Due to a combination of burned out power supplies, laziness, ennui, and general malaise, there will be no page 12 this week.

However!

There is a brand new Tweener!  And this one features the triumphant return of Sam to the pages of the Pub!

(and there was much rejoicing)

Dave and I had an absolute blast doing the anniversary comic.  These strips are very fun and satisfying to produce, and they look great.  We knew immediately that this is something that we wanted to do more often.  The original plan was to do them between major storylines (or chapters within a single storyline), but we felt that the pace at which the major Towne Pub arcs move would be too slow; it can take months (or years) to tell a complete story like Reboot to the Head, and we didn’t want to have to wait that long.

So, almost immediately, we came up with another idea: Tweeners are pretty easy to do; they take far less time than a page of the normal storyline.   So why not queue up a backlog of these strips and post them during the weeks that, for whatever reason, we don’t have a page in the main story arc finished?  Fantastic idea.

So, anxiety about switching my brain from long-term-slow-burn-epic-story-arc mode and into three-panel-gag-a-day mode quickly gave way as ideas began to pop into my head and I started to script them as quickly as I could.  We have ideas for several more of these, and I look forward to posting them to fill in the gaps (and break the tension) between parts of the larger story arc as we move forward.

Oh, one last thing.  The astute among you may have noticed that the name of this week’s strip is “quartet,” which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense given the actual content of the strip.  The reason for the name is that, right up until the last minute, this strip had a different punchline.  Originally, panel three read like this:

Sam: You guys are disgusting.

Phinn: Are you sure?  Because we’re looking for a fourth to round out the quartet.

After scripting the original strip, the other punchline came to me and, never being one to pass up a good fart joke, I ran them both past Dave to see what he thought.   Unfortunately, Dave liked the original better, so I went with that one.  Then, late Thursday afternoon, as we were making the final adjustments to the strip, I asked him one more time.  This time he relented!

And so…you get a fart joke.  Enjoy!

There is good news, and there is bad news.  First, the good:

If you look at the date stamp at the bottom of that very first strip, you’ll notice that it says “March 31st, 2000.”  Back when I first launched the strip I had been planning on doing 3 strips a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and it just so happened that that first Friday fell on the 31st, but how could I resist posting the first strip a day early on my own birthday?

So, as a result, Towne Pub the comic, and yours truly, share the same birthday.  Today I turn 35, and Towne Pub turns 10.

Ten years!

To celebrate, Dave and I have produced a new strip: Happy 10th Anniversary, Towne Pub!

It’s been no secret that many of the Towne Pub readers, including Dave and me, would like to see a return to the classic Towne Pub 3-panel gag strips that we did before things started to get heavy with continuity.  At the same time, I really, really enjoy working on dense, involved story lines and full-page comics.  It’s no secret that individual stories done in this fashion take months, if not years, to complete.  And so, even if we pause for a while in between stories, the opportunity to do gag strips will be few and far between.

That is, unless we decide to hell with it and do them anyway.

So what you’re seeing here is the first in an irregular series of continuity-independent gag strips that Dave and I will be doing from time to time.  I cannot even begin to tell you how fun and satisfying it was to put this strip together.  It was quick, and it was easy, and it looks great.  Dave and I were almost embarrassed at how stupid easy it was because, really, we should have been doing these all along.

Which brings us to the bad news that I mentioned up top there.  Even though this strip was relatively quick and easy, it did take time.  Late last week Dave and I had to decide where to invest our time, and we chose to do it here.  We absolutely did not want the 10th Anniversary to pass by without something special, and so page 12 in the continuing Reboot to the Head series sat by the wayside.  Sadly, page 12 will not be ready by this Friday.  I am not going to dump a load of work on Dave at the last minute two weeks in a row, and so we’ll be delaying page 12 until next week.

So, even though these “Tweeners” are relatively fast and fun, we likely will not have the time to do one every week.  We’ll do them as often as we can, and whenever we have an idea that is just too good to pass up, but realistically we need to make concessions.  We hope you’ll enjoy whatever we post, regardless!

