I read someplace that you should make rules for yourself when working on your own project like a graphic novel. One of my rules is to have a maximum of 4 panels per page unless it's the same camera angle repeated over and over. This repeated frame technique is pretty much inspired completely from working in the world of animation and storyboards for the last decade. Sometimes it's fun to explore a locked down sequence of frames to show the movements and visually explain how things happen over a period of time.

I guess my decisions here are mainly to show Victuals struggle to leave the comfort of the lighthouse to get back to the water. I'm hoping that my audience will wonder why he left the lighthouse as well as notice the first words coming from his mouth. Cat's talk?

Oh yeah, and I'm not using Comic Sans anymore.

Another thing I have been toying with is the idea of switching from Google's blogging service to WordPress.org.  A few things have come up swaying me to go this route.

Here is a list of my reasons, so far, for switching from Blogger to WordPress.
 

• WordPress looks much more professional.
• Since it's open-source it has more options for how to set it up. 
• Once it's set up right, it's amazing what you can do with it and it's easy.
• reMINDblog.com will be an actual domain instead of a forwarded domain name.
• All the content will be on my server and controlled by me.
• I can use ComicPress to easily display my pages in an orderly fashion.
• I can have a menu at the top with About, Contact, Links, Tutorials, Etc.

This spread was a fun test. A test to see if I could push your eyes back and forth between the same frames. Feel free to throw out any ideas to make this work better if you think it's broken. There are just so many rules that people create when trying to explain how to do something. Comics and graphic novels have a handful when trying to lead the eye around the page. I think I understand the rules. The fact is, as long as the average person can read the story without getting pulled out of the scene because they are confused then I feel like I've had success. And if the average person can think, "Hmmm, that was different but I liked it for some reason." then I'm a superstar in my own mind.  

Speaking of superstars. I need to hand out a bunch of "Thank you's" in this post so hold on to your seats.

Last week was a roller coaster for me.  Every night after work I was up till the wee hours of the morning testing my new WordPress blog, transferring over old posts, downloading plug-ins, deleting plug-ins, testing layouts, wondering what I'm doing, reading help forums, testing links, fixing links and emailing my friend for help while crying.  I got in seriously over my head and I promised I'd deliver two posts a week to my 11 Google followers. What was I thinking? By Wednesday night everything was up and running like planned thanks to my longtime friend and shorttime IT guru, Rand Fugate, who wrote all the CSS madness in the background to make my sweet menu bar look totally rad!  

Just in time too because literally 2 hours later, Jerry from CartoonBrew, wrote an amazing article about reMIND releasing the floodgates of traffic to scour and pour over every crevice of my newborn blog to it's embarrassingly short end.  Thursday I got the same amount of hits every 15 minutes as I'd normally get in a day.  That was a rush.  That day at work, people were giving me high-fives down the hallway and beautiful women were winking. Okay, so maybe not, but I still felt pretty cool about myself.

Later on, BlackStar9000, put a link to reMIND on Reddit.com.  I've never heard of Reddit before but, WOW, that place really generates traffic too. Thanks Blackstar9000, whoever you are!  You alone sent over 1000 unique viewers to my time-suck and are on my list of new heroes. So if anyone is reading this, can you do me a huge favor and go to Reddit to vote up reMIND or down if you really must.  I still need all the help I can get!

Then Saturday rolls around and Nate Simpson links to reMIND from ProjectWaldo! Thanks Nate!!! ProjectWaldo has greatly inspired me in so many ways and Nate's blog is the best thing on the internet in my opinion. So go there right now if you've never heard of it. Click on his pages and see the magic.

So thanks for all your comments last week and several emails. I really enjoyed responding to everyone. It was a real shot in the arm. In fact, now I REALLY need to step up my game and get more pages finished.  

Some of the emails I received brought up the following points that I promise to address in the near future.

• I need more in depth coloring tutorials and my process of creating tones.
• What do you do with flats? Why make them?
• Explain how I use paint textures in my pages.
• My writing sucks and seems cliche. Why don't I hire a professional to help me?
• How would someone approach coloring a comic with different mediums like colored pencils or watercolors.

To add to bullet point number 4. If anyone sees any grammar or spelling errors then feel free to let me know. You are my temporary editors until Jeremy Barlow rocks it!  Spelling and grammar are my mortal enemies.

