Olaf's comics blog

Just checked Gary Tyrrell’s Fleen for updates on what’s going on in Webcomics World, and in his latest update he mentions this blog. Awesome! But he also linked to a very interesting blog post by Howard Tayler (of Schlock Mercenary) about where ideas come from. The whole idea of his post is that asking where someone get their ideas is asking the wrong question:

Anytime people ask me where I get my ideas (and it happens all the time) I immediately jump up on a soapbox and explain to them that they’re asking the wrong question. My ideas, your ideas, and everybody’s ideas have no intrinsic value, so it doesn’t matter where I get them. They are not currency, they cannot be bought or sold, they are, in market terms, worthless.

Okay, on its own that quotation sounds pretty negative, read the whole post to see how it’s not.

My point is of course that I agree with what he’s writing. Where people get their ideas is a strange question, because ideas are very, very common. To repeat the comment I left over at Fleen’s:

My impression is that everybody get ideas all the time. When the bus is late, perhaps you’re thinking “Buses should go more often here, perhaps once a minute, so I didn’t have to wait so long”. When you’re cooking, perhaps you’re thinking “Okay, I’m all out of oregano, I wonder what this sauce will taste like if I use basil instead and perhaps add an extra pinch of salt”. When you’re waiting for your girlfriend to finish trying on the ten different outfits she wants to buy, perhaps you’re thinking “If I owned a mall, it would be designed especially for men, and there wouldn’t be a single clothing store there, only comic book shops and hardware shops and an all-you-can-eat pizzeria dominating most of the ground floor”. Congratulations, you just had three ideas. Ideas are cheap.

And it’s amazing how many of my favorite comics and stories are based on very ordinary ideas. For example, I still laugh at Scott Kurtz’ PvP. It’s a comic strip about a group of people and a troll running a magazine – not the most original idea. Or look at Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Awesome idea. Now, look at The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the movie. The exact same idea, but the end product is a turd. Having good ideas is great, but execution is everything.

If you’re one of my Norwegian readers, I’m sure you know about cartoonist Mads Eriksen‘s many replies to that question. Whenever somebody asks him where he gets his ideas from, he has a new answer: “They’re stuck between my teeth and I find a couple when I floss at night”, “I put a coin in a glass of water each night and wait for the idea fairy to swap it for an idea when I’m sleeping”, “I channel the kundalini energies around my heart chakra while listening to recordings of whale song and baby laugh”, “they come automatically when I hit myself in the head with a hammer while listening to Ravel’s Bolero“, “I spend a lot of time inhaling volcanic gases from a crack in the ground where I live while masses of skankily clad priestesses playing lyres dance around me”, “I buy them cheap from sweatshops in Asia along with my sneakers and T-shirts”… And that’s just the answers he’s given here and here.

Of course, coming up with ideas can be difficult. Or, not really, but coming up with the right kind of idea can be difficult sometimes (if I need a business idea, my musical ideas won’t help me much). But putting a good idea to use is the difficult part. And that’s the part you should try to copy in the people you admire.

Last week, I did something I’ve never really done before: I started reading up on JavaScript and played around with it a little bit… and to my great surprise, it was lots and lots of fun.

Okay, I need to give a short technical explanation here. Skip past this paragraph if you already know this — but basically, there are two kinds of scripting on web pages: Client-side scripting, and server-side scripting. Client-side scripting, like JavaScript, is a script in the HTML source code. When you load a website with JavaScript on it, your browser reads the code and executes the script. Server-side scripting, however, like PHP, is executed on the server before the web page is loaded in the browser. Meaning, when I make a website in PHP and you read the source code of it, you won’t even see my script because, as far as your browser knows, it’s not even there. Both these techniques have advantages and disadvantages. For instance, JavaScript is a lot faster because it lets you do big operations that change the page without having to load the whole page over again. However, different browsers react to JavaScript in different ways, and some doesn’t react to it at all, so if I make something in JavaScript I really have no idea exactly how it will work on your computer.

That last point is pretty important, and since you can do most of the things JavaScript offers in server-side scripts anyway, I’ve always been a fond user of PHP. And one side-effect of that is that I’ve never actually learned JavaScript. Since I run websites and want them to run as smoothly as possible, that’s really something I should learn. So now I’m learning JavaScript, and it’s lots and lots of fun.

How can it be that learning a script language that I’ve disliked for so many years can be so fun? Well, I still think that there are many areas where it shouldn’t be used. To be honest, I think that the fun has nothing to do with the script language itself. I think I enjoy this so much because I really like learning new things and doing things I haven’t had the opportunity to do before. I’m learning a new scripting technology again, just like I was when I was learning PHP, and the experience fascinates me. And while I still prefer PHP, I don’t do much PHP scripting anymore: It has become a routine, so now it’s a borderline boring experience.

If you’re new here, you’re thinking “Yeah, but has this anything to do with comics?” If you’ve read my posts before, you’re probably thinking “Now let’s see how he’s linking this to comics!”

My point is, I believe that this applies to everything. The JavaScript thing is a recent experience, but it’s not the only experience I can give. I could talk about how I changed jobs two months ago and how the new job feels a lot more exciting than the old one even though it’s not really that different a job. Or, to use an actual comics-related example, let’s talk about scripts. There are basically two ways of making scripts for Disney comics — you either write a full script, or you draw scribbles of the entire story. I’ve mostly written full scripts, but Egmont really prefers the scribbles way, so last year I did an attempt of making scribbles for a couple of stories. I later stopped because… well, I draw like a vombat, but for the couple of stories I actually scribbled, it was a new and exciting experience. And it was fun — even though I don’t really like drawing. And another comics-related example is that I just submitted something for the Nemi scriptwriting contest (yeah, that’s why I haven’t updated this blog in a while, sorry about that) — I could have chosen a genre I’m comfortable with and that I have lots of experience from, but instead I chose to write something I’ve never really made before: A pitch for a drama/sci-fi concept. I really enjoyed writing it, too.