As always, feedback is welcomed!  Please let us know how you like this strip, and definitely if you’d like to see more like it in the future.

Page 11 in the Reboot to the Head saga is live!

This page fooled the hell out of me in a number of ways.

For one thing, I thought it was going to be ridiculously easy to do compared to the first two pages of this chapter.  We’d already set the mood, picked the layout of the bar’s interior, chose the colors and lighting.  Most of the major decisions about stuff were out of the way.  And I’d decided when I wrote the script that these 3 panels would use flat perspective, which is just insanely easier to draw when compared to the one, two, and three point perspective used in the previous 10 pages.  I’d done a quick pencil sketch of Trebarg sitting in profile at my desk at work (which was the basis for him in the first two panels here).  And by Sunday I’d drawn the most difficult piece of background work, the “St. Pauli Cat” poster that you can see hanging on the wall.

So imagine my surprise when 11:30 pm on Wednesday night rolled around and I still hadn’t finished drawing.  It felt like I wasn’t even close.  I had maybe 2 cats penciled in the first panel, and roughs for only one cat in the second.  I was in a dead panic, and falling asleep at my desk.  By 12:45 or so, I was saving and checking in the completed strip, and in another surprise, I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the way it had turned out.

But I was being totally unfair to Dave.  He told me what he wanted way back in the early Fall when we first decided we were going to get serious about relaunching the strip.  He told me he wanted a backlog of at least 8 strips.  We ended up going live with only 2 strips finished.  He told me that he wanted the finished inks to him by Monday so he’d have 3 full days to color.  I typically get them to him Tuesday or Wednesday.   I accept full responsibility for these things.  It is very difficult to motivate myself to dive into the strip without some pressure on me, and this week I clearly failed to plan and took it way too far.

And, as usual, Dave saved the strip.  As recently as early this evening he had declared that we would not be making the Friday deadline.  He had a ton of work left to do, and he wanted to spend at least part of his evening relaxing and playing mass Effect 2, which he’s only playing because I begged him to so I would have someone to talk to about it, though at this point I think he’s invested enough in the series to keep going on his own steam.  Of course I told him to relax, we’d post the strip late, it was my fault, it would be OK.  And I would be playing WoW for much of the night anyway.

So, of course, Dave spent all night coloring, and he finished, with an hour to spare.  I really cannot emphasize how much of what you see on the page is Dave’s work.  It’s ridiculous how much depth, character, and life he adds to these pages.  So, if you do post any comments to this week’s strip, please take the time to thank Dave for busting his hump in getting this page finished on time!

Page 10 in the Reboot to the Head series is live!  Enjoy!

I’ve talked a lot…

…well…I just talk a lot.

But!  One thing I have talked a lot about recently is “panel density.”  That I’d like to fit more panels into each strip.  Given that there is a week between page updates, I want to give folks a little something to look at/read to tide them over until the next update.  Unfortunately, when writing the script for this chapter, I got a little carried away.  This page was supposed to be 6 panels.  What you see here was to be the first 3.  So I was supposed to squeeze Trebarg, 8 cats, two tables, and all that dialog into panels roughly half the size of what you see here.

Yeah, no.

So, instead, I decided to stretch this out into two pages, which would give me room to actually show what was going on in these panels.  As I reread the script I realized that I had committed the same crime on subsequent pages.  Too much action and dialog to actually squeeze into small panels on a single page.  So, instead of a 3 page chapter, this will be at least 4 or 5 pages.  I think it will work out a lot better in the end.

At any rate, I hope that you have enjoyed the last couple of pages.  As always, we look forward to your comments and e-mails.

HEY! The strip IS live. Click that Latest Comic link in the menu bar!

Bob will be back to post something that he believes to be witty soon!

Enjoy

-trebarg

The new Reboot to the Head page was live as of 12 am last night, but for those of you (Hi, Powers!) that may have stopped by before about 10 o’clock this morning, you would have seen an empty news post to go along with it.  I apologize for that.  Last night I was suffering from a splitting headache that only got worse as the night went on.  I typed a 2 or 3 line news post and hit the “update” button in WordPress but, alas, it did not update for whatever reason.  I know that the loyal fan….er…fans of Towne Pub hang on my every word, so I want to express how deeply, deeply sorry I am for the oversight.

