Probeersel

As the talk with Reinder seems to be slowly winding down to an end (I could be wrong though) here's another two bits of exciting news. Right now we're trying to organise a get-together for the Probeersel members. Initially we were even considering a comics jam but I'd really have to pull in some favors to get it arranged on this short a notice (place to host it, advertising to make sure there'll be a crowd to draw for) so I'm kind of glad that most of the members don't seem to be too enthousiastic about jamming live. But it looks like we will arrange for an informal get-together, albeit that I suspect none of our American members will be able to make it. Pity.. maybe better luck next time, who knows. In any case, I think it'll be fun, and who knows, perhaps I'll take my camera with me and get some nice pictures for you fans and/or for members who couldn't make it. We'll see. More on that later, perhaps. Since we're keeping it informal, I ...

Readers of Reinder Dijkhuis' blog know it, visitors of the Stripliefhebbers Forum probably noticed it, and I guess I should report it here as well: Reinder and I are chatting on storyline structures, webcomics, and our own comics (Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan and The Grim DotCom) here . No idea how long our chat will last, but right now I get the impression it's going well - I like Reinder's take on things and I feel I have some things to add to the dialogue as well from my Grim DotCom experiences and from founding and leading Probeersel.com so far. I'll quote Reinder: If you can speak Dutch, read it, and throw peanuts at us from the sideline .

I reported earlier that Nozzman was trying to find out if there were enough artists interested to join in a live comics jam on the Atlantis festival. Unfortunately, not enough artists showed interest, so the whole thing's off. Bummer. Maybe better luck next year. Any interest in perhaps organising a live event just for the Probeersel peeps ? I know the Cul de Sac would be interested in hosting it. Well, just let me know - other comic artists are welcome to sign up as well, of course ! Email me ? Click here.

Here's a thought for future functionality on the site that I thought I'd post. I'm noticing more and more web comics sites have webcams sections. Could be cool - webcams of our artists if they like, or even the possibility of our fans to add their cams as well ? What do you guys think ?

According to the "What's so special about today?" section on Probeersel, it's been three years since I launched the short story "Chalk" and started the The Artificial Real story collection. Since then, I've only added "Rock". I guess it's high time I free my hands and at least launch another chapter (I've got several of them semi-written down) to at least make it appear like there's some regularity in the updates on this series. Shame on me ! Ten years earlier than that, though, the first Bone album was published - some time in July. That makes for 13 years of time that this series has ran, and just today I read an announcement over at BoneVille that shipping of the ninth and final album, both hard- and softcover, will start some time this month (July). 9 Albums in 13 Years. At least TAR isn't going at THAT pace yet - I'll give Jeff Smith credit for launching the 'Rose' miniseries as well as the Big Johnson Bone bo...

Satan has resurfaced again ! And he claims to have four new episodes of Macadamia ready to upload, so we should expect to see new material appearing soon - then again, he's popped up several times the past year, so if anyone wants to start a little wager wether or not Macadamia will continue anytime soon yes or no, might be interesting. I'm hoping he will get round to uploading new stuff soon, since the comic went off to a great start and I've been anxiously awaiting new episodes of this witty, sarcastic 3D comic series. In other news: Dutch freelance comic artist Nozzman is semi-involved with the Atlantis festival : he works for the company that designed the site and last year he was a 'live comic artist' there, which was met with great enthousiasm. Enough enthousiasm for the organisation to consider an entire room for live comic artists this year. So he's trying to find out who'd be interested - I might be, especially if other Probeersel artists would li...

Reasons Why We Rule has returned to the web. Their site shows the reason it went offline (including in the new episode) but the short version is that a link to the large mpeg of Matt dancing to the Mortal Kombat theme was posted on a major forum so everyone started downloading it. So they exceeded their bandwidth as mentioned, which turns out to be a whole lot sweeter than ours: they have a whopping 65 Gigz. God damn ! And now they upgraded to 85 apparently, even -- I'm wondering who I need to lay at Protagonist to get that kind of a sweet deal. 3 just suddenly seems very, very little. RWWR humbles us.

