http://www.spinnwebe.com/ustream/

http://www.spinnwebe.com/ustream/

Rob Balder (erfworld): Man is he into his topic. Has a lot to say about art, story, audience, philosophy, combat, game theory, and the Dark Knight movie. I think this guy could possibly out-talk my father. I could’ve tested that theory but I finally decided to release him from the trap of my being willing to listen to him.*

David Malki (wondermark): To his credit, tolerated me.

Kris Straub (starslip): Whooo did not. I tried not to let this cow me for the rest of the show but unfortunately I let it set a cloud over my head.

Ryan Sohmer (least I could do): I recognized his comic and shook his hand and got out of there before awkward pauses.

Joel Watson (hijinks ensue): Didn’t know the comic beforehand, but I saw this shirt the day before, and the memory of it kept making me giggle after I went home, so I decided it was too goddamn awesome to leave behind. Talked to him for a little while and continued about 15 seconds after I started making it weird, and then had the good sense to get out of there.

Shannon Saar (wighthouse): draws a ghost comic which may, someday, contain a ghost.

Chris Hallbeck (the book of biff): Cheerful, friendly! Bought a book. Could only afford one, and I decided to ask, which should I buy if I were getting one? Wasn’t sure if that was going to be awkward (like why do people ask waitresses, “what is good?”), but he pointed right to one and I grabbed it.

Zach Weiner (SMBC): Fuckin’ awesome! Man he was cheerful and friendly and excited and I felt comfortable being an idiot in front of him and he high-fived me and drew me a sketch of a brain in a jar wearing a top hat. Really wish I could’ve spent time with him, we would’ve had fun. He was with the Cyanide and Happiness booth, but I didn’t feel right going over there because I haven’t read enough of it.

David Willis (shortpacked): Was also friendly. I miscalculated by trying to get him to make a cynical comment about the guy in the next booth over, but he was too polite to partake. On sunday I noticed the shirt he was selling (no direct link to the shirt, it’s the green one lower left), and experience with the previous shirt told me I would wind up giggling at it that night when I got home, so decided I’d better buy it.

*Did this come across as snarky? I don’t mean it that way. It’s just that he’s really willing to talk and I’m an attentive listener.

NOT PICTURED:

Jeph Jacques (unquestionable thingy): spent as much time managing his sketch-selling line as thinking about storming up and saying christ man what’s so wrong with Scribs that you don’t wanna take my money for ads.

KC Green (gunshow ‘n stuff): oh I saw him, he looked fun, but I didn’t really have anything useful to say to him and he was too close to the (entirely internal and not really Malki’s fault) Malki Tolerance Zone to be comfortable enough to go all “hey man, like your work” on him. Though right now I’m wishing I had told him how excellent Ghost Ship was, but eh I’m sure he was hearing that all weekend anyway.

Not sure what I was thinking. I signed up four months ago when I was getting Scribs into swing and had some fanciful notion that I was going to get more involved in the comics community, but now I pretty much don’t care.

Saying I had “plans” for Scribs is likely an overstatement. Probably more accurate to say that I had a certain mindset this time around that I thought was healthier. When I first started getting serious about Scribs four years ago, I sort of assumed that I’d just naturally get popular and such by virtue of making a funny comic and letting the fame pour in. I got frustrated with waiting for the inevitable rush of traffic, so I gave up on it. And then in the intervening time, I saw other comics that started around the same time get wildly popular, and then the frustration and the envy and the glaven.

But last year my more selfish mindset relaxed somewhat, and I decided to start up the comic again, but this time, I’d do it right — instead of thinking I’d let the world beat down my door due to my inherent assumed fabulousness, I decided to make an effort in getting involved in the community, get on some message boards, try to make a connection with some actual people. 

And that’s how I wound up signing up to volunteer for c2e2. Actually at first I thought about getting a booth, but 1) too damn expensive, and 2) nothing to sell. The way I pictured it, it was likely going to be less sales booth than performance art. 