I would also like to say that I’m sorry that this page is late going up.  This chapter of Reboot to the Head sees the return of Marc Trebarg, which I am very excited about.  It also features the first in-strip appearance of the redesigned character: now with 100% more necky goodness.   The reason that this page took so long to finish is that, unlike the previous chapter, the backgrounds in the panels of the next few pages will feature relatively static, interior shots.  I won’t get a chance to draw different stuff (like cars and buildings) to fill the backgrounds and try to make each panel look unique and interesting.  I want to avoid the old shortcuts from the class TP strips where backgrounds were just ill defined blobs (or, in some cases, just…nothing).  Back in those days I was trying my best to update 4 times a week, and corners had to be cut to keep up with that schedule, especially given that the strips were hand drawn and inked, which made art reuse painful and laborious.

This time around, I wanted to ground the scenes in real-feeling places, and avoid the cut corners.  I would rather post a new page late, and be happy with the results, than half-ass my way through it with empty backgrounds, or shapes to fill space.  So Dave and I spent a lot of time and effort on the background of this page.  It’s setting the stage for this chapter, and it needs to feel like a place.  There has to be stuff in it.  Stuff that will be shown again in future panels.  So, I spent a lot of time drawing, and redrawing, and redrawing again.  Getting things to look good enough to make me happy.  And Dave, to his credit, did a fantastic job with the color (as always).  In particular, the lighting effects in this are just the bees knees.  Check out the mix of purple, blue, yellow, and green highlights from the neon signs.  The way that the ceiling gets swallowed up in the darkness, and the foggy atmosphere.  I think he knocked it out of the park on this one.

At any rate, the extra time and effort we put into this strip will make the next few pages flow a lot faster and easier.  We won’t have to agonize over what decor to put on which wall, what colors to use, the orientation of the tables, how many aliens there should be, etc.   All those decisions are out of the way, and now we can just go with the flow.

I expect that we will be posting the remaining pages in this chapter on time over the next several weeks, though Dave has some incredibly hectic weekends ahead (with lots of travel) that may make that difficult.  I will do my best to continue Towne Pub’s new tradition of completely open honesty, and I’ll let you know well in advance if we’re going to miss a date.

As always, we love to read your comments and e-mails   Also, this Tuesday we have a particularly fun update coming.  I hope you’ll check back in.

Happy Friday!

This one really came down to the wire, but Dave pulled through like a champ and colored artwork that I was still tweaking at 9 PM tonight.  With page 8, the first chapter of the Reboot to the Head saga comes to a close, and beginning in a couple of weeks we’ll be starting the next leg of the storyline, which moves beyond Phinn’s solo storyline.

Before I go on, I’d like everyone to do me a favor.  Click on that link, the one that heads on over to the Reboot to the Head page, where you can see large thumbnails of every page in the series so far.  They are listed in reverse order, so please take a few seconds to scroll up and down once or twice to take them all in.  Dave and I posted 8 full sized, full color comic pages over 7 weeks.  Looking at them all end-to-end there I can’t help but very proud.   I still think that these are some of the best strips Dave and I have ever done.  I hope that you agree.

As I mentioned last week, and earlier in this very post, today’s page wraps up Phinn’s solo chapter.  Next week we’ll continue with chapter 2, which picks up with another beloved character in the Towne Pub cast.  Well, beloved by me, anyway.  I’m really looking forward to switching gears, but I’ve done absolutely zero prep work beyond writing the script, so I’ll be taking some extra time over the next week to build up some art assets (character designs, rough sketches, environments, etc), and Dave will be using the assets to experiment with color palettes.   I expect the first page to be posted two weeks from today (March 5th), after which our weekly update schedule will continue for the duration of chapter 2.  If I fall behind for any reason, I’ll make sure to let everyone know.

