend more time making sure theyre on model, and not hurt myself again trying to get 15-20 panels done in a week like a scrub

Ash🦀

I came from a novel-writing background. Although I wanted to write for comics, of course I had to learn about the fundamentals of writing at all, but that made me too dependent on words, so... I think in the beginning, there was simply too much dialogue. I didn’t let the characters breathe because I felt I had to give people at least a rundown of the world, foreshadow future events, all the things. I wish I’d taken more time to let the characters breathe and let the art speak for itself. As I edit the second chapter, I’m taking out whatever isn’t necessary, and focusing more on the marriage of art and words, letting them work with each other. I also dislike that it took me this long to get from the “it’s almost finished” stage to the “it’s finished” stage, solely my fault. I guess I can’t say much more since it technically isn’t out yet, but the pages are all there and everything’s finished, and I’m sure I’ll learn way more about the process as I keep going.

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

1) Fast pacing. People have told me it’s not a problem at all, and it’s actually good to have a webcomic that doesn’t drag - but I do feel somewhat restrained by my self-inflicted chapter page count. Sometimes I have to squish some things together in (what I feel is) an awkward way. But maybe it’s just me wanting to show more??

2) Lettering! Lettering is not my forte. Typography itself was always a problem for me to get right in graphic design classes. One of the few critical messages I’ve gotten on Phantomarine is about the wide-set lettering, and it’s stuck with me. I kinda want to fix it up in the future, or hire a proper letterer. Or... hand-letter! I dunno, it’s just bothered me ever since it was pointed out...

Urbanjawdust

@Ash🦀 that is AWESOME. more power to ya!!!

DaemonDan (The Demon Archives)

Heh, the main thing I don't like right now is that I'm on hiatus XD But the biggest artistic issue I'd been having recently was my previous artist wasn't very consistent with character appearances, especially the women/girl characters. Now that I've hired a new artist, the first thing I paid him to do was to make character sheets of them, with the hope that this will let us be consistent going forward.

Deo101 (Millennium)

I think for me it's also gonna have to be fast pacing. I get so excited about moving on, and so afraid of dragging things out, that I tend to forget to linger where it's needed. Since it's been pointed out to me, I've been working on adding an extra page or 2 to really wrap up my scenes... but it's definitely a problem in my past pages.

Urbanjawdust

Does anyone struggle deciding how many pages to post per update?

I'm debuting a new series and am struggling to decide how many pages the first episode should be

Deo101 (Millennium)

Hmmm...... Personally, if I'm uploading more than one, I like to get it to a point of "kind of a little bit of a cliffhanger" every time

instead of a particular amount of pages

Kay Rose

I upload on webtoon, so I count by panels.

snuffysam

depends what kind of comic it is, how much you get onto a page, etc. like if a page doesn't have anything interesting on it, it should probably have more on it or the update should include a second page. or like if you have a comedy comic, you shouldn't cut off the page in the middle of a joke.

DaemonDan (The Demon Archives)

Also where you post it. On my own site, i post 1 page at a time. On Tapastic, I'll post a few pages per update.

AntiBunny

Probably the slow meandering pace at which the story is told. 13 years and I still haven't gotten to the point I planned. Mostly because I want fully realized characters, and they need to go through a lot to get there.

Erin/Leif & Thorn on Kickstarter

Tapas & Webtoon seem to be optimized for taller updates, but with a regular site I'd post one page/strip at a time. People who want to read in batches can still bookmark it (or add it to ComicRocket, etc) and only check in every few update.

Most of my CR bookmarks, I wait until the comic has at least 10 unread updates before catching up.

(exceptions are mostly things like xkcd where there's not continuity to keep track of)

...also, seconding the "my least favorite thing is that it's on hiatus" for But I'm A Cat Person. Combined with "my least favorite thing is that it's not finished". (One more chapter! Just the one!)

sssfrs

I honestly really like the direction "Joe Is Dead" is going right now but there are areas I could definitely improve. I need to figure out how to strike a balance between perfectionism and speed, so that I don't take too long to put out pages but so that I can still put out high quality work. I'm also trying to work harder on characterizing characters, making their responses more individual to who they are and the kind of things they think about. When I first started writing I was putting in a lot of lines that were helpful to move the scenes along but the characters didn't have so much personal motivation to say them. I've been editing my writing over several times in an effort to really streamline the dialogue. You can read Joe Is Dead on Tapas: https://tapas.io/series/JoeIsDead(edited)

DaeofthePast

While I'm not too fond of the colors I used in the first episode of Dating Not-So Simulation, I have to remind myself that the duller colors serve a purpose. It works for symbolizing Morgan's emotional state at the beginning of the story and it'll get more colorful as the comic goes on.

Desnik

What I don't like about http://ask-a-warlock.tumblr.com/ is that it's been a couple of years working on it and it's STILL not done!!(edited)

The Q - working on WAYFINDERS

Pacing is my biggest issue right now. The story is so huge, so I can't linger. But also a comic needs time and space to breathe. I'm trying to let the scripts flow in a natural way, but I'm nervous to see how it's going to work once we get to thumbnails!

Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS

it is going to work GREAT!

The Q - working on WAYFINDERS

Haha, well in that case... I'm excited!