July 26th, 2007
Bee Allergy.
In today’s comic, Fred is pursued by a bee. Action Ensues.
This is one of those one’s I’m not crazy about. The idea worked out a lot better in my head, and also, I did a terrible lettering job on at the top of the comic. That’s just embarrassing.
July 26th, 2007 at 6:31 am
First post? Neat.
Anyhoo, as with many strips you seem insecure about, this one is particularly great. I was especially glad to see Adam’s lid in action (for the first time, no?). The J in the logo at the top is a little wonky, but that’s fixable; the only other possible problem is that it takes a little staring for me to figure out what’s happening in the last panel of the middle row (I got it after a few seconds, but it would sure help if Fred’s feet weren’t so oddly-shaped… but what’cha gonna do? It’s toons.)
I’ve never posted before, but I’ve been reading since mid-June, and I’ve been very impressed so far. I’ve recommended this strip to a number of my friends already. Keep up the great work!
July 26th, 2007 at 7:38 am
My cat has eaten three bees (that I know of). Not for street cred, of course. She just likes to hunt and kill insects. You’d think she would learn which don’t taste very good…
The new format is great! Lots more room to work. Oh, and it’s “allergic”… You need to fire your editor. :p
July 26th, 2007 at 7:50 am
I was going to mention the spelling but Erik beat me…good thing I read the other comments. I like the third frame in the bee-stomp drama
July 26th, 2007 at 8:44 am
@Jon: Reading since mid june? Here since basically the very beginning then pretty much. Yeah, it’s the first time something has popped out of adam’s head. I’m still trying to figure out what he’s got in there. Thanks for the feedback!
@Erik and Wit: You guys and your precious “speeling”. pffft. I blame Worth. He jinxed me by mentioning it the other day.
July 26th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Jim you are your own worst critic. This is a good strip. A minor spelling thing though…shouldn’t “Whoa” be spelled without the H? (Hey, I said it was minor.) Probably doesn’t matter….kind of like “Yea” and “Yeah.” Although I like that one with the H.
A friend was over last night and I showed her your strip. She took one look and said “Wow.” So whether or not you’re happy with today’s strip , you got a great review last night (from a woman who’s pretty picky).
July 26th, 2007 at 9:11 am
THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS!
Yeah, I already fixed spelling mistake number one, so i’m leaving the h for now. Damn spelling. Adobe illustrator needs a spell check feature!
July 26th, 2007 at 9:34 am
Ill. CS2 does have a spell check. Choose “Edit”, “Check Spelling”. I believe the older versions have it also, but I’ve been stuck on CS2 for a while now. Do you use the live trace feature. I feel it adds something to my strips. I have now done about a dozen of them with it, and I can’t stop using it.
July 26th, 2007 at 9:44 am
Son of a… Yeah, it does have spell check. Why the heck didn’t I look into that before?
Nope, never used the live trace for the strips. Do you mean you live trace your penciled strips?
I only lay out the text and frames in illustrator, then I use painter for everything else.
Doing strips digitally is pretty interesting though… It’s kind of like uncharted territory… there are a whole lot of techniques out there to be discovered.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:01 am
whoa whoa…don’t fix it. whoa is spelled with an H. I checked in the dikshunerry.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:01 am
I like the new, larger format. It really works with the animated nature of your strip. Keep up the great work. I like that we see Adam’s cyborg lid in action.
Crit time (sorry, but I promise not to bring up speeling): I had a little difficulty making out that it was the monkey showing up in the penultimate panel.
By the way, what font do you use?
July 26th, 2007 at 11:02 am
oh..you mean the H on the END of whoa. my bad…hahah. sorry. Jim, I am the worst speller out there because by the time I get to the lettering portion I just want to be done. So I feel your pain.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:12 am
I ink in my strips, then use the live trace to clean up the scan. I tried using live trace on my pencil scketches, but I was not happy with the results. I really want to get CS3, but I’m to poor and the company I work for does not see it as a justifiable expense. I don’t know if Adobe made any changes to live trace that may help with the pencil sketches, but the live trace and live paint a great for digitizing comics. I, myself, am partial to vector art, and live trace beats retracing in Illustrator.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:14 am
@wit: Don’t worry man… it happens. Luckily I use a font and illustrator, and as kevin luckily pointed out, it has spell check, so there’s no reason I should have another spelling error. It even caught the Whoah.