I think Dave will be doing a Tuesday update this coming week, and it’s a fun one that features some behind the scenes detail from the last two pages Phinn’s chapter.  I hope you’ll stop by to check it out.  I’m also planning on posting some original artwork next Friday to give people something to look at.  So please bear with us for the brief delay!

As always, we loves the comments.

Better late than never, right?  Right?  How’s this for a Tuesday update?

With page 7, we’re approaching the thrilling conclusion of Phinn’s solo chapter of the Reboot to the Head saga.   Page 8 will be posted on time, this Friday, and we’ll be taking a brief break of a week or so to begin work on the next segment in the storyline.  I expect page 9 to be posted on or around March 5th.  I hope you’ll bear with us.

This strip was drawn over a period of a month or more.  The first two panels were done before I even started work on page 5.  I knew page 5 was going to be difficult, and I’d written the script up through the entire second chapter, so I decided to skip ahead to page 8 and work backwards while I was still working on page 4.  One of the really nice things about working ahead is that i can jump from one page to another and back whenever I hit a snag, or start to get bored.  Of course the problem there is that you end up with 6 pages in various stages of completion with nothing actually done.  And then you have to delay posting page 7 by 4 days.

But I digress.

The first two panels of page 7 were laid out, and the foreground images were penciled, weeks ago.  The last three panels remained blank for the better part of a month.  Last week I decided to bridge the gap between paper and digital, and sketched out the rough Phinn drawings for panels 4 and 5 on a sheet of scrap paper in my office at work. Instead of taking a photo with my iPhone like I did for the last panel of page 6, I brought the sketches home and scanned them in.  I’ll probably be doing more of that in the future because it lets me sketch during down time at work, which is normally a time of day when I can’t get anything done.

True story: the first few TP classic strips were almost completely written, penciled, and inked from my cubical at Nortel.  I used to waste a lot of time there.  Ah, the good old days.

Anyway, I hope that you enjoy page 7, and page 8 is coming along later this week.  As always, your comments and feedback are much appreciated.

Page 6 in the Reboot to the Head series is up today.  Please let us know what you think!  The production of the last panel was fairly interesting.  I had been struggling with digital roughs at home, but I had a clear image in my head but was having trouble getting it down on paper.  It’s hard to describe, but I’m sure other artists understand how you can see something so clearly in your head, but the translation on the page just isn’t working.  While I was at work one day, I started sketching on some loose paper on my desk.  I really liked the result, so I snapped a pic of it on my iPhone, and mailed it to myself and Dave.

Panel 6.6, Phinn roughs. Click for larger version.

Dave was actually the one that opened it up and dropped it into panel 6 in the strip.  When I got home I was able to begin penciling right on top of the photo, which, I hope you’ll agree, turned out just fine.  It’s cool to know that, if the inspiration strikes, I can sketch something out at work and quickly get it into the strip without ever needing to touch a scanner, or even be at home.  Man, I love my phone

Speaking of which (sort of), I’ve decided that I probably won’t invest in an iPad, at least not the first generation.  It’s not that I don’t want one.  I absolutely do.  But my wife and I got a nice tax refund this year, which means we’ll be able to tackle some home improvement projects that we thought were out of reach this year.  I’ll be contributing any extra cash I have to that.  In the longer term, I’m seriously considering an investment in a Wacom Cintiq to replace my Wacom Graphics Tablet.  I love the tablet, but there are some drawbacks.  While I’ve gotten very good at looking at the screen while I draw on the tablet, not being able to “turn the page” so to speak, makes drawing sometimes very difficult.  If I do decide to make the investment, it won’t be for at least another year.  I also haven’t decided whether I’ll go for the 12″ or the 21″.  But, hey, it’s always nice to dream, right?

Even though Dave and I began working on these new strips months ago, we’re still learning how to do things.  Not just techniques, but ways to do artwork that we’re both satisfied with in a reasonable amount of time.  This strip is a good example of adjustments that we’re making to speed up the process a bit.  You may have noticed that the buildings in the second panel of page 4 were very different from those in the other panels and pages.  Dave and I both liked the look of the buildings, and they were much faster and easier to draw while accomplishing more or less the desired effect of providing perspective, and depth.  We decided to run with it in this strip and use the same (or a similar) style in every panel of the 5th page.   The big problem is that this strip has a distinctly different look from the previous pages.  I’m not sure how well it will flow, or how much it will matter, but I’m fairly happy with the result.