But, dunno. Might have been fun, but in the intervening time my attempts to interface with the human-units went less than well. Tried getting on message boards, but ech, made some shitty entrances and tried to just bluster through, but my tolerance ran out. Tried Twitter, but ran out of interest for that and now my spinnwebe account is just retweeting my scribscomic account, which I’m sure is not going to get it much attention. 

And it’s not even about the comic, really. I was kinda hoping to get myself into a community with some cool people. Though even there I guess I’m failing, because what I really kinda want is a nearby group of people. One, I already know a cool group of people online, and two, getting involved with comic artists online is not really the correct target anyway. I’d like to know what it’s like to have friends that I would pick up a phone and call, you know? Or having a reason to have a phone other than my college to leave messages to try to get money from me. But on the other hand, I’ve seen get-togethers with some comics people and they generally look nerdier than I can deal with.

So, I dunno. Every time I think of c2e2 now, I just find it kind of depressing. I don’t much feel like being around people right now, especially seeing people that are living the kind of life I could be living if I’d properly applied myself.

I can’t show it to you as it exists, but I wanna show it off a bit so here are a few screencaps of it in “action”. The questions editor would be even harder to illustrate this way, and anyway I got six screencaps done and got bored, so that’s it. Though I should probably figure out some way of doing a video cap.

Though now that I’ve finally been able to schedule them, I learn that I have enough comics to update until about August 16, which is a week under six months. Which means that since I’ve started in the beginning of January, I’ve only lost one week’s worth of backlog.

Which is pretty cool, but I realized I have to start scheduling comics I’m currently drawing to the end of the queue, because otherwise I’m just going to push older ones back farther and farther until I’m embarrassed to publish them.

Though I’m trying out drawing teeth in my cartoon mouths, which I don’t typically do, and it feels weird. I feel like I drew dentures on myself.

It wasn’t until after #249 went live that I realized I’ve probably been staring at these ads for too long. I wonder if the next Scribs in that series is going to be about a magical fuzzhat, or something.

I got a few entries for that non-contest I started last week! Which is cool, though I will tell you that if it was a contest, I’d totally be winning.

My latest aggravation on that front is Reddit. I know it’s not meant to be my own personal comic advertisement machine, but hell, there are “share on Reddit” buttons everywhere on the web, and I think my comics are good, so I share them. (In fact I don’t share all of them, just the ones that I think are pretty good.) I shared Figure 4 which I thought was pretty good, and it scores 1 to 3 points depending when you load the page, which I don’t get, but it suggests around 8-ish people voted it up and 6-ish people voted it down. And I was like, man, tough crowd.

But then I posted Figure 6 a few hours ago, and so far, it’s gotten one vote. Which okay, I guess is kinda early to expect anything, but man. This amzingsuperpowers gets 28 points, and it’s an okay comic, but of course they know amazingsuperpowers so they vote it up. And I wanna complain about this Subnormality but I can’t too much, it’s pretty good. But christ 135 upvotes in the last six hours? That only happens because Reddit loves Subnormality.

But I can almost kinda get along with that—benevolence through popularity is just a human thing, fine—but then I saw Lunar Antics Comics – How Would Aliens View our Society? was linked shortly before mine, and somehow it gets five votes. Five? For that? Maybe because of the talk-to-your-kids angle, because it certainly isn’t for the comic. And it’s not even a link to the comic, it’s basically a link to the blog post advertising its sale on Amazon.

Here’s the comic they give as an example:

Seriously? Formulaic much? This is the silver medal over ventriloquist pervert pants? Just to help you out here, I’ve made the formula somewhat clearer:

Just for the heck of it, I decided to make it a better comic open to lots of interesting possibilities here. It’s not even that great of an attempt but it’s like original comic times eleventy.

Basically I gotta stop thinking of these linking things as useful and keep doing what I’m doing. Which sucks, because that was kind of my pre-hiatus plan, where “just do well” was the #1 to #3: Profit. It’s a good thing I have five months’ worth of Scribs in the wings, because if I had to draw this week’s comics, it wouldn’t happen.