Friday, September 19, 2014

Back from the great beyond...

Greetings, readers.

It's been a while, and first, I want to apologize for not having made any posts in 2 months. I have been extremely busy with a variety of things and have not been able to keep up my regular posting here. I'm going to briefly explain why.



First, I have been swamped at work. During July, I was preparing to go to a national conference, which happened in August. Then I returned to campus and immediately got thrown into the new semester. This promptly buried me under a mountain of work, some of which I had been putting off due to the conference prep.  On top of the normal work, my colleague and I are trying to get not one, but two scientific report manuscripts out the door by the end of the term (at least one will go for sure... the other we are having some issues with in terms of collecting data). And to cap that all off there was an unfortunate blow-up at work between two of our faculty members and I was one of the people asked to mediate. Thus, work has just been a nightmare.

Now, that doesn't leave me with zero time. I still had weekends and some evenings, and I certainly could have blogged. But the reality is that I was so fried from dealing with stuff at work that I just didn't feel like it.  As readers here know, I have been working on a Supergirl fan comic, and the 3rd issue, if I had stayed on pace, would have been done around Labor Day, but it's still not quite finished. There are some other reasons for that (see below) but one of the biggest was I didn't even feel like working on my comic -- something I've been enjoying doing since December of last year.  Clearly, I had been burning out on things, and I needed a break. So I decided to take one.

Over and above the burnout however, is the fact that I have stopped reading most of the DC titles I used to read -- the only remaining ones are Supergirl and Batgirl.  And even there, Supergirl I read mostly as a matter of form (if a Supergirl comic exists, I will buy it, no matter how much it sucks -- and believe me, it has sucked a lot for well over a year).  Batgirl is a wait-and-see title at this point. Gail Simone has written her last issue, so when the new writer comes on board, I will give him a few months to see how he works out. But unless the Barbara Gordon character remains recognizable, I will probably bail on that.  Besides those two, I am done with DC, and with the "Female Thor" silliness at Marvel, which is yet another gimmick (and I don't do gimmicks), I have dropped the Thor title.  This leaves me still reading tons of comics, but not really invested at all in either of the Big Two companies. And since those guys and their foolishness are what caused most of my rants, I have not been inspired to come here and rant about anything comic-related for a long while.  Simply put, the indies have kept me fairly happy, so I haven't felt the need to kvetch about things like events, crossovers, and 3D cover gimmicks. As you know, DC and Marvel still do those in spades -- if anything, it's only gotten worse since I started reading comics again almost 2 years ago -- but since I completely ignore them now, I am not inspired to vent about them.

I have been reading some wonderful comics -- Lazarus, Alex + Ada, Rai, Gail's Red Sonja, Fables, Fatale, and Velvet come to mind -- and I will try to start posting about those in the coming weeks.  But the sad truth is I tend to write more profusely when I'm ticked off, and Greg Rucka, Jonathan Luna, Gail Simone, and company just have not pissed me off.  I mean there is not much to say about Lazarus except buy it... it's the best comic-book on the stands, bar none.

Two more bits of news: Supergirl: Last Daughter of Krypton, and another project I am working on.

As you can see in a couple of older posts, I've been producing a home-made fan-fiction comic about Supergirl, called Supergirl: Last Daughter of Krypton (or SGLDK). It's been great fun and very rewarding to write my own Supergirl tale. However, it has also been wildly frustrating for a number of reasons.  The main issue is the lack of available resources on the DAZ Studio shop (or other similar shops like RuntimeDNA) to allow me to shoot the scenes I had envisioned when I wrote the script.  Who knew, for instance, that on the entire DAZ Studio shop, plus Runtime, plus ShareCG, not one nicely modeled ambulance existed?  There are police cars, sheriff's vans, SWAT vans, and so forth, so I assumed there would be an ambulance. I wrote a scene with one and then discovered there aren't any. So I had to figure out what to do about that.  I have grown tired of re-writing scenes to accommodate what I cannot render in the artwork, and this is particularly a problem with Supergirl, because of her super-powers and her ability to fly and do amazing things (it would be much less of a problem with, say, a martial arts character who is stuck on the ground and can't punch things 100 feet into another building).  Effects like exploding walls, shattered glass, and the like are hard to come by, and many scenes do not look anything like I had originally imagined.

The scene frustrations are one issue. The high expense of ordering DAZ products that do fit my imagination is another.  I have spent well over $100 a month since last December on these products (so you can do the math on that) -- virtual products that only exist in the computer. I don't mind this so much, except that it is extra frustrating after spending all that money to discover that the skirt doesn't properly fit Kara, or the prop doesn't work right in the scene, and now I can't use it anyway.

And the final problem, which makes the others seem utterly not worth it, is that, because Supergirl is a trademarked character owned by DC, I can't openly share my work with others. A few friends have downloaded and read it, and seem to enjoy it,  and I have no illusions about the thing going viral or thousands of people reading it even if I made it available. But to be unable to even put it out there is more strait-jacketing than I had thought it would be when I started.

Therefore, I've come to the very difficult decision that I will mothball the SGLDK series after issue 3 is done. I will finish it (I only have about 3 more pages left to shoot), and I am not going to change the story (it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, but oh well). But after it's done I am going to stop with this comic and move on to another project.

Which leads me to the final bit of news -- I still really enjoy DAZ Studio and making comic-book pages, so I am going to move on to my own, original character concept.  The details are still being worked out, and my good friend +Stuart Johnson has been a great sounding board for me as I come up with ideas, but I think this newer project will provide me with less frustrations (I won't need space ships, alien locales, or over-the-top Superman style special effects). And because it's original, I can release it to the public. It may be that the same 2 or 3 people who privately read SGLDK will be the only ones that read the new one, but at least it's mine, I will own it, and I don't have to worry about getting a C&D letter in my inbox one day.

Well, that's a longer post than I intended, but I guess I owed you guys a few thousand words, so there you go.

So long for now, and be good.

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