Ye Olde Towne Pub

Good afternoon everyone.

Just letting you know about a few minor tweaks to the site. We have removed the links section over there on the right sidebar, and put in two new links to follow Towne Pub on Twitter and to become a fan of the new Towne Pub Facebook page.

We added a link to the menu bar at the top of the page to easily get to the latest strip without having to dig for a link in one of the posts.

Under each post and on each page you will find a Share This button to share content on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Email, Digg, Delicious, and so on.

Our resident writer and artist is having issues with the latest strip. At 10:31am he tells me that he finally decided that the strip kicks hiney.

At 10:36am, he comments on his post saying that it is not great and that a new version might go up.

What say you?

Update:

The pictures to the left of the post there are small parts of other strips. On the old, non-WordPress site, you could click on the images to see what strip they were from. Now you can again!

I just fixed up the DB (read, HACKED) and wrote (read, mangled) some PHP to make it happen.

If you were ever wondering why there was a giant Volton-looking dog robot that showed up here every once and awhile, click away and you can find out.

I also added two new portraits from two of the new strips.

Have a great weekend. If you see Bob, tell him to put down Mass Effect 2, and get inking!

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.

We here at the Ye Olde Towne Pub Institute for Perfection understand that navigation of the strip archives is a little odd at the moment.  If you click on the most recent page of the Reboot to the Head saga, page 4, and then hit the button below the strip to move to the previous page, you will not find page 3, but instead a silly, homicidal, radioactive squirrel that I drew on a lark as part of Tuesday’s sketch.  This certainly makes trying to reread the first few pages of the new story arc a bit uneven.

Dave assures me that the problem is correctable, and he’ll get to it when he can.  As it turns out, he’s actually working at work today.  Or something.  So he can’t get to it right this second, which he would, if he wasn’t a selfish, cold hearted bastard.  Which he is.

In the mean time, you can view individual storylines without the clutter by clicking on the “Categories” shortcuts on the lower part of the left sidebar.  For example, clicking on the Reboot to the Head option on the sidebar will navigate to a new page that shows only the first four pages of Reboot, with the newest page on top.  You can use this, along with your browser’s handy dandy “back” button, to navigate from page to page.  Yes, it’s clunky, but it’s also only temporary.  Because, again, Dave’s fault.  The end.

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.

Page 3 of Reboot to the Head!

Dave and I have spent a lot of time talking about how we create strips, both in blog posts here on the front page and Dave’s excellent (and very detailed) behind the scenes article.  Over time I think we’ll flesh that article out to include chapters on each stage of the process, along with detailed examples from several strips, but if you haven’t already read through it, and you’re curious at all about the process that we undertake when creating a strip, please check it out.

Today’s strip is a very interesting one, for me.  I was extremely proud of the first two strips.  I’ve got the 3rd panel from page one as my desktop wallpaper (on both monitors), and the splash page for page two is one of my favorite things that I have ever drawn.  But this strip was incredibly painful to work on.  It was slow to write; where the first two pages popped into my head all at once, writing the action in this third one was like pulling feef.  But rather than go into nitty gritty detail about the strip, even though it’s tempting, I thought I’d share a little snippet of why it’s so fun to work together with Dave.

Many times when I hand off a black and white strip to Dave, it can be very confusing for him to decide which little squiggly lines belong to which part of which character.  He makes a best guess, and usually gets it about 95% correct, but sometimes he misinterprets what I meant in the art.  It’s totally understandable, especially when we have so many overlapping, transparent layers in each panel.  In some cases the coloring missteps even make it past me, and end up published on the site (we later correct them once we find them).  When I drew the first panel of this page, I was concerned that Dave might have a hard time figuring out which bits were Phinn, and which were the cat alien, especially around Phinn’s left hand.

Confusing Inks (click for larger).

To make things a little easier for Dave, I thought I would provide him with a color guide (because I am such a nice guy) pointing out some of the more, er, hairy parts of the image, as it were:

Handy dandy color guide (click for larger).

So, of course, the next time I opened the file…

Dave wins.