I am this way when trying to decide where to post my blog, comic or artwork online. I’ve studied all kinds of options.  I tried multiple services for years with my portfolio. I learned Flash and built animated menus. I tried free portfolios. Even MySpace for some dumb reason. I’ve used many hosting sites some of which really sucked and some were okay but overwhelming when trying to settle on a hosting package. I mean, what’s SSH, SSL, CGI, Ruby, RoR, Perl, PHP, and MySQL? Please don’t answer that. I really don’t want to know.

So to make this simple, I’m not going to go into all the options, hosts, sites and portals that you can use. Instead I will focus on the two best ways for artists to start a blog or comic online. I might talk about BAD options later, but not now.

The two best options are Google’s Blogger or WordPress.org. Both are great and could be your Internet home depending on what you want out of it.  Before you decide, here are pros and cons of each that are important to me as an artist.

Google’s Blogger (Blogspot domains)

Blogger – Pros

• Blogger is super easy
• Blogger has free hosting of your blog and files.
• Blogger is easy to access from any online computer.
• Blogger does not spam your site with unwanted ads.
• Blogger has a big artist community.
• You don’t need to know any programming at all. Period.

Blogger – Cons

• Blogger has to have (.blogspot) within you domain name. Unless you forward one to it but that costs money.
• Blogger has limited templates to choose from.
• Blogger does not have a menu bar.
• If you want to move to another host later then all your permalinks are permafried.

______________________________________________________________

WordPress.org with ComicPress template

WordPress – Pros

• ComicPress.
• WordPress has thousands of free plug-ins and widgets.
• which means WordPress is easy to customize to do ANYTHING you want.
• WordPress has the ComicPress template to help showcase your comics in addition to your blog.
• All your permalinks are registered to your domain name so they can be moved to a different host without changing your links.
• WordPress has page options and so it could pass as a website or portfolio as well as a blog.
• Comicpress allows you to click through your comic pages easily as well as many other features.

WordPress – Cons

• WordPress takes a bit more time to set up.
• ComicPress takes some knowledge of CSS to customize.
• WordPress needs a webhost to store your files.
• You need to buy a domain name and web hosting service.
• I recently noticed lots of spam comments. But this can be controlled. It’s still a little hassle.

So there you have it. If you want things as simple as possible then use Blogger but don’t expect it to be unique. If you want more info on the two then do the google search: Blogger vs. WordPress. You might want to get comfortable. It’s an endless search. But that just proves they are the two best choices.

I switched to WordPress because I wanted to start having a professional presence on the web. I wanted my site/blog to have a unique feel as well as other pages with links and information aside from my blog. I liked the idea of controlling my permalinks and content too. Here’s what reMINDblog looked like on Blogger. It’s still active but I rarely update it.  But if you decide to set up a WordPress blog then I strongly recommend one host.

Bluehost.com

I’ve used many hosts before and the only one I will recommend is Bluehost. In fact Bluehost will give you a free Domain name for life if you use them as your host.  It’s $6.95 a month for everything.  Wordpress recommends Bluehost above all the other hosts and Bluehost is the only one to offer a WordPress auto install. I used it and it set up everything in a minute and logged me onto my new WordPress site. Bluehost also includes everything you need for WordPress and Comicpress to function. Bluehost has unlimited bandwidth. This is important if your art or comic gets popular. You don’t want your site getting shut down when tons of people start flocking to it or be forced to pay more money for more bandwidth.

I decided to start calling the spreads "pages" now because I don't like that Google's number 3 keyword for my site is "spread". In case you are wondering why the page numbers don't quite match up to the spread number, it's because I'm using the page number of the printed book just so I don't get confused. Worry not, you are still seeing all the pages here.

How to get 10,000 unique viewers in 3 days.

So if anyone wants to know how to get 10,000 unique viewers in 3 days, then write an article about how much you love or hate Comic Sans MS and submit it to a few sites. A warning though. With great arguments comes heated comments. Not so much on my blog but on the websites linked to my article. 

Most of the negative comments came from my statement that people will hate you for using Comic Sans in your comic. Now I know the truth, may people will hate you for talking about Comic Sans no matter what the context. So to please all the haters, I have changed my statement from "many people will hate you" to "many letterers will want to dropkick you." I hope you will take me seriously from now on. I never joke. Comic artists don't exaggerate anything. EVER.

