Thursday, April 22, 2004
| '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. |
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
 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, on Feb 29th several Probeersel.com artists undertook their own attempts at one, and Steve Troop joined in on the fun. I personally thought it was a very intriguing experience, but I don't think I'm gonna join in on the event on next Saturday, regardless of how historical it is. I'm beat and I have loads of other stuff to do, to be honest. However, if not a single Dutch comic artists participates, I may have to defend our fair country's honor and try my hand at another one, after all. We'll see. However, if any of you want to participate, and if you happen to be a Probeersel.com artist (yes, I'm talking to seven rather specific people here) I can probably re-use the code I used for the 29th so you can upload your own work 'live' as proof to your audience that the comic was completed in the necessary time frame. I guess that's why I'm posting this - I want to find out if anyone's interested. If not, I'm not gonna bother rewriting Perl code when I could be spending my time otherwise. But if anyone wants to take a crack at it next Saturday, please, let me know on time. Another point of interest may be that there's a completely new variant of the 24HC coming up May 1st, initiated by Barry T. Smith. You can read more about that here, but the general idea is not to whip out a 24 page 'loose' comic in the 24 hours, but basically sit down and jot down as many comics of your regular series as you can in 24 hours. It's a good chance to get caught up if you've been behind on schedule or if you want to create a backstash, and it may just show you how much work you can do in that amount of time if you really put your mind to it. Well, just thought I'd point it out to you folks. Let me know. You know how to contact me :) |
| 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. |
Sunday, April 18, 2004
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's interested in joining our collective, I'll set up his account and whatnot. He hasn't responded yet. If he does join, that'd make 8 members by now, wouldn't it ? That's not bad - not bad at all :) That's twice as many total artists as there are staff members, and one staff member isn't an artist here, so we're doing well. A group of nine, essentially. Wonder when exactly we'll hit ten. And then, when we'll hit fifty. And more.. as long as my wallet (or funding from any other source that will allow us to stay independent - I'll be looking into that in the future) can handle it, I say keep the artists coming. At least as long as they are PROMISING. We've had to turn down at least as many artists as have joined (as the staff well knows). After all, without quality selection, we might as well be Yahoo!Geocities, or Keenspace (I'm not referring to Keenspot here !), and that would mean several things. One, we'd have to get major funding off the ground, which'd mean either a coorporation buys us, or we'd have banner advertising n stuff. I hate both ideas. We're an independent, censor-less, cultural initiative operating on an international scope. Commerce, censorship, those are things you will (hopefully) NEVER see on Probeersel.com. We're making art, folks, and we're sharing it with you for free. That's what we're all about. So here's a few little questions to my staff and the other artists on board. When I set up this blog, I basically invited all the artists and staff to publish on here as well. Do you think it'd be wise to do the same with newly joined members ? I personally think we should give every member full (non-staff) access from day one, since he or she has been made a member because we trust they'll add something of value to our community. This trust means that no matter what they publish on the Probeersel site, all censorship is off. Should we do the same on the blog as well ? I could decide for myself, but we're running a COMMUNITY here, so I really would like your input, guys. And um... do any of the Probeersel audience ever read this blog ? Or can we just as well take that 'blog' link out of the page headers ? Don't hesitate to let us know. Alright, that's all for me today. Now let's see if Patrick still wants to be a part of our crew :) |
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
| 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 :) |
Thursday, April 08, 2004
| 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 deskundige jury onder leiding van striptekenaar Jan Kruis kiest de eerste uiteindelijke winnaars, die bekend gemaakt worden tijdens de officiële opening van het museum op 21 april aanstaande. Nieuwe beloftes Het Nederlands Stripmuseum Groningen organiseert de wedstrijd om aandacht te vestigen op de talentvolle striptekenaars. In het museum is volop werk te bewonderen van de reeds 'gevestigde orde', maar er komt nu ook plaats voor 'de beloftes'. Inzendingen moeten uiterlijk 15 april aanstaande binnen zijn. De deelnamevoorwaarden zijn te vinden op de website van het museum: www.stripmuseumgroningen.nl. Nederlandse Striphelden In het museum kan men kennis maken met bekende Nederlandse striphelden als Erik de Noorman, Agent 327 en Ollie B. Bommel. Jan, Jans en de kinderen ontvangen de bezoekers in hun huiskamer die vervolgens tot leven komt. De stripfamilie vertelt alles over de geschiedenis van de strip in Nederland. Striphistorie In het museum komt men alles te weten over de allereerste strips in de wereld. Bovendien heeft de strip door de jaren heen een enorme ontwikkeling doorgemaakt. Zo maakt de bezoeker een reis van de eerste hiërogliefen tot de modernste computeranimaties. Leuk voor stripfanaten, volwassenen en kinderen De collectie rondom diverse Nederlandse stripfiguren is opgedeeld in speciale ruimtes voor kinderen, volwassenen en echte kenners. Naast originele tekeningen van Paulus de Boskabouter kunnen kinderen ook echt in zijn kabouterwereld stappen. Voor de echte kenners zijn er unieke stukken uit de Nederlandse striphistorie te bewonderen. Men vindt de collectie in het Striplabyrint waar iedere bezoeker een bijzondere ontdekking beleeft. Voor meer informatie over Het Nederlands Stripmuseum Groningen kan men bellen met: 050-317840. Ook kan men een kijkje nemen op www.stripmuseumgroningen.nl. |
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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. |
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
| 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" |
