Sam! @saorlathesurly - Tumblr Blog

If you dont mind me asking how do you do comics??

My exact process is kinda... it's working, and so far it's sustainable, but I dunno how strongly I can recommend it because I dunno how well it'll work for another person. But still!

My writing process is... I don't. really have one. I started off from the idea of "After the team is officially disbanded, Jet becomes a PI in New York", which in and of itself combines two premises used in 009 before- the team disbanding is from the prequel comic to Re:Cyborg and Jet being a PI is his status quo in Conclusion: God's War. I haven't actually read either of these things, but the idea itself was inspiring enough I decided why not, I'll give it a shot. Since then it's been stringing ideas together in service of this main one. What happens when the team disbands? Well, Jet certainly wouldn't like it, and would go back to NYC without a purpose. What's something that could give him purpose? Being put in a position to help someone, since that's what he did as a member of the team. Where do things go from there?

I imagine most writing/comic advice would tell you that this is a very bad way to approach making something like this, that you should have the broad strokes of the whole story planned out in advance and have a general idea of how things are going to go in more specifics. And I'm sure all that is correct! I'm not sure how this comic is going to actually go, and for right now that's fine with me. I'm having fun making pages because above all this comic is an excuse to draw my favorite anime character a lot. If I were to sit down and figure out the exact minutiae of how things are going to go, there's a good chance I'd put too much pressure on myself to execute on that plan and kill my motivation for actually making pages, since this has happened in the past. I do have ideas for stories I want to explore and wider elements I want to start tying in, but ultimately my focus is on making the next page.

So if I were to boil that down to one piece of advice, I'd say: don't do your writing in a way that will stress you out of actually making a comic.

Visually I at least have a little bit more of a process.

I tend to go either sketch-forward or script-forward, depending on whether or not I'm thinking in terms of dialogue as I'm planning.

Here's a few pages with the sketches done first- here I have more of an idea how I want things to progress visually through paneling

And here's one where I laid out the dialogue first, because I had a better idea of how I wanted the text to be paced and flow down the page (it also helps quite a bit with figuring out how to best space out text so that the reader naturally reads it in the correct order)

I don't have a picture of the beginning of the process (and the pages I'm working on right now are about 15 out from where the comic is currently posted, so I don't want to spoil) but it kind of looked similar to this- I tend to hang on to specific dialogue strings in my memory less specifically than visuals, so it legitimately helps sometimes to get down the script I want for the page loosely in the order I want it to appear/be paced, then sketch around it and adjust placement/spacing as needed. Here's the same page with the sketch added:

Something I want to point out is how loose these sketches are. Some pages have more detail if I want to capture a very specific expression or pose that I'm worried I'll lose later, but for the most part these are meant to be very general guidelines. (A sort of character-specific advantage here is that it's very easy to quickly indicate where Jet is looking even in rough sketch form because of his nose)

Largely this is because of something I realized early on in making this comic, which is sort of the secret formula to why I've been able to stick with it for so long: I have to spend as little time as possible on each page. That means sketches have to be loose so that most of the work is actually stuff that's going to be shown in the final page.

Since the comic posts at a rate of about 1 page/week, this is both to build up a backlog (especially since I took July off from making pages to put more focus into Artfight) and to keep motivation up. If I were stuck on making a single page for an extended period of time in order to make it super pretty and polished, I'd have very quickly gotten tired and stopped wanting to work on it. Instead, I decided to do away with some things that would be nice, like polished lines and colors in favor of stuff that was more essential. Hence the comic having a looser style, only two tones, and relatively simplistic backgrounds.

I think the final and probably biggest thing that helps me keep going is the context of the pages before it. Thinking up something to happen in an individual page is, at least for me, pretty hard. But having the page before the one I'm working on means I'm not really expressing a new idea, I'm just continuing on from the one before it, and can slowly introduce new elements as they crystalize in my mind.

So yeah, that's basically it! Some things I wouldn't really know how to explain, like paneling- I very much just feel it out as I go with the goal of making each page visually interesting to look at. I dunno how much this advice is really worth outside of walking through how I think about things, so I hope it's at least interesting to read ^^

dentedsporkreal

I'm working on a fan-run indie project to dub the entirety of The Glass Scientists, and we still have some major roles uncast- including Victoria Frankenstein and Edward Hyde! If you know someone who would want to be a part of this, please send them my way!

consulships

i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls

literaryreference

Time to take this post entirely too seriously:

I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.

When I was in college I had a professor who was an expert on detective fiction. He had a longstanding beef with the idea that "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was the first detective story. He thought that it seemed way too polished to be inventing a new genre, and also that the whole orangutan business had the vibe of someone subverting preexisting audience expectations and maybe engaging in a bit of stealth parody. With the help of some student volunteers, he went trawling through old magazines and newspapers and found hundreds of detective stories from the early 1800s that just hadn't garnered enough individual attention to be remembered. This was because most of them sucked balls. He created an online archive of them, so you too can read these mostly terrible stories.

tricky-pockets

I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on Project Gutenberg sifting through forgotten old fiction and lemme tell ya. a lot of that stuff sucks ass.

asteroidtroglodyte

Tremendously comforting, really.

problemnyatic

the most valueable skill a white leftist can ever learn is how to take an L with grace.

problemnyatic

You gotta be able to take an L if your moral and ethical belief systems are to be capable of guiding you. Otherwise you just have an idealized self where you get really mad and scared when anyone points out it isn't actually you. How the fuck are you gonna walk the walk if you can't handle being told when you are not, in fact, actually walking it

problemnyatic

you cannot just socially transition into being a good person you are going to have to settle for being a messy human being who has to try and fail and keep trying to get better like everyone else. yeah even when it's embarassing and sucks for you a lot.

livseses

Ya gotta learn to earnestly and honestly say "Oh shit, my bad."

tartrazeen

And to then end the sentence there, not launch into a paragraph of explanation or panicked super-apology.

definitely-zen-browser

A LibreOffice developer has shared his experience of having his Microsoft account banned, and how the company has been uncooperative in help

Sure would be a shame if thousands of people saw this...

artphobos

After having gone thru acct recovery a couple times early in the days of OneDrive, I got the vibe that saving ANYTHING to a propriatary service was a huge mistake, ESP anything MS. Nice to see that vibe continues to check out.

MS does not care how many years of your life you have backed up to their cloud- they can take it away/delete it for any reason at any time. Keep your stuff local on an external drive.

elfwreck

This is your reminder that "cloud" is short for "someone else's computer" and that "someone else" may not have your best interests in mind.

Backup your content somewhere that you control.

pharmersonly

me when i engage with something that i know is gonna piss me off: wow that pissed me off

realcharadeltarune

Personal attempt at a Super Robot Optimus

realcharadeltarune

beesgav

finally drew @realcharadeltarune's Kasper

redstonedust

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

ralfmaximus

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

dentedsporkreal

New design available on Redbubble!

Redbubble

dentedsporkreal

Anyway I HC that if she had just stopped running from her identity she'd be going by Daisy Bell (at Caine's suggestion) and be an obnoxious scene girl who liked when her friends use her as a dress up doll.

She's also still a menace, but for bratty reasons now.