Rants 2006 July - December

7/5/06

Recording the creative process
Yesterday when I was making frozen waffles for breakfast the smoke alarm went off. My wife asked me, "What did you do?" I said, "I left the toaster setting at the level you had it."

7/9/06

I know, I know, golf gloves are worn on the left hand. Had a dyslexic moment I guess.
After the first week or month I decided Arthur must be ambidextrous (which is funny for a reason that won't be explicit till year twenty-five). Maybe the other two are too.

7/10/06

After these last two, it's safe to say that from now on western arc gags will be allusions to the immediately previous episode of Deadwood for as long as this season of Deadwood lasts.
If you don't get the gag, review this gag.

7/20/05

Yesterday Boxjam's Doodle (referred to in the AKOTAS FAQ as "the closest thing there still is to Peanuts") ran a strip scripted by me. Remember this AKOTAS, sending up Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics? This week (I assume it's just for this week) Boxjam is sending up both Dinosaur Comics which uses the same art every day and Exploding Dog Comics which uses reader-submitted scripts. Not being previously familiiar with Exploding Dog, I wrote a strip attempting to pastiche both Dinosaur Comics and Boxjam's Doodle, and Boxjam liked it. The strip I scripted's here.

7/21/05

In The Once and Future King Lancelot is resentful that Arthur won't leave him behind during the Roman War because Lancelot knows Mark did the like once. The difference between that and the AKOTAS baseline arc is that, there, all three of the principals are aware of the growing tension between Guenevere and Lancelot (even though they won't admit it to themselves) while, here, only Arthur knows what's really developing (because he was warned by Merlin) except that Lancelot just today figured it out himself finally (as a result of his resentment that Arthur won't leave him behind). As for Guenevere ... well, Camelot warns us never to be too disturbed if you don't understand what a woman is thinking.
(What Lancelot says to Arthur in panel four isn't a lie. He doesn't deny that he's fallen in love with Guenevere - that's what he realized in panel three. He only denies that he'll admit it to Arthur.)
Why am I explaining all this when I think the work should speak for itself? Actually, I wasn't going to, except a reader recently wrote in his LiveJournal how much he enjoys the "annotations" where my sources are discussed, and I decided this occasion merited one.

7/22

There's something new on the extras page.

7/26/06

In the Morte "the king with his great army departed, leaving the queen and realm in the governance of Sir Baudwin and Constantine". Constantine, of course, is the son of Sir Cador, Arthur's heir apparent. Twenty-two years from now when Arthur and Mordred kill each other, Constantine succeeds.

7/30/06

Recording the creative process
Remember when I discussed logistics of cut-and-paste-for-effect?
If I have a gag in which one, some or all of the figures are identical in two or more panels, I'll draw the figure/s once, scan it/them, and paste it/them into each panel where the character/s so appear/s. (Those are easy to color too - I just color the first figure, select the colors without the outline, and copy the color selection into the figure/s in the other panel/s.) If I have a gag in which some figure/s are near identical in two or more panels, I'll draw the figure/s once with all (and only) the attributes required for every panel, scan it/them, paste the composite figure/s into each concerned panel, and for each panel erase the bits that don't belong there. (Coloring these is more difficult, which is why I say cutting-and-pasting near-identical figures into multiple panels is probably more work than drawing each panel separately.)
I'd thought of doing last Monday's cartoon as cut-and-paste, since the first four panels are the same two characters discussing the same subject in four different arcs. As I said before, when it comes to many merely nearly-identical panels, it's more work to cut-and-paste than to draw every panel fresh. For last Monday's, I wasn't up to the challenge.
For today's, I didn't feel like letting my ~~sloppy~~ spontaneous draughtsmanship produce renderings of the car that differed enough between panels that they might distract from the gag. So I drew the car only once. In fact I drew only half of it and cut-and-pasted the half to itself, so it'd be symmetric. The seats behind the boys I drew seperately and pasted in. Then I drew the figures. I pasted them into each panel, and then I pasted the car exterior over them again. Then I realized there ought to be the inside of the car body; so I drew that into the dummy car exterior I still had, pasted that into every panel, and - having previously copied the whole cartoon onto the clipboard - pasted the seats, the boys, and the car exterior back into every panel over the interior.
Think of it as "layers for MSPaint".

8/1/06

No one seems to have spotted yesterday's blooper before I did: Merlin's on the boat crossing the Channel when he's supposed to be the regent-of-record according to Arthur's announcement at York and has been seen to have remained at Camelot. The other day in the space arc, for the Taiwan pun, Arthur and Merlin shouldn't have been in the same place either. This morning I seem to be coming down with a cold. I'm not saying the bloopers are related to the cold, except that the cold means I don't care about the bloopers and probably won't be taking action to fix them. Perhaps this paragraph ought to be headed Recording the destructive process.

