I feel so bad for little Bubroche.

I DO HOPE I MIGHT BE ABLE TO MAKE SOME COMICS SOON, BUT I CAN’T SAY I’VE BEEN IN A TERRIBLY CREATIVE MINDSET THESE PAST FEW MONTHS. I DID GET A NEW JOB AND A NEW PLACE TO LIVE THOUGH! THESE ARE THINGS WORTHY OF NOTE TO SPRITE COMIC READERS. OF THIS I HAVE NO DOUBT.

SEE YOU AROUND, HOPEFULLY SOONER RATHER THAN LATER!

[DISCUSS]

• I used to make the panels 250×250 pixels, then shrink them to 225×225 when I put them in the comic. Please don’t ask me why I did this, because I have no damn clue. It’s one of the most nonsensical things I’ve ever done with this comic (besides the rancor’s cameo, anyway)
• The comic has a transparent background. I think I originally did this because I thought it would make smaller files (ah, ignorant youth; transparency is a color when it comes to images, so it would have been the same file size with any solid color). The biggest problem is readily apparent with the title and episode number information; at that level of GIF compression, the characters become blocky and a little difficult to read. It’s probably worth a few extra bytes of data to give the image more colors to have more anti-aliased text and get a more legible result.
• Mouse-drawn word bubbles?!? The less said about this, the better. Same goes for the Zelda I title image in a Zelda II comic.
• The sweatdrop (besides being a way overused carryover from Japanese animation) would have looked a lot better in sprite form. Same goes for the telephone in the next episode, and the crapload of drawings in the one after that.
• Main characters ought to have faces. I’m glad I figured this out eventually.

And now, a few things you may not have known about Zelda Comic. Were you aware that:

• Zelda Comic was originally a small subsection of my Geocities site, “It’sa Me, Mario”? (thanks to my packrat nature, I’ve got the whole original site saved on my computer. The entire site consisted of three drawings, four “rants”, a handful of links, and a section detailing when I made updates to the site. So even in its early primitive state, Zelda Comic was a major step up in site content)
• there was no pre-planned plot for several months after starting the comic, and that each episode was written as it was being constructed, moments before uploading? (this included Pit and Bub being characters)
• the fire image used in the background of Episode 3: The Ultimate Revenge is almost the only image I use for fires in Zelda Comic, and in fact in any other comic where I need a background engulfed in flames? (want it?)
• I sent Brian Clevinger an e-mail asking him for permission to make a sprite comic? (I feel so embarrassed saying that now. Maybe I thought he was the rightful inventor of the idea? Long story short, he did indeed give me permission)
• I had never played Kid Icarus before putting Pit in the comic? (Paul was a fan of the game, and I thought the sprite looked cool, so I checked out the ROM, quickly took some screenshots and threw him in. Die-hard Pit fans, please feel free to shun me a little bit. But hey, I’m a big fan now, and just bought the game on Virtual Console, so that’s gotta count for something!)

I think that’s enough embarrassing confessions for now. I leave you with a special treat: an early version of the Zelda Comic website courtesy of archive.org! You can check out all the archives they’ve got here (GameRoom), here (Zelda Universe) and here (self-hosted)!

Holy crap, I’ve been using the blue site design for over three years now! In case you haven’t noticed yet, I’m doing a bit of retooling along those lines. Like I said on Monday, nothing earth-shattering, but mostly a color rethinking that’s been a long time coming; in fact, the comic background color change last year was made specifically in preparation for a brown website. The blue was fun and all, but the comic’s colors pop out a hell of a lot better against a more neutral background. Blue was getting a little garish. The biggest change would be the retooled title bar, designed to make much more efficient use of vertical space. I’ll be refreshing the non-main pages soon enough to reflect this design shift, but I’m thinking of calling it a night soon, and will be out of town for a large chunk of Saturday, so the rest of the site may be slow to update.

Thanks to everyone for sticking with me for the past five years! You’ve put up with crappy update schedules, fits of writing myself into a corner, and seeing a male Blooper in drag! You all rock my world!

[discuss]

So there’s this guy named John Campbell, and last year he started the day of Hourly Comics, once a year on February 1st. The only annoying thing is, I had to work both last year and this year on that day! It’s not always easy to pull yourself away from troubleshooting kids’ computers or fixing old peoples’ iMacs so they can use Eudora again, so I missed out both times. Luckily, we came up with a solution: we’ve been holding our own hourly comic day today, and putting up our efforts on the forum. You can see the rest of my comics in the appropriate thread. It may even include me working on the next Zelda Comic, once I deem it the appropriate time to do so. I went to Target today! There were no turtles.

This is sort of a preview of my regular art style. As fun as drawing things in a Wind Waker-esque fashion can be, it’s somewhat limiting as far as character designs go. Anyone I try to draw in the Wind Waker fashion ends up looking like Link. Kinda like my custom sprites, come to think of it… -_-;; So odds are future filler strips will look less like past ones and more like this. That means a few important things: Link will be taller than Pit, Bub won’t look retarded, and I’m gonna do drawn comics a hell of a lot more often. I’m not gonna stop spriting, but some of the action scenes I have in mind just aren’t as effectively portrayed in sprite form. Sprites are great for talking head-type comics (which there is no shortage of around here), but they absolutely blow for dynamic camera angles. We’ll see what happens, I suppose.

I plan to sit down today and try my damnedest to storyboard a few episodes before I go back to work tonight for Super Happy Fun Tech Meeting Time! Wish me luck on all accounts.

UPDATE: I couldn’t decide how best to set up the next episode, so I decided that, instead of potentially butchering that comic, I would concentrate all my powers of butchery on a comic where it didn’t matter how butcheried it was. This latest comic doesn’t even deserve a discussion thread, though all you Diminutive Mega-Man #2 fans are welcome to make your own.