For those who have been paying attention to Probeersel.com's activities, or even more specifically my own, you may have noticed that we like Reasons Why We Rule . Unfortunately, for over a week now, their site is down because they've exceeded the hosting limits from their hosting provider. So all week there's been a "Site bandwidth exceeded" page on there instead. A real pity, because Matt puts up an average of three new episodes every week and it's always been worth checking out. Their forum is also populated by various interesting people - no 'celebrities' like on the Comics Journal Forum or Stripliefhebbers forum, but just ordinary yet very interesting everyday people with original, funny postings and great ideas and comments. Once we get a forum on Probeersel.com (at some point it'll be on top of our to-do list, trust me) I can only hope we get even slightly as interesting a crowd together on there as they have. And I've already before offe...

The Saiso girls noticed the review I wrote for their site on our links page and they copied it proudly onto their weblog . I've noticed some other people doing the same, like Mr. Satanism , and even Marq van Broekhoven, although in his case he proudly displayed the fact that I don't care too much for his Plintkabouter comics . I must, however, admit that I like some of his other work a whole lot better, and that he's a rather intelligent guy with a reasonable knowledge of the comics world, and ever since I met him in person I also must admit he's a rather friendly and funny guy. Makes you wonder why his 'Peer' comics are crap. Luckily he doesn't consider it his own greatest work, either . It's weird how it gets contageous when people start posting responses to their site and yours is in there. Technically, this is the second time I bring them up - or third, if you count the fact that MY text is on THEIR site now. I should have gotten copyright.

Alright - with the help of Sionnain for figuring out which code to put into the template, and with the help of Blogger Help pages, we switched on the comments. Personally I think that if you want to be able to post something that people can respond to publically and you can then reply and they can reply etc. you should really just get a forum and not publish a blog, but hey, people like commenting on blogs so to hell with it. Now you can. In other 'eager to please people' news, Worst Case Scenario is completely dedicated to FarScape this whole week, so (Dutch) fans of the show should definately go check it out. And of course, for about an hour and a half after midnight last night, the comic displayed the wrong episode - 'luckily' I was still up and about to correct that. So now you guys got comments and FarScape-themed episodes. Rejoice !

Reinder has another point, and I guess I've got some work cut out for me now. I'll look into it, folks. As soon as I have time.

I finished the second episode of RCH tonight. It's a tad bigger than 'Ball' (12 pages), it's called 'Door' and you'll be seeing it on the site either tomorrow or monday, along with two wallpapers of the series. Hopefully you'll enjoy 'reading' it and if you've got any thoughts on what it'd be about, send me an Email and we might arrange a T-shirt for you if you got it right (and no, 'Door' is not the right answer - it goes a bit deeper than that :) ).

Perhaps you all remember my regret about my initial response to the webcomics selection in the new Dutch Stripmuseum. Well, as I explained, this was based merely on the pictures I saw of the pillars, which gave a bad idea of what I could really find there. Then, shortly after, I decided to take back the expression of regret because, after all, I'm entitled to a nuance-free opinion in the light of my 'profession'. Today, I was in the Stripmuseum. I saw the webcomics selection. And besides having had a great time there (in the museum itself) I have to admit I'm impressed after all. It's a good selection, tipping my hat to Reinder there. And as I understand, this is before the new update, so I'll anxiously await the updated selection now. Meanwhile, Probeersel.com is mentioned TWICE in that collection. That's right - first of all, we're one of the collectives named in the summary of Dutch web comics podias. While that's not entirely accurate - we...

RCH (pronounced 'Arch', not Ahrr-See-Eych) premiered yesterday. The comic is fairly basic and one episode fits on one piece of paper. The first episode revolves around the concept of keeping your friends close to you. That you never should try to abuse any one of them. You could say that the black figure in 'Ball' represents the US, but I'll leave that to the reader's imagination. I might just do Episode 2 today. I don't know what it'll be about...we'll see. Keep your eyes open for further installments though...