@ worth: Yeah, this being a mostly illustrated narrative comic i’ve done, there were a few issues that I struggled with. The monkey showing up, and fred missing the bee being the primary ones. If I were to do it again, I would zoom out that panel a bit, put fred in silhouette, and maybe accentuate the path of the bee more.
As for the font, I made my own font, it’s called 005 lettering (so it shows up at the top of the list) there’s also 006 lettering - which is the bold italic version (because I’m not familiar enough with the font program to know how to just make a bold version of a single font) and obviously there are four other previous fonts, one is a hand lettered “computer voice”, and the others are less successful variations of 005 lettering.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:22 am
@ kevin: Ah, so you ink them old fashioned style huh? I did that for a while, but man I freakin’ hate scanning. I’ve used cs3, but I haven’t used live trace enough to know if it would work better or not.
I like the vector art, and I used to use flash to ink my comics for just that reason… the only problem was that the nature of how flash works meant a lot of going back and cleaning up the lines, which was basically the same thing I was doing when I worked pen+paper… I’d draw a line, then trace back over it. It was like drawing every comic twice though, and chewed up a ton of time long term (the little things add up exponentially.) Now I work strictly digital with painter, because I love the natural media brushes. It’s everything I liked about working the old school way, combined with the joys of the eraser and the undo button.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:42 am
I’ve never used painter. I have recently started working with a wacom tablet in Ill, Freehand and Photoshop. I really have not gotten the feel for working strictly digital yet. They say practice makes perfect, but we’ll see. I would like to move out of the stone age, but for now I work paper/scanner/Illustrator.
On the topic of fonts, I have recently started using Font Creator 5.5. It has been tedious, but its free. Which program did you use?
July 26th, 2007 at 11:54 am
I used fontlab. I found a book “learn fontlab fast” which was priceless and pretty much worked as advertised. I never bothered learning the more high end font stuff though, because I found that using a digital tablet and the brush tool in fontlab, I can whip up a font pretty quickly, and then it’s just a matter of adjusting the spacing. (I guess kerning helps here, but I never got to that chapter in the book)
Speaking of working digitally, Have you listened to the comics coast to coast podcast yet? There’s a link in my side bar to it… In the episode where they interview the creator of Baldo, he talks about working digitally, and he mentions how fast he can create a daily strip… He also covered digital work a bit more in the forum when I asked him about it… good info there.
July 26th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Are there any other benefits with using Illustrator to letter your strips rather than Photoshop (other than spell check)?
July 26th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
hm… not sure, I don’t use photoshop for it much, but I use illustrator because I have my frames, word bubbles and text all in one file, and it’d divided by layers, so there’s a bubble layer, a text layer and a frame layer, and it’s more convenient to manipulate them as objects on the same layer than the way photoshop puts all that stuff on it’s own layers. I don’t know if it would pay off for daily strips or not, but for more complicated arrangements, I like it.
July 26th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
I’ll have to check into fontlab. Thanks for the tip.
No, I have not listened to the podcast yet. I’m at home now, but most of my web comic viewing I do at work. Checking out comics is one thing, but I don’t think it would be apreciated if I was streaming audio in the office.
To comment on Illustrator vs Photoshop for text: In Illustrator, once you have the text typed, you can “create outlines” and then manipulate the text further just like any other vector art, or just add stroke if the font doesn’t have a bold version. As I said earlier, I am partial to vector art, so I prefer working in Illustrator. I do prefer the filters and adjustment layers in Photoshop to anything Illustrator has in it’s filters or effects.
July 26th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Loving the more ambitious layouts. And sadly, though I’m not allergic, that’s exactly what I do when I see a bee.
July 26th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Thanks Dave, now how about you go out and get furious? I’m afraid your Europe vacation may have taken some of your edge off.
July 27th, 2007 at 11:10 am
This is a great webcomic *salute*
-M
July 27th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Thanks M, I’m workin’ on it!
July 27th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
brilliant comic. it took me two looks at the thud panel but so what.