I was going to compose a top ten list of hate comments from other sites linking to my post but it would be to hard to weed through. Plus, some are so vulgar it would make a drunk navy trucker quiver. So I decided to share one of the funniest comments I read among the rantings. And here it is:

"Comic Sans is based on Watchmen. Why do you hate Alan Moore?"

This quote truely sums up the power of the internet. I laughed, I cried. I scratched my head because, Wow!

First of all, Watchmen was written by Alan Moore, not lettered by him. Dave Gibbons lettered Watchmen and in an interview with him he says Comic Sans is "an appalling-looking font" and "Comic Sans is so ugly" and "The major sin about it that really bugs me is that it only includes the uppercase I, the one with bars on the top and bottom, which as you know, you only use in comics for the first-person pronoun."  Read the interview here.

With all the opinionated controversy behind me, it's time for my next subject. Why Mac's are better then PC's. ha!

I finally got my Page Rank back!

I'm sure there are a number of you who love this technical stuff like PageRank and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but I am mostly clueless about making my site stand out on search engines. From what I know, search engines like Google, rank websites depending on things like who and how many links they have going to them. The more incoming links a site has the higher the page rank. The higher the page rank, the better chance that site has of being displayed in a search with similar keywords.

Before I switched from Blogger to WordPress, my site had a 3 out of 10. Shortly after I switched, it dropped to 0 and I couldn't figure out how to get Google to know I had switched. Apparently I didn't submit a sitemap to google. My IT guy helped me and a week later my site was recognized by google again. I now have a 3 out of 10 page rank.  The funny thing is, I still had the same amount of traffic after dropping to a "0" as I did with a "3" from before. So now I'm trying to figure out why. It seems like many of you understand this better then I do so maybe you can shed some light on it. I also read that there is a difference between a PageRank and a page rank. So confusing. Anyway, I have a 3 now and I feel better about myself but I'm not sure what it's really doing for me.

My Top 10 Favorite reMINDblog Articles…so far.

1. Before You Start Your Graphic Novel – This was the first real article I made to try and convey something I learned about the GN creative process. It started as an answer to a question that someone asked me in a forum. I didn’t feel like I was qualified to answer but once I started writing it, it was clear to me that I had some important things I wanted to say and warn people about. I’ve updated it since it’s inception so check it out again.
2. Outsourcing Comic Pages (Specifically Flats) – What I learned in this series of posts on Outsourcing really changed everything for me. I was able to color my last 2 pages in an a hour and a half last night, and it was largely because I learned about flatting and outsourcing. This article has a few parts to it so keep clicking.
3. Interview with Ian Hannin (a professional comic colorist) – It’s not everyday that I get to interview someone working on Batman. Plus it’s very informative of the creative process of coloring comics.
4. Making Your Own Comic Font – When I first started my graphic novel, I didn’t seem to care about my fonts or anything to do with Lettering. After showing some pages on forums, my eyes were opened and I realized that the Lettering is just as important as any other aspect of my comic. I tried to find the right font but had trouble getting one I was happy with that matched my style. Shortly after, I learned how to create my own font and never looked back.
5. Blogger Vs. WordPress – I started out using Google’s Blogger for reMIND but once I starting getting serious about blogging I learned about WordPress and the ComicPress theme. What I discovered completely revolutionized the direction I took with reMINDblog.
6. RGB Vs. CMYK in Photoshop – This has been a tricky learning curve for me because there are so many opinions of the right way to do things. Even so, I never understood the real working difference in Photoshop until I made this video comparing the two modes. Decide for yourself which mode you want to work in but only after you see what the difference really is.
7. 1000 Ture Fans – This is an encouraging article about making a living off your comics or graphic novels. The linking article by Kevin Kelly is a must read and can really change the way artists think about their work.
8. 7 Reasons to NOT use Comic Sans MS in Your Comic – This is by far my most trafficked and controversial article to date. Some hate it and some love it. Before just plopping the first comic font you find into your artwork, check out this article.
9. Easy Word Balloons – I made a quick tutorial a while back about word balloons. I’ve made them many ways over the years and this is the easiest and best way I’ve discovered.
10. Unnatural Talent – I know this is a new article but I think it’s one of my most heart felt posts I’ve written so it definitely deserves to be on this list.

Thank you for all your support and comments over the last 6 months. If it wasn’t for all your warm encouragement I’d still be trying to finish the first Chapter.