jikokeno3.3

Christ on a bike

It's been a long while. See, me being self conscious on a constant basis does have an effect on the internet; I can see people reading and getting bored or thinking me pretentious when I write a depressive sounding post, and so I don't bother writing one. Plus, at the end of the day, it's healthy for a boy to have his secrets. Unless, I guess, if one of those secrets is that you rape children. That is a secret that should be revealed so as to lead to your appropriate punishment and retribution.

My Sunday has been good, for a change. I usually wake up around 1pm with a feeling that I have wasted the day. By 1pm today I had done my laundry, showered and dressed respectably, wrote, pencilled, inked, coloured and uploaded tomorrow's comic and watched High School Musical 1 & 2. I then wandered into town, bought some food and cooked me some roast beef. This has been my most productive day since I first pushed my head out of my mother's vagina all those years ago. I am down with that.

Comic news, as that endeavour seems to take up a good ol' portion of my time. Wednesday's strip is going to be number 40. In less than 2 weeks I shall have reached 50 comics. It took around 6 months for that to occur with TraGic, mainly because I couldn't be arsed on a regular basis. Other than some slip ups, I've been fairly constant with Dead Ends, even to the extent of drawing extra comics to make up for the ones missed. I have all of next week's comics written, and I've pencilled Wednesday's, which is unusually productive for me, but I have a basic plot outline in my head that lasts until the end of the series (which I believe will be strip 100). The end strip I've more or less written in my head as well, and I'm well excited about it. It's probably more predictable than I think it is, but hell, it's my dangin' comic and so I'm gonna run with it.

And GUEST SUNDAYS. I fucked up one week and ended up not doing the comic intended for that Monday. To make amends, I uploaded a non-plot related affair on the Sunday, which turned out to receive the highest viewing figures I'd had after a new strip. It seemed to have escaped me that most people are more likely to view a webcomic in their spare time, which for the vast population would indeed be the weekend. And whilst I don't want to change the update pattern to include Sundays, and I know that I'd be run into the ground if I had to do four comics a week, I had a notion that a Sunday comic would lead to more people reading it. So I was wondering how I could work this; maybe run TraGic on a Sunday, which is essentially what that first Sunday comic was. Nah, I don't want to cover old ground just yet. Aha! Take the work out of it for me entirely! Get other people to do it. I suggested this to my housemates (Daniel seems to be my personal adviser when it comes to things like this; I often show him the pencilling and the scripts before I continue), and both seemed really interested. Yesterday, Sofi, the other housemate, shows me a mockup for her guest comic. Which is amazing, I hadn't expected anything so soon.

But what she did was superb, and can be viewed here. I love her style completely, and would love to see her do a webcomic. It's like nothing I've seen in a webcomic before, unlike my shoddy efforts. Huzzah to Sofi, the very first Guest Comic Dead Ends has seen. Admittedly, I did of course add the last bit. And that's great, it's like a collaboration. Daniel is booked for next Sunday, and I think I'm doing the foreground art for that as well. It's good, it's interesting for me as the author as it forces me to do something different and look from another perspective, as well as showing me what other people read into my comic.

Incidentally, if any one reading this (and I know people do!) does fancy guesting me up, please drop me a line at cos@dead-ends.co.uk with GUEST SUNDAY in the subject line, so I can differentiate your email from the spam which seems to find me like it's hooked onto my genetic material.

But onto other stuff. Work's going better for me now; there's a new incentive at work - you get a lead and pick a square from a grid. With each square comes an envelope, and in each envelope there is a 50/50 chance of receiving some kinda prize. And, as luck would have it, the two leads I got last week were both prizes; the first being a bottle of red (which it turns out is not that pleasant) and the second being an hour off work, which I am taking next Wednesday. Incentives have always made me sell better than targets, and that is likely to be the case until I expire. I like to be motivated to sell, not forced to.

Other stuff... wait, pretty much all I do is comic and work. Or work and comic, but even then there's not really any variety. I shall just get to the point and say that some stuff is alright, some is not bad, and the rest (ballpark figure... 89%) is horrifically, intensely, fucking shite. Again, with reference to the opening paragraph I shall not go into it. Instead, to play us out, here's Flogging Molly with The Wrong Company.

The Wrong Company
Well, I fell into prison, about a quarter to three
Where I found in my cell a glass waiting for me
So I filled what was empty and I pulled up a stool
But he stood in the corner, the old devil wouldn't move
He said "you drink when you're lonely"
"No, I drink when I want!"
He said "you'll never be sober"
"Sure, why would I want that?"
I only drink to be merry, but unfortunately
I'm in the wrong prison cell and the wrong company.

posted by Cos Ryan @ 8:31 PM