Hurm News: Playtime Projects: "Thinking of You"

New Playtime Projects merchandise is now available in the Hurm Store (www.hurm.com/store/products/thinking-of-you.php)! The new swag uses a new design called "Thinking of You." The design features the orange generic puppette poetically summarizing your lifelong feelings for humanity—it's pure poetry suitable for t-shirts, mugs, or even posters for your wall.

So way back in the dawn of Webcomics, I came up with this nutty idea.  Since I didn't want to spend actual time drawing a Webcomic, I figured I'd put together some Perl scripts to draw one.  Toonbots ran from 2000 to late 2001, eventually adopting a sort of fractal hiatus pattern and limping along even until this year.  And who knows?  The Muse may kick back in any day.

Suicide Serpents. We're fighting a new kind of enemy here in Elf `n Troll land. The Realm of Atland is probably behind the whole thing. Invade! Invade! Let's fight them there so we don't have to fight them here! Fear! Fear! Fear! :)

Sarcasm over.... Play Nice.

I’m a little late in getting the show notes up. Our 8th show had a stellar turnout with cartoonists of all walks. We discussed several topics, including the perennial writing vs. art debate, Scott McCloud, how to pronounce Jeph Jacques, and shared a whole host of tips and book recommendations for cartoonists. Here are some [...]

MILESTONES
A shout-out to the conclusion of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge which was an amazing webcomic - telling the story of several different people in the midst of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans.  There will be a book next year from Pantheon Books.  Congrats to creator Josh Neufeld - this is one of the best works of the year so far and I hope everyone has given it a read.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
D.J.Coffman is working on a (politically-minded band) Flobots-inspired comic called Rise of the Flobots: Architects of Change.  Simil;ar Coffman art but definitely a different vibe for him than previous work.

WEIRD
Desmond Seah's webcomic Bigger Than Cheeses is often pretty funny.  Lately though he's spent an inordinate amount of time mocking a particular scene and storyline from Tim Buckley's Ctrl-Alt-Del.  I don't think there's much of a legal problem using the one bit of art from C-A-D in Seah's comic (perhaps a taste problem but I'm not going there...), but when you do it over and over and over and over again... I don't know what my point is, but it's beginning to feel like an Andy Kaufman sketch or something.

WARREN ELLIS
Why not give Ellis his own category - he gives me a reason to write about him enough.  I forgot to mention this bit on Freak Angels from last month:

When we started FREAKANGELS, some webcomickers were heard to say “weekly webcomics suck.” Like there was only one way to do a webcomic, and that the daily newspaper strip was somehow inherently superior to six-pages-a-week. Even now, I’m not seeing a lot of weekly webcomics. If you know of any, stop by freakangels.com/whitechapel and tell me about them. Hell, maybe we could generate a weekly programme guide out of them.

Weekly comics don’t suck. You can read them anytime. You can wait for weeks and read several episodes at once. But it’s nice, I think, to have landmarks in the week. Friday is FREAKANGELS day. You don’t have to be there at 12noon UK time when Chief Mechanic Ariana pushes it live. But it turns out that tens of thousands of people like coming over here on the day a new episode goes live. FREAKANGELS Friday. And I like doing that for people.

Weekly webcomics are great when they give you a satisfying chunk of an update like Freak Angels' six pages does.  Update no more often then you can keep up with and design your update "chunk" plus frequency to both ensure you can keep up with the schedule but also so that you can break up your story into satisfying chunks.

And it really was on Thursday at my first Barnes & Noble signing.
Originally, we had planned to do a short drawing program then open it up for questions and such. But with the remnants of Hurricane Gustav raining down, hardly anyone was in the store.
Naperville has a nice little downtown, but in the summer it relies heavily on foot traffic so the staff knew people wouldn’t be turning out. They set up a table next to the entrance and probably didn’t expect much out of the evening.
But I came through.

Hi,

...no, not World of Warcraft!

How about some serious love for our pal Travis? Because if you don't think this art rocks from top to bottom you must be dead.

This is the first panel of the first page of the new webcomic project Zyn Dweomer.