Happy Birthday, Tori
It’s my sister’s birthday! Yay for sisters! I made you a thing, Tori, starring your favorite SnoogleZoo friend. I didn’t have a tremendous amount of time, so the animation’s a little rough, but I hope you like him anyway:
What Happened to SnoogleZoo?
I’ve started doing this exercise that sits me down in front of pen and paper every single night. I’m making more drawings than I’m posting on the blog here, and I’m okay with that. I’m making doodles that I can see developing into stuff and that’s good, too. Then I did this last night:
I haven’t forgotten about SnoogleZoo, I just needed to take a break. I don’t think doing a serial webcomic is for me- it’s not exactly the time commitment, like I thought it was, because doing all this constraint-free drawing is taking up the same kind of time that working on SnoogleZoo was. I think it’s more like feeling trapped within a certain framework. It felt like homework and I think it was stifiling the art. Not to mention all my other art that I wasn’t doing.
I’ve been kicking around a couple of ideas of what to do- I miss the characters more than I thought I would, so I’d rather not abandon them to the realm of silent, one-off illustrations. But I don’t want to get trapped slogging through an un-interesting story arc just to meet a deadline. I’m thinking I should just do stories on a whenever-I-feel-like-it basis, which I think will serve my desire to do something of quality, and also prevent me from growing a readership of any respectable size.
But you know what? I don’t really care about that right now. I really need to be making art before I can concern myself with things like making art on a schedule.
So don’t worry, Pan. We’ll be back soon enough, and you can pick on Efram and get extra whipped cream from the Kitties’ cafe and have all kinds of fun and silly adventures with the rest of the gang real soon. But sometimes I will have to give my attention to killer robots and pin-up girls, too. It’s better for everyone this way 
Today’s SnoogleZoo is about Advent Calendars
My blog posts will occasionally suck so that I can manage to get an episode of my comic out on time:
Today’s comic is kind of related to today’s Holidailies prompt; my family never did Advent calendars when I was a kid, but a lot of my friends did. I think they’re neat, particularly the ones that are permanent and meant to be refilled and reused every year. Someday I want to make one!
Some Thoughts on Forums
Now that my comic is well underway, the mechanical act of producing a strip three times a week is starting to feel easier. That seems like I’ve gotten over the first hurdle on a project like this and I can start tackling other aspects like good draftsmanship and storytelling.
I’m thinking about closing the comments because I don’t want to feel like I have to answer to my readers on the decisions I make. This isn’t in reaction to anything that happened over at my site, or any of my readers’ comments; it actually has more to do with the way I react to the discussions in other comics’ forums. With the example I just linked to on XKCD, I noticed comments like “you’re insulting your audience! How dare you!” and “I don’t think you ended the strip right. Here, I photoshopped it better!” I love having people participate, and it’s wonderful that they’re in to it enough to take the time to write a reaction to what I’m making, but It’ll hurt my ability to tell a story if I’m worried about what they think the characters should do in addition to my own thinking about what they should do. I don’t want to write a comic by committee. And I’m not saying that people who have forums like this do that- to the contrary I see that the comicker hard ly ever participates in those threads. But I know myself and I know how self-conscious I can be. I also know that when I post my comic to the cartooning forum on LiveJournal for exposure, and get feedback, I am compelled to respond to the positive and negative, and the negative will tweak me out for longer than it should.
But really, that’s what this project is all about. It’s practice! I’m practicing the act of comic creating, storytelling, ink and color, building traffic and handling feedback appropriately. It’s all part of the process of making and maintaining a webcomic.
Holidays, Holidaily
I joined the Holidailies portal again this year, because I’m a masochist, but also because deadlines seem to keep me drawing. I’m getting very close to 30 comics over at snooglezoo, which means ten whole weeks of posting with only a few lapses, and I think that’s fantastic.
I’m trying to exercise some discipline lately. If I’m not drawing, at least I’m doodling, because doodling leads to ideas which lead to drawings, which is pretty much what I need to be doing not to be miserable. Also, if I’m drawing I can’t pick on my cuticles because my hands are busy. everybody wins!
Anyway, with Holidailies I’m going to have to post something to this here blog nearly every day from Dec 5 to Jan 6, either 50 words or a photo (or in my case, a drawing). This on top of keeping up with the comic every three days, it should keep those art muscles of mine nice and limber. Here goes!
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