July 3, 2008: The state of the comics

Here's where the comics are at right now:

Feral: Chugging along nicely. Aggie's switched to larger format paper, and while the update frequency is now down to a shaky once a week, the results do look gorgeous. The fact that Aggie's drawing it is helping me focus on the writing as well. As in doing it, and doing it a bit more thoughtfully and effectively than I have been in the past.

Invasion: Going very slowly. It's literally been progressing at a rate of a few lines a day, or a few bits of Photoshop colouring a day. That's all I have time and energy for after work and going to the gym or the running club to blow off steam after work, which I'm afraid has become very necessary for me to maintain emotional stability. Day jobs suck.
Still, some progress is being made and I've been able to free up some more hours this week than I have in the weeks before. There are some pages of art on my desk and the whole thing is scripted all the way until the end.

I have a new collaboration with Aggie in the brainstorming stage. We now plan to aim at a younger audience - what I have in mind is a present-day science fiction adventure. It's gonna take time to develop, but when we do, it will be very thoroughly thought out.

Crossovers/Spin-offs: I also have a fun crossover planned with another webcartoonist. This will be a standalone story that will be kept separate from the ROCR archives. It's probably best to think of it as more of a spin-off. ROCR itself will never do crossovers again. Seriously. If I want to mix it up with someone else's characters, I will set up a separate series for the purpose.

Remasters: The Drunk Duck mirror has been running for almost a year now, at a rate of one update a day. Lately, it's featured remastered versions of The Faerie and the Earth-Pig at a larger image size of 560 pixels wide. While preparing those, I found two updates that had been missing from the regular archives: the comic for February 13, 2001 and the one for February 28, 2001. Both have been restored to the regular archives, at their remastered size. The entire story will eventually appear on the main site in remastered form.

That's all the news, really. Stuff is moving, but very slowly.

June 26, 2008: Invasion original art for sale

Original art for page 29 of Invasion.

It's taken me months, but I've finally put all originals from the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story Invasion up for sale through my ComicSpace Galleries. So if you want an original from this popular series, you can now buy them there. Prices are somewhat negotiable - I've assigned a fixed price to all of them but you can email me if you want to haggle over any one page.

A few points:

1) The pages Calvin Bexfield worked on are more expensive because a) he's fab, and b) we're sharing the loot for these pages.
2) All pages are European A3 format, except for this one, the first to be made, which is A4.
3) I will give each page a final check before sending it out. I don't expect any issues with the state the pages are in, but if any turn up, I'll let you know and cancel the sale if you want.
4) All originals will ship with a colour print of the finished product.
5) Many originals from Feral are also still for sale.

There are 106 pages in the gallery, several of which got very good comments when they were published. The one you loved is almost certainly still there, so why not do some browsing and invest in the arts?

June 23, 2008: Uhm.... yeah

Apologies for the radio silence here. I've been back for a week now, and I still haven't posted. While waiting for my plane at Philadelphia airport, I tried to write a post about my stay in the US, but it came out all rambling and I never finished it. Then I had to plunge right back into my day job, while still suffering from jetlag. That sure was fun.

Instead of trying again to write that post and having it be a little less than fresh, I'll just be lazy and point you to Aggie's newspost about it. It's short, well-organised, comes with a silly photo, and she mentions that I look hot, which you wouldn't believe if I told you so myself, so referring to her post is a win-win solution for me.

May 24, 2008: Off to America

Today (May 24 if you're reading this on the ROCR.net front page), I'm going to Amsterdam to stay with a friend, so I won't have to get up at some God-awful hour to go to Amsterdam Airport on Sunday morning. From there, I'll be off to Nashville, Tennessee, where I'll be spending the next three weeks with Aggie. New comics may be delayed.

May 18, 2008: Civil rights in the Netherlands: The Nekschot affair

Following on the previous post in which I rag on the US for denying travelers from abroad basic (one might say self-evident) human rights, it's worth noticing that the erosion of human rights within the Netherlands is proceeding at a steady pace as well. I had several long rants planned on the high-profile arrest of cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot last Tuesday, on the basis of a complaint against him filed in 2005, for inciting racial hatred through his cartoons. I'm not going to post any of that, though; this is not the time and place. Let's just say I don't have a high opinion of Mr. Nekschot's talent, motivations, or general character, and leave it at that. However, when it comes to freedom of speech, what happened to the worst of us could happen to any of us, so to hear that Mr. Nekschot had had a ten-person SWAT team descend upon his house, had his home searched, the tools of his trade confiscated and vague threats of the elimination of his anonymity uttered at him, is very very worrying. I am glad that support for Nekschot is pouring out from across the blogosphere, across the political spectrum and across the intellectual spectrum, from the shockblogs to places like Frontaal Naakt (pretty much the entire site there is devoted to it at this point) and Progressive Gold.

There are of course, varying analyses as to why this is happening, from "The Netherlands is becoming a Caste system in which Muslims are the Brahmins" (which statistics about the income, job opportunities, educational opportunities and general integration into society most Muslims "enjoy" would seem to disprove, but never mind that) to knee-jerk blaming of the Labour party (which wasn't in government when the complaint against Nekschot was filed, but never mind that) , to the one that I subscribe to, which is that the Christian Democrats in goverment want to restrict blasphemous and other undesirable speech, but can't do that without making a show of impartiality, so they pick on a cartoonist who insults Muslims first - who also happens to be an easy target because his work is genuinely loathsome and ugly.

I'm pretty sure that Mr. Nekschot will be cleared of all charges; his work does not incite hatred in any legal sense, though a case can be made that it reflects, and feeds on, existing hatred in himself and his readership. It's firmly in the realm of opinion and satire. So it's too early to say that some kind of turning point has been reached. Yet it is very worrying that the enemies of freedom are apparently trying to get us to that turning point and make an example of someone.

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