Gah still messing with the eyes; nudged them down and to the right a bit. :P

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 88
• A* Episode 10, Page 89

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I've been invited to be on tonight's (Friday) podcast of a webcomic talk show called Villainland

http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/ta ... 734&cmd=tc

It starts at 10:00 pm Eastern time and as far as I know will be me and the show's two hosts, webcomic authors in their own rights, rapping about A* for an extended period of time! Like an hour or hour and a half maybe. 8o I will probably be babbling incoherently for most of that time.

There's no particular need to tune in live since the show should be available for download at any time afterwards. You do need to register and certify that you're over 18 (and thus able to withstand mildly salty conversation, I guess?) in order to listen in, which is kind of a pain but um hey it's probably better than... Oh well no it isn't, but I hope you'll give it a listen anyway, assuming I don't make too much of an ass of myself. ... Which I probably will.


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Speaking of which, I made more icons. :P (Feel free to take these and use 'em if you like; I use them in ads and on mirror sites and stuff. I should probably wait until the end of an episode to pick out just a small number of the very best images, but eh we all know I can't wait that long.)











Some day maybe I will draw a normal face. For now I always seem to draw something weird about a face; the eyes I've been agonizing over yesterday, for instance, are kind of demented. Looking at them in icon form I was thinking oh boy, I'd better clean those up, so I started trying it



but the regularized eyes were...boring. Then at the end there I thought well maybe if I make both eyes kind of crazy they'll balance out--but that was just getting ridiculous. I should just relax and realize I'm all about the crazy eyes. =P Which is not to say that there isn't still a lot of improvement to be made on my work in that department.

Drawing process animations for the last two pages--these might help me out of some podcast questions ;)

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 90

Hey I was on a podcast talking with a couple other webcomic authors about A*! They were Roy Duncan and Jay Bradley, and it was their webcomic podcast Villainland.

*cue Nixon accent* "I am *not* a villain!"

It was fun! Thanks to Roy and Jay for having me and being nice about A* and asking lots of questions and letting me ramble on and on, telling stories about lawyers fleeing to Mexico and how I ended up as the "lead" designer on a high-profile MMO (those two stories are not directly connected >_>). I even gave out some minor A* teasers/spoilers. It's all in the hour-long Villainland episode 31, and you can listen in or download it on the show's page (the link above), but you do have to register (free) with the site first and certify that you're 18 or older--because younger people aren't allowed to have fun, I guess?

Roy and Jay have comics on Drunk Duck--Villain Next Door and Danielle Dark, respectively--which have both been running for years and are quite well done; same goes for Putrid Meat by Deidre "Pit Face" Crouch, who was on-hand providing moral support and Skittles.

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Speaking of Skittles... Wait, no, I got no candy. I do have little animations of the previous two A* pages being put together, though.

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Gosh where did the week go? I nearly missed pimping out last weekend's edition of my weekly comic, The Princess and the Giant, by posting my usual teaser/link:



Whew, done! And there's another Princess page due this Sunday, just as soon as I can get it drawn. :o

So I had a listen to the interview, it was cool! That was a tele-conference and you were all in different locations?

Betty Rubble? Really? lol that was an odd thing to throw at you.....which you handle well :)

So, you tested games at Monolith before being a dev....I would have never guessed. That was an interesting story....we never really end up where we expect in life it seems.

Anyhow, 2 thumbs up -

Glad you enjoyed it! Yeah it was over phones, in fact it got off to a slow start because the guy who hosted it had his phone die, then he tried coming in on a land line, but it wouldn't accept it, so he had to get through the show on his cell phone with very low battery power, which is why the other guy had to ask most of the questions.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 91
• A* Episode 10, Page 92

Preliminary/alternate versions of page 92:



Cheeahh.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 93
• A* Episode 10, Page 94

Hey my silent fantasy comic "The Princess and the Giant" updated this weekend...as it does every weekend, so that really isn't news, but I like to pretend it is. Anyway it's an excuse to show you this snazzy banner/preview that links to the new Princess page:



And if you're really feeling frisky you could hop over to the forum post about that page wherein you will find preliminary versions of the page, featuring, among others, Ninja Princess. Yep. >_>

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 95
• A* Episode 10, Page 96

Dang I'm way behind on my usual storms of icon-making. Hmph! As a tide-me-over I took page 91 and split it into two portraits, which are in the episode 10 gallery if you need to find them in the future:





Oh man and I hadn't even thought at first I was gonna get two pages done today because I was up all night reading La Muse; the first page says the online version is just a "preview," but in fact it's all 220 pages of the story, which took some time to get through! Very interesting going, for me primarily because the art by Hugo Petrus is often amazing, looking simultaneously almost photo-referency but also really stylized and with often cartoony exaggerated expressions--but then what's uh extra interesting is that it seems to go through some streamlining processes later on, so for instance some panels just get a little loopy, particularly in the faces, but you also see sorta clever shortcuts being taken, like small background characters no longer having faces drawn on them, but just being sort of blurred. That doesn't sound great but really, some of the art is super, especially near the beginning. Petrus' strong smile lines probably influenced Selenis' face on today's page 96.

The writing is interesting in the same "hm this didn't all work out equally well but some is awesome and the rest is a fascinating attempt" way: the base premise, basically an ultimately powerful, frivolous, well-meaning superwoman out to cure humanity, is patently ridiculous, but that's kind of the point, and it's played for increasing laughs as you wonder how far they can take it, but then tries to get some serious stuff going on, and...well that doesn't work as well, because La Muse (aforesaid superwoman) never takes anything seriously, so you don't believe her when she's finally supposed to be doing that. And then it runs into the old cosmic super-book problem, where they're dealing with poorly defined cosmic powers, and then they have to keep one-upping them, and eventually you get to ridiculous stuff like (actual La Muse quote) "They threw a **** universe at me!" Now if that was still playing for laughs, it would be prime stuff, but it's actually supposed to be kind of serious by that point.

Aaand there's my overly critical review of a vastly superior comic. Yay webcomics! But really go check it out, it's fun.

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Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that with page 95 today I started adding the subtitles at high-resolution, instead of shrinking the art down, then adding the captions at screen resolution; I had thought that the subtitles would come out sharper if I wasn't doing them big and then shrinking them down before they go up on the web, but in fact they come out way nicer if I do them at high res and then shrink 'em down--the kerning or whatnot is much more precise and stuff, and the letter edges are smoother without being blurry. The little "smbhax.com" in the corner isn't quite as sharp as it was before, but that's just sort of an easygoing watermark, so no biggie. Also this means if I ever have to print them out (in pages after 10:95, I mean), I won't have to reconstruct the darn subtitles and captions! Phew.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 97
• A* Episode 10, Page 98

Stupid tricks you can do in Photoshop!
- Stick a semi-transparent white layer behind all your shading so the head looks kind of like a sloppy skeleton!
- Invert that sucker! OMG it's totally different now!!! Your character is on a campout, playing with a flashlight in their tent! Man!



Right, this unworthy entry will join all the others in the episode 10 gallery. Galleries are accessible through the "episode list" link in the site's top menu. I suppose technically I should just put a "gallery" link in the menu, but this way uh the art sneaks up on you?