8/3/06

Several message board posters responded to my discussion of last week's bloopers stating that the discrepancies had not gone unnoticed before I pointed them up, but that they had only said to themselves, not without accuracy, "It's Merlin. He can do anything."

8/4/06

King or Duke Hoel of Brittany is a kinsman of Arthur's in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, but Geoffrey can't make up his mind whether Hoel is a cousin or a nephew. But if he's a nephew, it's by Arthur's full sister Anna, who must be younger than Arthur is (since Arthur was conceived the first time Uther and Ygraine slept together), which is too young to have a son who's a king (or a duke) during Arthur's succession wars, when Arthur was fifteen at succession.
Anna, you may recall from previous annotation, is fated to marry Pellinore. I haven't figured out quite how that'll work in AKOTAS, since Pellinore already has a family. I'm nearly as confused as Hoel is, and I still may leave Anna out entirely since there's nothing else about her in the stories except that she marries Pellinore. (Joan Wolfe in The Road to Avalon puts an interesting twist on it: Pellinore marries Morgause after Lot is dead.)

8/11/06

The Fans archive is here, and yes it's really free now.
Boy, I'll be glad when the three of them are in college in the contemporary arc and all in the same place, so they can converse without having to sit boringly immobile at their desks.

8/16/06

Arthur's trouble deciding which mount giant was fiercer is from the Morte. There's no earlier or later mention of the giant of the Mount of Araby. Since what Malory seemingly was after doing was a compilation of all the Arthur stories he knew, maybe here he was alluding to another version of the same story where the mount had a different name. Or maybe Arthur was just battle-drunk.

8/24/06

Snarked!

8/28/06

You may notice a new one among the navigation buttons above, labeled Movies. I'm teaching myself Flash cartoon animation, and to do it I'm reviving the premises of what I call in the AKOTAS FAQ my blue binder cartoons. The first four, produced over the summer, are up. I don't promise how often there'll be new movies but there'll be new movies.

9/1/06

As you may have suspected, even though I genuinely value the shapes motif as a style in itself, I also find it handy for busy days when I'd use a filler if I weren't still in the Daily Grind contest. I want to assure you, however, that I don't use that as a crutch. I can say that with certainty because yesterday it didn't even occur to me to do today's in shapes until two hours before scheduled update time.

9/7/06

Ms. Hernandez' LiveJournal.
The PayPal button at Websnark is currently directed to Hernandez' account, or PayPal her directly at: divalea@gmail.com

9/12/06

I'm not a lawyer, but here is a perspective on internet neutrality which the telcos might want to stop and consider before things get out of hand.

9/14/06

Checkerboard Nightmare is only no longer in my daily reads links because it wrapped up some time ago and no longer updates regularly.

9/15/06

Yes, Gawaine actually did this in the Morte.

9/16/06

I didn't mean to make a running gag of this when I wrote the other one, but there it is. And while Daily Grind rules prohibit the re-use of art, today's Saturday and the rules don't apply.

9/20/06

In response to Monday's cartoon a reader remarked at the message board that it seemed odd the Farenheit and Centigrade temperature scales are still being used in the space arc, and I think my response would be well repeated here.
History's a cycle, and even prophets and time-travelers are familiar with history only to the boundaries of their native cycle. Some things have been held over into the next cycle from this one and some things (e.g., King Arthur's story) started over at their appointed time in the new cycle, but translated to an interstellar instead of planetary environment. (Not that there isn't progress made from one cycle to the next.) The Farenheit and Centigrade scales appear to have survived the cycle turnover.

9/22/06

Paul Gadzikowski English 150 N - Ketcham November 20, 2003 In-class exercise 3(?): thank-you note Dear Charles M. Schulz, Thanks for Peanuts, Sparky. Thanks for Charlie Brown, who never wins and never gives up trying. Thanks for Snoopy, who never loses if only in his own mind. Thanks for not caving when readers wrote in offended at the presumption of putting Bible quotations in a comic strip. Thanks for simple art and complex thought. Thanks for inspiring Vince Guaraldi. Thanks for "security blanket". Thanks for rampant unrequited crushes and sibling rivalry. Thanks for five-cent psychiatry and the pun on "dogfight". Thanks for Beethoven, the kite-eating tree, and sincere pumpkin patches. Thanks for happiness. Paul

9/29/06

Thanks to Kris Overstreet for the research.

