by ·Comments Off on Uninspiring Television

Nothing gets me more depressed than watching an excessive amount of television.  There is something undeniably soporific about the process but it can easily lead to you watching things that you’ve seen before or things you have absolutely no interest in just for the sake of slumping in front of it for a little longer.

I very rarely come away from a television show, no matter how good it is, with a fired up sense of enthusiasm.  Even a short five minute webisode can instead just leave me wanting to watch more moving images, but no matter how much I get dragged down by television that is actually of a high quality, it’s nothing compared with the way I get dragged down by something that’s trashier and as I often think, if this is happening to me, it must be happening to other people as well.

I can’t help but feel we are being fed poor ideals by the box of flashing lights that sits in our living room.  Cheap to make easy to digest competition shows, such as the box opening non-game No Deal or No Deal, the Weakest Link or Who Wants To Be a Millionaire have all set the tone for what should be desired and sought after and that is money.  I remember watching game shows when I was little where the prizes were somewhat a bonus as opposed to the goal, with any monetary incentives being incredibly small and the prizes taking the form of washing machines and fridges presented on slowly rotating platforms.  It was the actual taking part, being on television and playing a game that was what was important.  I suppose when Countdown starts offering money to its winners, then we know we’re doomed.

The other form of cheaply made easily digested yet simultaneously nauseating show is the reality contest.  Thankfully survival shows like Big Brother seem to be on their way out and really in later years I got the sense that Big Brother was abusing the mentally ill rather than providing solid entertainment, but they have been replaced with the trend for talent shows.  There’s the excruciatingly drawn out X Factor, or Britain’s Got Talent (And Must Be Stopped) or the inexplicably popular Strictly Come Dancing, the show with a title which has never quite made much sense to me.

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by ·Comments Off on Incomplete Works: The Student Squad

The cover of the one complete issue of the Student Squad

The Student Squad is pretty much the first thing I ever worked on with any regularity.  At one point I did fifty days of daily updates to the web comic, building a relatively substantial arc of events and filling a nice healthy archive.

There are two reasons why I don’t really carry on with this any more:

1)  The characters were all loosely based on some very close friends of mine, so I never felt I could do anything too interesting with them and due to mild superstition was always scared of damaging or killing any of them just on the off chance that I might have created some form of Voodoo comic.

2)  I don’t think it’s very good.  At a later date I think I will compile a list of mistakes that webcomic authors can make drawing completely on my experience with the Student Squad, staring with the author self-insertion character and going from there.

Here is a pdf file of the first issue of the Student Squad.  Despite this being the first issue, it does still draw slightly on an archive of the older webcomics but was intended as an entry point for new readers.

DOWNLOAD PDF FILE (Recommend Right Click and “Save Target As” – File is about 30mb)

If that file is way too big, it is also available online in an old version of my website that I keep alive and can be found by following this link.

If I ever did resurrect this project and attempt to work on it further, I think I would go down the reboot-route and have some ideas on how I could make it more interesting and less…in my opinion…rubbish.  In short, I find it highly unlikely that I will carry on the Student Squad’s story as it exists above.

More than anything else, The Student Squad was a vehicle that taught me a hell of a lot about drawing both inside and outside of a computer and about web editing and maintaining a website.  If anyone ever wants to learn anything about any of these things, I can’t recommend trying to maintain a webcomic strongly enough.

Additional Notes:

It’s bizarre that almost every webcomic out there has some form of author self insertion and it rarely helps the comic.  There are a few notable exceptions but really it just seems like a bad idea.  This desire to put a caricature of yourself into your work I think goes beyond basic wish fulfilment and taps into something different.  It’s something I plan to write about and explore more in the future, and one of my more recent projects deals with self insertion characters in more detail.

by ·Comments Off on The Incomplete Works

I don’t believe in New Years Resolutions.  I think they’re daft and only set you up to look stupid when you inevitably fail.  Not only that, but if something is worth doing, you might as well just do it instead of needing to tie it to some date-triggered calendar event.  Despite all of this, I do have a sort-of-resolution-of-sorts.

I have a chronic problem whereby I constantly start projects and leave them hanging.  I know that I am not alone in this, but my problem extends to the point that I get distressed about their incomplete state, procrastinate, get more stressed about it, assign some arbitrary requirement for ultimate quality on the project, panic that my work will never be good enough for it and then never progress at all.  I have one project in particular that was born out of a five minute think on the bus about what I would do if I had to do a 24 hour comic, grew from there and now sits in my “I will never be artistically good enough to tell this story” pile with everything else.

My resolution that is happening at new year but is not a new years resolution is therefore the following:

This year, I will work on at least one of my unfinished projects and see it through to either completion, or a state where if it was never continued, it wouldn’t be considered unfinished.

In order to do this I’m going to source a little help from anyone who is interested.  Over the next week or so, I will be posting information on each of my unfinished projects and samples of them and inviting any criticism or encouragement for which, if any, projects have wings and which, if any, projects should be buried.

I might not take any advice or suggestions, but I thought I might invite it, partly to see if anyone beyond a few people I know actually reads this, and if anyone out there really desperately wants comments on at all.

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There’s a saying that everyone has a novel inside them. I think it doesn’t necessarily have to be a novel, but the sentiment is probably true and that even the most unlikely people have a lot of creativity inside them that they can’t get out. Everyone has something. A lot of people secretly work on little personal projects or just daydream about working on little projects but everyone has these little ideas that they want to get out.

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by ·Comments Off on Time Travel the Wrong Way

That last choose your own adventure style post was a little self deprecating, slightly exaggerated and probably made me come off like a pathetic alcoholic, which just isn’t true.  I’m not an alcoholic.

However, the point that’s there is that time very quickly slips away without you noticing it.  I suppose my only real comparison that I can make is school life contrasting with working life  (University doesn’t count.  I had very few contact hours which meant the time could be divided between time spent awake and time spent asleep, but the hours with which each were happening were not consistent).  Whereas I get home from work most days around 5:30, during my time at school, I could have been home for an hour and a half by that point.  With this in mind, it’s clear that I already have less time in the evenings.

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