What I am not happy with is that some of the panels look barren or blank.  I feel like there should be flying cars in the backgrounds of some panels where there are none, and more in the backgrounds of panels that already have one or two.  But I tried inserting some and it gave the panels a cluttered, busy feeling that didn’t help at all.

Of all the pages posted so far, I have the most mixed feelings about this one.  I’m absolutely thrilled with the foregrounds.  I love Phinn in virtually every panel, and particularly the last which was a joy to draw.  I hope you guys like it as well.  As always, we’d love to hear your comments and feedback.

One last thing: I would like to apologize for missing the Tuesday update this week.  This week has been nuts.  My wife works full time, as do I, but she also attends classes at RIT four nights a week and does not get home until well after 8.  As a result, it’s up to me to help with homework, get the kids doing their chores, make dinner, and drive to and from after school clubs, classes, and other activities.  This week was one of those perfect storm weeks were commitments to work, family, and the strip were difficult to balance.  I hope you’ll forgive me.  I plan on doing Tuesday updates whenever I can with behind the scenes updates, goodies, sketches, and other fun stuff.

4 weeks, 4 pages!

Solar Phinn is based on a character I played in the Star Wars role playing game for a couple of year’s in high school.  I was obsessed with Boba Fett at the time, and I wanted to play a character that wore Mandalorian armor, similar to Fett’s from The Empire Strikes back and Return of the Jedi.  Of course Phinn’s armor is very simplified, to make it more stylized and easier to draw, and there are some other changes as well.  Obviously missing is Boba Fett’s iconic T-Visor helmet.  Additionally, Phinn wears a full cape, while Fett has a cape over one shoulder.  Notably absent from Phinn’s costume are the wookiee scalps that Fett wears as trophies.   There are many other minor changes as well, but the similarities are inarguable.  The grey jumpsuit, the large pouches, the bracers shielding his forearms, etc.

For the past 10 years Phinn has been parading around in Towne Pub comics in this armor, but he hasn’t done much other than show it off.  He’s fired a few shots from his blaster, and even pulled out his obviously lightsaber inspired sword from time-to-time (the one you can clearly see attached to his belt in the first panel here), but he hasn’t really used the suit to its full effect before now.

I’ve decided that, in these new reboot strips, Phinn will be very keen to use the many gadgets built into the armor, and hidden in those huge pouches on his belt. For the first time ever, we also get to see what’s under the cape (which should come as no surprise to anyone).

I’m pretty excited about these new strips because it’s giving me a chance to take a fresh look at the characters, and the way that I tell stories.  I’m enjoying the artwork, which I think is some of the best stuff I’ve ever done.  And Dave’s color is a work of artistic brilliance that really brings my humble drawings to life.  But beyond all that, it’s fun to take these characters that I love so much and just play.  I really hope that you enjoy reading these pages as much as we’ve enjoyed making them.

Before I wrap this up, I would like to let folks know that we are on target to have a 5th page up a week from today (Dave is already hard at work coloring it), and the 7th and 8th pages are really coming along nicely (with the inks for the 8th page nearly complete).  Unfortunately, I have hit a bit of a wall with page 6, and it’s been stuck in limbo for the past few weeks.  I see no reason why it won’t be ready on time, but I do see a slight hiccup coming down the line.  We may need to take a brief hiatus when this first chapter is complete in about 4 weeks to give us time to queue up a few pages from the next chapter before we begin posting them.

I do not anticipate that it will take more than 1-2 weeks at most to get back on schedule.  In fact, I am not even certain we will miss a week at all.   At the same time, I do not want to sacrifice quality to keep to a schedule, so if it comes down to it, I will delay a page for a week or two rather than post one that I’m not completely happy with.  Hopefully we won’t miss a beat, and the art for page 6 will come quickly and easily this weekend, but in the interest of full disclosure, I wanted to keep everyone informed.