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
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 ages with his books and often not finishing various of his stories, so parodying that in five minutes time each was very funny to me. I dunno. Just my strange sense of humour I guess. Still. What do you guys think, should I try more of these ? Not with Kafka anymore, obviously, but with other writers ? Any ideas ? Don't hesitate to email them to me if you have any. Also soon to come.. the 'halfway' episode. Yes, that means we're nearly halfway the 365 episodes ! Cause for a little celebration I'd say. |
Saturday, April 03, 2004
| 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 episode ahead of schedule. Buttttt - that means, to me, that I have room for an extra intermission, and I get to shove the storyline I'm so dreading to put into storyboards, ahead another week. And as anyone working on long storylines probably knows, putting a completely unrelated intermission in between and getting away with it, is great fun. We all forgive Tatsuya Ishada for quite regularly doing that, and the Grim's popularity hasn't decreased with the intermissions so far, either. So I'm looking forward to it (it will appear in just another few weeks) but I also have to come up with it now. So. An intermission, that's related to the comic, but not in the storyline, and that will fit in the state the characters and the story so far are in. Shouldn't be TOO difficult. Anyway. Thought I'd semi-apologise and explain here. Don't go looking for eggs yet. It's next week. |
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
| yesterday i had a really bad day. my mom was angry at me because i didn't finish my dinner. she: eat your potatoes! i: no! my dad: both of you, go to bed! - and this time in seperate bedrooms! so you understand, it wasn't fun. a consolation: april 1st RexRex starts! |
Monday, March 29, 2004
|
That's right! You will be assimilated! |
| The incredibly complete comics-site (with the pretty damn famous Comiclopedia) Lambiek.nl now added an article about Comics and the Web. Good for them (and about damn time) I would say. What really kinda irks me though is that, as the Netherlands' first INTERNATIONAL, SELF-FUNDED, web comics COMMUNITY, we didn't even get a pixel's worth of attention. We're getting plenty of love elsewhere on the web, especially where fellow 'new generation' web comic artists are concerned, and nobody feels above wanting their link on our site, or their personal information in the "What's so special about today"-section, judging from the amounts of emails we received from people who wanted to be added there, or requests to be reviewed, but to actually recognize us for the initiative we have started, that seems to be above anyone who decides to write something 'serious' about comics on the web.
Well, cudos to them, I say. Why on earth would you want to write about a group of promising young artists, from all kinds of backgrounds, nationalities, ages and interests, working in all kinds of different styles, humour, etcetera ? Where you have computer-generated comics, manga, european-style, american style, cartoons, taboos being broken, new styles explored, no censorship, just freedom to do your thing freely and for free, where artists work together, and where attention going to one artist means the entire site and all artists on it get the attention as well ? Where you have a robot wars contender, an opera-singer, a much-travelling CGI artist, two web developers, a journalist and a founder of another comics community thrown together in a mix ? A site that's been in controversy with religious people, with voting lists, a community which continuously welcomes new talent but tries to keep quality high, despite the fact that NOT A SINGLE VISITOR has to pay a single dime for access to the artwork, a site that doesn't require banners or any other kind of degrading, lame web-financing plot, that doesn't ask for your paypal contributions, that in fact gives stuff away for free, even T-shirts in limited editions designed by the artists themselves, accompanied with original drawings from them ? A site that keeps growing and growing in fanbase and attention, and whose members always willingly contribute to any initiative from others ? A site that gets referenced in forum-debates about online publishing (as an example of where it works), a site whose comics sometimes get referenced on science-, philosophy- or even psychology-debating forums and sites, a site that offers free, self-refreshing comics on your site - alright, so ModernTales does some of these things, too, and so does Keenspot, but doesn't that make us an interesting third party to discuss ? I mean, we've had plenty of applicants to publish on our site who clearly stated we were their second choice after Keenspot. No, of course not. Probeersel.com is best left ignored. It'll go away. Just ignore it. Well, don't count on it. And ignore us for as long as you want. Because in the end, you won't be able to get around us anymore, and we'll seem all the bigger a hit for it. Even if we've already been building at our success for two years now. So here's to anyone who doesn't think there's a story to tell about our site: *MOONS YOU* |
Sunday, March 28, 2004
| I've been digging through Reinder Dijkhuis (best known from ModernTales webcomic 'Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan')'s reasonably new blog and he writes a few interesting things here and there. He's putting together a museum exhibit on webcomics (I can't completely agree with his picks since they reveal mainly a focus on 'established pros' and fairly little on new-and-upcoming-talent, the latter of which are actually lately pulling in the much larger visitors' numbers as it seems - like Reasons Why We Rule, Monkey Business, the PC Weenies, etc., but it's still an interesting subject and I'm definately considering visiting the exhibit - unless I read wrong and it's over already) amongst other things. But here's something that REALLY caught my eye: a small post about a database for WebComics crossovers ! Now, as many of the loyal Probeersel.com fans know, there's been plenty of crossovers between RWWR.com, The Grim DotCom, God.Inc, hell, Penguism is a spinoff from the latter, etc. and we're far from done yet. Besides that, I've done more than a handful crossovers with my OWN seperate comics. So it might be good to get all the info on that and start submitting. In any case - and I'm talking from a promotional angle here, of course - it'll be good attention to the Probeersel.com initiative.
Just a thought. |