I don't think I've laughed so damn hard in quite a while as I did yesterday ! Jean-Paul Arends, comic artist behind daily comic 'Scribbly' from the Dutch 'Metro' newspaper, has admitted before that he's a semi-fan of the comic that Joep and I are doing for one year (and we're wayyyy over halfway), Worst Case Scenario . To make a long story short, he spammed the Stripster forum by posting the comic's eternal punchline, "Wilt u daar ook worstjes bij ?", in every thread. The owner of the site stopped him after about 25, 30 threads were contaminated or so, after which a huge discussion arose because he took it so seriously, so the thread about that joke became divided between people who laughed their asses off about it, people who seemed to be attacking the owner, and the owner. The thread is still alive as I write this, however, by now everything's cooled off and René Janssen, a Dutch freelance illustrator, had put two Worst Case Scenari...

Out of the blue, we receive email from Satan letting us know he's alive and intends to resume the Macadamia strips ! Woooo ! I'm excited, seriously. The comic was off to a good start and I really like his work and sense of humour. So I hope he does get to resume the comic :) We're also approached by a new applicant. I'm not going into details yet because the entire staff's not quite sure wether or not this person's Probeersel.com material or not. We requested them to send in more material that will give us a better idea of what they can add to our community. So we don't know if this is the tenth member already - however, several dozen people have now over time applied for the site, and less than half have been accepted. Redeeming factor in the indecision was that the submitted material consisted of loose scribbles, and Sionnain was quick to point out that the way people submit to our community should already tell us something about them, or how they view u...

I just realised something earlier today while posting on the Stripliefhebbersforum. There's a reporter who posts there a lot called Peter Breedveld, and I cracked this little joke about him calling my comics crap which he responded quite seriously to. I realised that it's comic artist's job to vent straight, uncensored, unnuanced opinions and remarks, and it's journalists' job to actually nuance everything to the bone to make sure it corresponds with the truth. The jester and the herald, so to speak. That's probably also why I hated the thought I'd have to watch my big mouth (see previous post) because I'm a comic artist, dangit. I'm gonna damn well write what I like - I'm not a reporter, after all. So yeah, my completely biased and uninformed opinion of the webcomics exhibit was that it focussed on comics that don't represent what's out there too well in my view - it may be way off the mark, but that's how I perceived it. Then again...

Amazing - whereas my experience so far was that not a controversial (or non-controversial) thing I said or wrote made even a dent on anything because our community (and yours truly, as well) is constantly being (deliberately or not) overlooked, we seem to have been raising a few eyebrows lately here and there. Good news - although I'd just as well have us continue being ignored so I can continue to let stupid things fly straight out of my big mouth and coming off as justifyably indignant. This, however, is now (in my opinion) no longer the case. Whereas I've been rather comfortable with the fact that no matter what we tried, our little (now ten-headed after all - meaning: I count Tom too, of course) initiative was never mentioned in summaries, and the consequently very pleasant situation that I got to bitch and moan and speculate about media conspiracies and sabotage through systematic silence, truth is, slowly people are looking. And listening. And - quite rightly so - commen...

We have another aspiring community member - his name is Bandirah and he's going to send us some audition material. I have a feeling - just from his email - that he'll be doing something very interesting, but we'll just see. If his stuff IS interesting enough, we'll have a ninth member on board, which brings me to a little betting pool I want to propose amongst us Probeersel folk: When do you think we'll hit ten ? Not counting Tom as a member here, since he IS staff but not one of the artists, mind you, otherwise we'd hit ten with the first artist that joins next, Bandirrah or not. But stuff's getting exciting ! When I steered this site's course away from just the Probeersel books towards an artist community, I wouldn't have dreamed to have so close to ten people on board this quickly, let alone such talented ones. I would like to raise a glass on all you loyal Probeersel folks, and to all future community joiners the future will bring us ! Now - I...

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...