Probeersel

Allrighty - it's the queens birthday by now, so everyone has the day off. Me too - but then, I always have the damn day off so it doesn't count. In fact, it's a disadvantage because I usually utilize my Fridays off to do some groceries shopping and I'll bet ya the stores are closed. Guess I won't be sleeping in late on Saturday... Anyway, it's that time of year again, folks: Tomorrow's May 1st - which means Probeersel.com is publishing another half year report ! I've been publishing these babies for two years now and received positive responses so I guess I'll keep at it. It'll have the usual rundown of statistics reportings, summaries of what went down in our lil' initiative the past half year, and some other fun stuff. Contrary to what you may think, these documents are a lot of work for me to write (and calculate) so you better damn well appreciate the service ! I guess that's what I'll be doing most of the day then.. I'll tr...

'The new comic' has now 3 pages done, but it sure isn't even near to be finished soon. The Annoyment one is stil in its 'done-but-still-needs-a-good-ending'-stage and today inspiration for a new comic came up. I've yet to come with a good title for it but it seems a pretty good project. It revolves around the adventures of two rather abstract characters. The comic's going to be mainly non-verbal - should be fun.

For anyone who hasn't been paying attention to the online comics buzz - unlike certain webmasters of this site with jobs that enable them to surf endlessly and read up on everything, PAID (you may envy me) - there's another 24 Hour Comic day coming up. In fact, many would say this is THE 24 Hour Comic Day. It celebrates 10 years of 24 Hour Comics since Scott McCloud first invented it, and the book that will be published (or is already published ? Unclear to me ) containing 9 of the best ones, hand-picked by Scott himself. They chose the 24th of the 4th of 2004 because the date seemed ideal for it, both in a numerological-poetic way and in matters of convenience. It's next Saturday, folks - yes, that's short notice if you hadn't heard of it yet. So what is a 24 Hour Comic ? Please, don't make me explain. The official rules are here . The boil-down version is that you make a 24 page comic book from scatch within 24 hours time. Since this year was a Leap Year,...

Patrick's officially joining the site - he sent me his info today and I'll be getting some pics of him and later this week the first pages of the comic. So expect to see him appear on our pages ! You heard it here first.

Oi...it's all about us, so why shouldn't it about the ones fresh in town? Besides, we can't handle that giant stash of beer on our own...oh wait...that was the big secret right? Dang...

We may have a new member joining our community soon. His name is Patrick G. Smith, and those of you part of this site's staff have already seen his huge attachment when he sent us a page of his comic. Here's a reminder, first of all, to all new applicants: please, if you're sending us a sample of your comic, keep the image size below 500k ! Wayyyyyy below if possible - we just need to get an IDEA of what you're gonna do, there's no need to send us print-quality BMP's n such. It just clutters up our mailboxes and forces us to delete your email, since email storage is part of the total storage space we rent at our hosting company. So big emails means we lose space we could otherwise post comics up in. I'll try to keep available space bigger than what we're actually using, at all times, but when you send us huge emails, you're making that quite difficult for me. So please, don't . Anyway, Patrick's stuff looks good in my opinion. So if he...

Alright, the bill for the site just came in again. It's a bit sooner than expected, 'Cause after al, the site doesn't exist for two years yet, does it ? Or am I really losing track... geez. Anyway, it's pricey. On a yearly basis it's still incredibly cheap, but since I only get this bill once a year and have to cough it all up within 10 days, it can seem a bit hefty. Anyway, I'm not complaining. It keeps our initiative worldwide available for free to all, which was the point, right ? It's one of those moments that I'm always forced to re-evaluate the worth of Probeersel.com in my mind. And I look at what we've archieved, which promising artists have popped up, which people have paid attention to our initiative, how much our visitor's growth has been, and most importantly, how much fun we've had. And, well. THEN it's a bargain. Just thought I'd share that thought :)

Stripster.nl pointed out the following press release. If you're all good boys and girls I might translate this at a later time - right now I'm at work, still, it's 1 at night, and I'm drop dead tired so excuse me but I'm not going to translate it. It only really applies to Dutch comic artists anyway. But since we have four of those on board at Probeersel.com, and have reasonably good relations with others, I figured it would be of quite a lot of interest to point this out. So here goes: 07-04-04 -- Stripmuseum zoekt nieuw Nederlands tekentalent Het Nederlands Stripmuseum Groningen, geopend voor publiek vanaf 22 april, zoekt nieuw Nederlands striptekentalent. Onder de naam "De Belofte" is er een nationale wedstrijd uitgeschreven waaraan aankomende tekenaars kunnen deelnemen in twee categorieën (t/m 15 jaar en 16 jaar en ouder). De genomineerden mogen drie maanden lang exposeren in het museum. Daarnaast kunnen zij diverse prijzen winnen. Een deskundig...

Did some work on both 'the new comic' and the annoyment comic; the annoyment one seems to be finished now and all that remains to be done is come up with a good ending to it. 'The new comic' (I bet René hates this vague kinda stuff - heehee) has got a second page in its storyboard now and has a lot more to come. I was happy with the result and will do a third page this evening I think.

Thought I'd mention here that I stumbled upon the ComixPedia-site's little story about us. Feel free to read our tiny bit of exposure - the encouraging part is the title: "Probeersel: Kind of Like the Dutch Keenspot"

That's right - Worst Case Scenario got a literary edge to it as of today. I was so fed up with all the news lately about the comic artists turning renowned novels into graphic novels - especially Dick Matena who will soon be done with Gerard Reve's De Avonden, and who, though it's not a small archievement, gets majorly overhyped in my opinion (I read them) - that I thought it was time for a little parody. I took a few of Franz Kafka's most famous books and stories, and turned them into cartoons like the above in five minutes time each. The method ? Copy the very first line of the book (two of them start out with the very concept of the book, explained in the very first line, after which this strange situation is basically examined from all sorts of angles) and then a clever second line that either says 'eventually he died' (which was the case with the beforementioned two) or 'eventually this story was never finished'. Kafka was well-known for taking...

Yes, yes, I got the damn date wrong on The Grim DotCom . What can I say in my defense ? I dunno, maybe I have a bit too much on my plate, with having worked on a daily Worst Case Scenario, having done the Penguism prequel episodes, The Grim DotCom (which lacked new storyboards until a few days ago), a guest comic here and there, a 24 Hour Comic, restructuring the Probeersel books, the stress surrounding the recent new server crash which disabled some new site functionality, my own actual paying job, the household, the shadow of a social life, keeping track of online comics news and generally being a damn nice guy. Perhaps it was alcohol-induced. Perhaps I looked over the weekly planning for the episodes while still half asleep. Perhaps I couldn't wait for Easter because it means an extra day off which I can use for comics or relaxation, and so my subconscience put it a week earlier in my head. I dunno. Fact remains, it's not Easter yet, so I had to shift an intermission epis...