10/1/06

Originally I wanted their buttons to say "Nixon" and "HHH"; I wanted to put Merlin in long hair and love beads. But I looked at my spreadsheet and Uther was only 11 then.
Later
Below is how today's strip appeared for the first twelve hours or so it was up. I don't always reedit cartoons once updated for errors or for sloppy art, but I always do for clarity, and I wanted it clear that this was 1976 and not 1980.

10/2/06

After today's cartoon had been up for about twelve hours, a reader suggested that the issue to which it alludes isn't being covered in the news extensively enough for the cartoon to be comprehensible.
There's a good article at The Washington Post, but in brief: Both houses of the U.S. Congress have passed a bill which, if signed into law by the President, will give the President the power to wiretap at his own discretion, to detain without due process at his own discretion, and to torture at his own discretion and have those who commit it pardoned. The Post article contains a quote from a Republican senator who decried the law as unconstitutional before voting for it.
I didn't have any plans to address the issue in my work because, with Merlin, I fear and believe that the growing obvious, blatant deterioration of the U.S. government is manifest of the cycle of human history; and that that won't be broken till we evolve into something else; and that there's no point to beating your head against a tidal wave. Then I read what Wil Wheaton wrote and agreed with it, which amounts to, "I want at least to go on record." Because the heroes I write would not be okay with this, none of them, on either website (nor some of the villains), and that's exactly the sort of thing I hope my readers come away with.

10/9/06

Shaenon Garrity included a cartoon of mine in yesterday's Narbonic fan art collection. Thanks, Shaenon.

10/16/06

Bedievere seems to be good for those punchlines that don't match anyone else's personality, since his isn't terribly developed in the sources.

10/21/06

I see President Bush has signed the Military Commissions Act into law.
In the past I've promised in this space that I shall never miss a scheduled day of AKOTAS unless I'm "in mourning, hospitalized or dead myself". Today I add to the list "jailed as a terrorist sympathizer". If the whole website vanishes, it's the last one.

10/22/06

Well! Finally figured out that one. (See comments in this cartoon, this essay and this essay.) *****
There's a new Infinity Labs movie for the first time since the site went live on August 27. There's also a FAQ now.

10/25/06

Recording the creative process
As may be easily deduced, this is pretty much the state I was in on Monday once I'd written yesterday's gag.

10/29/06

Thanks, Daibhid.
Studio 60 will continue tomorrow.

11/3/06

This friend of Merlin appeared previously here and here.

11/7/06

Recording the creative process
Originally there was no skipped line in the multiply-instanced dialog balloon, but I didn't want readers confused and wondering what Guenevere saw Lancelot stop doing.

11/10/06

Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary, himself a devout Mormon, this week put out a call in his newspost blog for authoritative arguments to persuade fellow devout Christians that the campaign by some Christians against D&D is born of a basic misunderstanding of what D&D is. Many of his readers responded in comments at the blog entry itself, including one who provided a link to an essay by a born-again Christian D&D advocate who is an evangelist and a Juris Doctor. It's fascinating reading and I wrote this newspost for no reason but to create a place I know I can find these links again.

11/25/06

David Morgan-Mar of Irregular Comic wrote yesterday about Scott McCloud's latest work, Making Comics, and went off on an interesting tangent in his comment:
... I heartily recommend it. And for anyone who's wondering about the four-way classification of comic artist tribes that McCloud introduces on pages 230-237, and where I see myself in it, I'd classify myself as one of those bizarre diagonal combos that he says are rare and unusual: a Formalist-Animist. For those who haven't read the book, this means that the two highest priorities in my comic making are exploring the comic form itself and stretching its boundaries to see what can be achieved, and telling a (somewhat) decent story. The other two options are the Classicist, concerned with making a skilled work of art, and the Iconoclast, who wants to use comics as a way of expressing deep truths and real life concerns, both of which I have to admit do not feature particularly heavily in what I'm trying to achieve here (although if I can, hey, I'll run with them).
I'm not a big fan of pigeonholing people or things into categories, but it can offer a useful way of thinking about things sometimes. And the very fact that McCloud says a Formalist-Animist is almost a contradiction and very rare in the comics world just makes me glow with pride. :-)
From Morgan-Mar's paragraph summary of McCloud's category system I'd classify myself as a Classicist. Yes, I have telling a "(somewhat)" decent story as a secondary goal here at AKOTAS. There are those (even, sometimes, I) who mistake that for the primary goal, but my primary goal for thirty years has always been making people laugh every day: which I'd say falls under Classicist of McCloud's categories [as Morgan-Mar defines them] if any. As for "skilled work of art"; while my execution leaves room for technical criticism to readers whose top criterion is that sort of thing, I like most of it and remain satisfied that each day's work was the best I was capable of for that day.

