As I type this, it is 12:01am on Friday.  The schedule lives on!  In my ears, the Ents are just now releasing the river Isen from Saruman’s dam.  Good for them.

If you follow me twitter feed (over there on the side, or simply @TGDSteve), you may have noted that there were some rather cryptic tweets to the effect of “not this week!” The explanation for those is that eventually I want to move the comic over to doing it in Manga Studio (I have v4 Debut, I had 3 EX previously which is overkill for me, not to mention that I suspect it doesn’t work with Snow Leopard).

Manga Studio is a great program, my main problem with it right now is wrapping my head around how the interface is just different enough from Photoshop that it makes my brain hurt.  Certain things are done slightly differently, and I’m not quite used to the whole bleed/trim/safe concept yet in that program to really do anything productive with it.  Add that to the fact that it slows down my workflow considerably (which is already pretty damn slow), and it’s gonna take me a while to move over there.

Meanwhile, I’ve been watching Noir, which is, as the kids sometimes say, an “older” series (okay, it was released here in 2001… but I’ve heard people call Cowboy Bebop an “old” series, too…).  It’s pretty good, and I’m wondering why it took me so long to watch it.  I remember getting the first few episodes in the English version of Newtype back in the day (first 3?  not sure) and liking it (particularly the music), but never got around to seeing the rest.

I was telling a friend that I found the gun porn in it somewhat amusing, given that there’s a dearth of personal sidearms amongst the general populace in Japan.  She pointed out that Shirow does a ton of gun porn in his works (or used to, I haven’t really checked to see what he’s up to recently), but that’s more “extrapolated into the future” gun porn.  I have a feeling that if you knew your handguns, you could easily pick out the gun models when they do closeups.

The other weird thing about it is that while there tons of gun play, so much that Kirika and Mireille rival the original Predator squad in terms of “kills per engagement”, there’s very little blood.  They also variably use silencers, with no real apparent logic to the pattern.

Anyway, that’s enough out of me.  Tiem for teh sreep.

See you next Friday!

Hey, lookit (Charlie Brown), it’s a new strip.  I actually thought I wouldn’t be able to get something up by dawn this Friday morning, but in the end some stuff came together and I imagined to produce something that doesn’t entirely suck.

I actually started this strip on Tuesday, doing the layout and what not.  I then discovered that I was working at far, far too low a resolution for the sort of “pencil drawing” thing I’m going for, so I had to redo that.  Then I was kinda faked out by the fact that my inkjet printer doesn’t handle printing line-art very well (I’m gonna have to try it on one of the nice printers at work we use for proofing).  Then I had been looking at some resources about printing and realized that if I didn’t adjust the way my images were being arranged, it’s gonna be a super pain if I ever have to print them out in some sort of particular manner.  As such, redid the template a bit.  That all took so long I figured that I’d have this done 8pm friday *maybe*.  As it is, it surprised me.  Kinda nice.

Hopefully I’ll be able to iron the kinks out of the particular “pencil brushes” I’m attempting to use, and things will go from there.

See you next week!

And here it is, the long awaited first TGD strip.  Took longer than I thought it would, but it turned out alright in the end.

I tell ya, though, in the future?  Grayscale and/or hand-done shading.  The coloring took soooooo long.

Next strip will be next Friday.  So get up there and make sure you’ve got the RSS feed up above and/or my Twitter account (@TGDSteve) followed so you don’t miss anything!

Now, for a weekend full of fun things like replacing showar heads and doing dishes >:|

See you soon!

- Steve
The Geeks Domain

Yep, it is.

“But Steve,” you ask, “What happened to the serial novel format?”  Well, I’ll tell ya… Two main things led me to re-re-vamping the site as a webcomic.

1. Most of the time when I was writing prose (and outlining), I was trying to jam what was a series of episodic instances into a “novel-like” format.  This probably stemmed from the fact that I conceived the whole idea as a comic in the first place
2. I had wanted to eventually have TGD done as a comic anyway, and I enjoy drawing comics (even though sometimes it takes forever).  I began doing Negative Zen as an outlet for that, but there’s only so much I can do with that particular strip without redoing the entire thing… and so I figured, if I’m gonna go through that trouble, I may as well do it for TGD.

And so here it is.  “But Steve,” you might continue, “No one cares, we just want to see comics.”  And you’d be right.

They’re coming up.