The Wonderful World of Computers
Hi! You're reading this on a Computer. If you aren't, how the hell ARE you reading it? Obviously, computers have taken over the world. And Ed's Dark Chicken Empire. We here at EDCE try our hardest to stay, literally, years behind the cutting edge. Today we'll discuss some of the technology(?) that makes this book possible.
The Web Page:
You're lookin' at it. I update this from anywhere with an Internet connection, since it's actually a Geocities page in disguise. (The URL is "Masked," meaning "Fake"). It's not like I get a ton of traffic, so this is fine. However, it does save me an assload of time, since I can just refer people to "my website".
The Comic:
Scanning:
I draw my pages the same size as my girfriend's scanner. Or at least I do now. The first 4 pages or so were all wildly different sizes (The world may never see the bottom right corners of some of them), and then I figured out how big the scanner would take. I end up drawing an original that isn't really much bigger than a normal comic. When you ink like me, that sucks, but it's better than trying to piece a pair of half-scans together later. Plus, her scanning software has some filters in it that REALLY clean up the pages.
Coloring:
I bet you were saying to yourself, "That guy must go through a TON of black markers!" Hee hee...Thanks to the marvels of technology (and the "FILL" option on Paint Shop), spending hours getting loopy on Sharpie fumes is a thing of the past.
Yes, I "color" the book (even though it's black and white) digitally. My greyscaling is actually based on the style that MAD Magazine employed for many years (before they went to color and started running ads). I always thought it looked cool to have the foreground characters POP off the page in contrast to the grey backgrounds. While MAD probably used "zip-flim" for it, which actually takes skill, I just point and click.
Lettering:
This is where the computer becomes my enemy. I'm using a program that wasn't really designed to do comic book lettering, so I can't get speech balloons to go the direction I want, or it takes me EONS to line up words inside their proper balloons. I'm thinking I'll just hand-letter them on tracing paper, then scan them in and go from there. It couldn't possibly take any longer than it does now...
IN SUMMARY:
Computers are another tool. They don't do the work for you, and they don't always save you time. But, they're great tools, and , hey, if someone in Burkina Faso wants to read a dumbass comic book about... well, who knows what this is about...then...uhh...I guess they can.
My head hurts.