11/26/06

The knight in Pellinore's color standing with adult Mordred is Sir Percival. Sir Percival has appeared previously in a cameo in the MASH arc, and his eventual appearance in the baseline arc was foreshadowed last month. Percival was the main protagonist of the Grailquest story till the invention of Galahad, and is again in the film Excalibur which despite claiming to be a faithful adaptation of the Morte leaves Galahad out.
At the beginning of Percival's story he comes upon the Grail Castle and witnesses a procession which includes the Grail. Because he's been brought up in seclusion by his mother instead of in knightly ways, he's too polite to ask, "Whom does the Grail serve?" Later he learns that, had he asked, he would have learned that the Grail Castle king was suffering from a chronic wound that Percival could have healed almost by asking that question alone, thereby avoiding the consequent quest. Also, there's a point during his quest (I can't tell from the online Morte I use whether it's before or after he learns the consequence of his manners) when someone who comes on him asks him how he's doing, and his reply is, "I do neither good nor great ill."

Percival at the Camelot Project

Percival at Wikipedia

12/6/06

Recording the creative process
The neat thing about Tristram not having gone on the Roman expedition is that when I'm out of steam on Roman expedition gags and regency gags I can do Cornwall gags. The trouble with that is I've taken this long to figure out where in Tristram's story I've dropped myself.
You may recall I wrote in this space when Tristram first showed up as a knight in Camelot that it's unclear in the Morte quite how his chronology relates to Arthur's; that he was definitely among Arthur's knights at the time of the Roman war but didn't go along. Well, I've been browsing the Morte lately trying to find a point in Tristram's timeline which can be the exile to Camelot on account of Mark's jealousy which occurred during the first year or so of AKOTAS, and not having much luck. So today I've been looking for the incident at the ford in the Morte. Figure out when that happens, I told myself, and since you've already used it just pick up Tristram's timeline from after that. Except I don't find it.
That's how it is with these stories. Not every version makes use of all the same tropes in the sources. Or, come to think of it, in the same order. Which is why I didn't feel too badly when I forgot that there are two battles with Lot in the Morte.
Today's cartoon goes back to the beginning, with the first incident in (as Vinaver has it) Malory's Book of Sir Tristram after Mark and Isolde's wedding that isn't directly related to the wedding. I'd already had an idea I'd do it this way, which is why I made sure already to establish that Lamorak has started boinking Morgause, a development that predates today's run-in with Tristram.
And I'm sure if I'm wrong about the incident at the ford not appearing in the Morte that one of you will point it out to me.

12/8/06

Yesterday, as anyone self-assured enough to put their work on the internet in the first place is wont to do, I websearched my webcomic's name just to see what I could see.
While it's far from true of all the webcomic blogs out there, I notice that there are quite a few of them who have started out with the mission statement of picking out the bad ones to comment on. Lots of them seem to be reactions to Eric (WEBSNARK) Burns, the popular webcomic blogger who only writes about webcomics he likes (or that he once liked), on the (to me, elementary) principle that he only reads webcomics he likes. The negative bloggers complain that Websnark is misnamed. But if I were one of them, I'd think I might ask myself why Eric is so popular, arguably the most popular webcomics blogger there is. (Not that there aren't other positive webcomics bloggers out there, but most of them postdate Eric's initial popularity and most of those were inspired by Eric.) (Say, that's a conditional probability... Don't mind me, my applied mathematics final is next week.)
Anyway, one of the hits I got yesterday was to a negative webcomics blogger's entry on Questionable Content. The string match wasn't in the blog entry itself, but in one of the comments, in which a reader requested of the blogger future entries tearing into Dinosaur Comics, Narbonic, American Elf, and Arthur, King of Time and Space. The reader noted, "I'm the only one I know who hates them."
Well, I could find that reader compatriots at least as far as AKOTAS is concerned. But it brightened up a bad day for me to see it listed alongside those other three, for any reason.