You see the pattern? It doesn’t really matter what you’re doing. This isn’t specific for client-side scripting or getting a new job: It goes for making webcomics, too. If you’re offered a bit of variation, and you’re at least a tiny bit like me, your brain will enjoy the variation. No matter how much you love doing something, it can become stale and repetitive if you don’t do anything else. I believe that if making your comic bores you, your readers will pick up on it, so: If you get the opportunity to do something different, do it. You will enjoy it, and your readers will notice that you enjoy it, so they’ll enjoy it too.

Have you always wanted to try making comics with watercolors? What’s the harm in trying it? If you don’t like it you can go back to the way you work today, it will still be an interesting challenge. Do you make comic strips with one gag a day, but dream about telling a story spanning over several pages? Try it — you can always go back if you don’t like it. Are you fascinated by infinite canvas comics and want to try making one? What’s stopping you? Variate, variate, variate. Of course, everything with moderation, you don’t want to scare away your readers with too much experimentation. But one of the worst tihings that can happen to you when you have a creative profession is that you get bored from your job. Avoid that whenever you can: If you see a chance to do something different, do it, and it’ll probably be a lot more interesting than going through the motions one more time.

When your job is to entertain others, you should have fun yourself, too. Variation is one way of doing just that.

As I reported last week, one of my Disney comics were printed in Norway this week. This is the first time it’s taken as long as seven years for one of my comics to reach publication, so I was pretty excited to see it. While I have copies of the artwork lying around and I’ve occasionally looked at it, I haven’t read the story in a while, but I remember it as pretty good.

However, when I read the comic, I found it… pretty boring. Sure, I still like the idea, but nothing really happens, or things happen really slowly. The lack of action makes it an uninteresting story… and I used way too much text. And what really amazes me is that this is a story I thought was pretty good seven years ago. I wouldn’t do these mistakes today — some of them I still struggle with, but I’m aware of them, and I’m trying my best to change them. Still — seven years from now, I’ll probably look at the scripts I write today and get the same impression from them.

This is what improvement is all about: Realizing what your greatest weaknesses are, and changing them. If you believe that you are perfect, you will never improve. Everybody has mistakes — you need to find yours if you want to get rid of them.

Do you make a webcomic? If you haven’t done it already, here’s a tip for an exercise I believe will improve your comic:

• Take a look at your archives from a couple of years ago. Read at least a couple of weeks of comics.
• Jot down everything you don’t like about the comics. Writing, art, anything. Do the characters talk as if they’re just reading stuff out loud from a script? Do the characters have abnormally large hands? Anything.
• If you have a list of things you dislike now, congratulations! You’re already improving. These were comics you were satisfied enough with to publish a few years ago. The fact that you find errors in them now means that your standards have risen since then.
• Go through that list and ask yourself how you’re doing today. You’ve probably improved, but can you improve more? If you drew abnormally large hands two years ago, are they good enough today? Can you do something to improve them? Do you still have strange-looking dialogue? Fix it.
• If you didn’t find anything wrong with your old comics at all, there are two possible reasons:
  1. You are Baby Jesus. You never make mistakes.
  2. You are still doing the same mistakes that you did back then, and thus you don’t notice them. If you haven’t improved at all in the last couple of years, you’re probably doing something very, very wrong. Show your webcomic to other neutral parts (that is, not your best friends) and ask them to tell you what you’re doing wrong.

Do this right, and you’ll be able to improve your comic drastically. And your readers will notice.

Good luck!

Over at Nettserier.no, Trond Stavås quotes some information about a new comics contest hosted by the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet. The short summary: Make fifteen comic strips or political cartoons, send them to Dagbladet by October 5th, and win 68.000 Norwegian kroner. Click the link for more information.

Here’s a small pet peeve of mine, and if you know me you’ve probably heard me complain about this before, too. That’s because I think this is one of the most important things anyone working on creating creative works should know.

When you’re writing anything intended for a larger audience, proofread it. Typos, bad grammar and SMS language all looks very unprofessional. If you write in a language that’s not your native tongue, you look lazy. If you write in a language that is your native tongue, it just looks very, very embarrassing.

You want to be this guy.

Write something riddled with typos, and you’ll lose readers. I’m not making that up — here’s an example of it actually happening.

If you write a script for a big publishing house, chances are your text will pass through professional proofreaders before ever being published — at the very least, it will pass through an editor who will weed out the worst typos. But if you make webcomics, you don’t have that luxury.

Proofread your comic. Learn the language you’re writing in, and look over the text before you publish it to make sure it doesn’t have any typos or terrible grammar. If you don’t have the proofreading skills needed for taking such an action, get a friend to proofread it for you. It doesn’t take that much time, and it makes your comic look a lot more professional.

And don’t stop at proofreading the comic. If you have a blog right below your webcomic, proofread it. If you have a discussion board on your website and you’re active there yourself, proofread your posts. It makes you look a lot more professional, I promise.

And yes, I am fully aware that according to Muphry’s Law, this post is probably full of typos.