12/13/06

Recording the creative process
I almost didn't run this gag. This gag is a variation on a gag I drew years ago¹. I've always planned to reuse the original variation for AKOTAS when the time came. This variation came to me last week when I finally resolved my issues with Tristram's tale's chronology and saw where that left me.
But I realized in short order that I can't run both here. Come on, it's the same gag. So I had to decide whether I'd run this variation now, or wait and redraw the older variation sometime later². I was really leaning toward saving the older variation for later. I think it has a great subtlety.
I finally used this variation today because I purely didn't have another joke ready to go. It wasn't Aaron Sorkin writing about burnout here. But tomorrow starts a string of gags long-scripted in preparation of Arthur's eighteenth birthday.
¹ During the scannerless period which prompted fanfiction triangle caricatures, but just before that. Exhibit A: It could be worse!
² And remove all indexing links to it from other fanfiction pages, as I always do when I reuse an old fanfiction gag here

12/14/06

You may be asking yourself, "When Scott Kurtz of PvP appears as a contemporary arc character in AKOTAS - when Serenity and Wonder Woman director Joss Whedon appears as a contemporary arc character in AKOTAS - when the tv series Eureka is supposed to have Morgan in its cast - why invent a comic collective that's so obviously just Joey Manley's Modern Tales under a fictional name?"
Well, for the same reason contemporary Arthur (or Superman, or Homer Simpson) lives in an imaginary city. It may become dramatically necessary to attribute actions to Arthur's collective's chief, or events to the history of the collective, that manners or libel law dictate not be attributed to a real person or webcomics collective. I don't really expect any such situation to arise, and in fact I considered not making up names. But there'll come a time when Arthur will move into a phase of his life when there will be such dramatic necessity (many many years down the path Merlin's setting him on tomorrow), so I decided I might as well start now.
No, Arthur has not really been invited to join Modern Tales, nor have I. Nor is it likely that it shall be offered to me, or that I should accept if it were offered. Webcomic collectives' goals and mine don't match up.
(Manners, fairness and full disclosure compel me to note that it's Joey Manley's free message board site at TalkAboutComics.com that hosts AKOTAS's discussion forum. And I've been considering the possibility of creating a mirror site at Manley's Webcomics Nation Free.
(Also, I don't believe salability is actually one of Modern Tales' criteria [except insofar as quality work can be assumed salable]. When I first drafted Arthur's dialog, the offer had come not from ~~Modern Tales~~ Today Fables but from ~~Keenspot~~ Swellpoint, where salability is a criterion. Then I decided manners and fairness compelled Arthur's offer to have come from Jose Macho instead of from Harry Hope, but I still decided to leave the salability bit in. ...Perhaps thereby justifying my decision to invent a collective.)
I'm actively disinterested in making a business of AKOTAS. I already have a job - one with health care benefits and retirement plans, which matters when you're about twice the age of most webcartoonists. Now, I might sell the property outright (except for Aihok and Effex, who've been with me since 1977) if I got a good enough offer, and start a new webcomic. (I even know what the new webcomic's premise would be, and if no one ever buys AKOTAS that's possibly the premise I'll start drawing in 2029 if any, so don't bother asking now what it is.) But the offer'd have to be really good. Retirement good.

12/15/06

I'll be on the road for the next eight or ten hours. Ordinarily I'd update six hours later than scheduled update time instead of four hours earlier, but one of you emailed when I updated four or five hours late last summer the night I saw Superman Returns, which I appreciate, so today I'll save you guys whatever concern it may have caused you in the interests of the season.

12/28/06

Daily Grind rules prohibit the re-use of art. But even notwithstanding that I modified the old art, I still produced two new panels today, so I'm good.

12/31/06

Longtime readers will recall that I keep a "filler reserve" of cartoons to run on days when I can't produce a new one, that I like to run out the filler reserve in December because they all have the present year's copyright date on them, and that I can only do that on weekend days while a contestant in the Daily Grind if I wish to remain a contestant in the Daily Grind. Shorttime readers will have figured out that much from the top cartoon today.
What still bears explanation is that, this year - what with the contemporary arc revelation surrounding Arthur's eighteenth birthday two weeks ago - there was too much going on for me to remember to spread the year's leftover fillers one-a-day on weekend days. So I'm running them all today.
What also may bear some explanation is that D.J. Coffman is a jerk. Sometimes. When he feels like it. Which is most of the time.
... Okay, it bears more explanation than that: D.J. is a fellow Daily Grinder. At the start of the contest he was one of two contestants who truly took to heart the admonishment at the message board for us to start "trash-talking" each other, and most of us were quite taken aback. D.J.'s humor style generally is much more Stone and Parker than Parker and Hart, and despite (or because of) our discomfort he went with it. Over about a year and a half he probably succeeded in offending the rest of us at least once each, and loved it. For some of that time he also was always the first contestant to call the rest of us on a perceived violation of the Grind rules; in most cases the judges ruled in favor of the other party, and in most of those cases D.J. failed to let the issue drop in a timely fashion. But D.J. is one of the few of us who actually makes his living at cartooning, and his changing professional life led him to drop out of the Grind a few months ago in favor of other concerns. He's doing exactly what he wants with his life and I say all power to him.

Arthur, King of Time and Space

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