CH-CH-CH-Changes! Tiiiiiime to say good, Bry!

Hello friends,

Yes, I acknowledge that I have not updated this blog in a long while. There are reasons, and while a number of them have to do with me being lazy, I shall explain two of the more legitimate ones. 

Firstly, it just seemed as though there was more to talk about at the beginning stages of creating a comic. Conceptualizing, building, burning, and re-creating were much more rampant in the initial few months. After that, it was more or less a constant lesson of keeping at it over and over again. Maintaining your goal and keeping it's progress consistent is incredibly important, perhaps even the most important. But unfortunately it just became less and less fun to write and update about on this blog. I saw it as something that could quickly regress into sounding like a self-imposed adversity over something we choose to do (and love doing it I might add). 

Secondly, and in an more practical sense, the apparent inconvenience of having a blog separate from our comic has made me rethink the process. I'd much rather have our updates, musings, and ramblings conveniently located for all our fans to see right out our homepage. In light of this, I am happy to say that we are likely to have a new and improved website after almost exactly a year of this stripped down, amorphous blob of a site I created. There are a number of cool and significant changes that are in the works, and one of which is a more accessible, interactive, and constituent blog. I will probably keep this blogger site around for a bit more, but it's days of update and functionality are certainly drawing to a close.

Lastly, I wanted to report that we will be switching our update day from the wee hours of Wednesday night to Thursday. This is in part due to the fact that my grad school course load has me home at around 11pm on a Weds, but it is also in hopes that it will reduce our middle-of-the-week desperation in terms of comicking. We think it will be a good change, and we thank you all for continuing to read more and more, as well as put up with our occasional tom-foolery. Good night, and look for our newest page tomorrow evening!

Friends for Sale!

This is what happens when I draw something last minute. You can almost hear the dreams dying while looking at it...

The best thing you can do if you want to get a project going and growing is to make certain you're working with partners who are at least as motivated as you are. In my case, I think my heart would explode into a cloud of ash and coffee rinds if I tried to match Katy's workload this week. If you look at our update with this week. please take a moment to ponder that our wonderful artist completed that page in a DAY! A DAAAAAAAAAY! She has a DAY job too, ladies and gentleman!

We had a great deal of help as well. The Man of the Words Jim Cottage stepped in to set the type into the dialogue boxes for us this time. Because of this fantastical amount of effort, we were able to update in spite of a crazy work week challenging us to delay. Long and short, we love this comic, we love updating this comic, and we love to know you lovely people pay attention to our consistent updates. Another Wednesday is upon, so soon another update will be as well! BAAIII EEEE!

D&D Made Me a Better Writer (And Worse Human Being)

Hello team!

Today I wanted to talk about a significant influence in my writing that could be considered unique: Dungeons & Dragons. In the fourth grade, I read Lord of the Rings and the Redwall series during countless sessions of recess. The love of the fantasy genre was the focal point in inspiring me to write and aided in developing as a writer. When it comes to good storytelling, I owe a great deal of credit to dungeons and the dragons that may or may not reside within them.

After re-reading Lord of the Rings began render a diminishing return on feeling whimsically fantastic, I sated the thirst by forcing my friends to play D&D campaigns I developed for years to come. I'd like to say that I'm the type of Dungeon Master capable of pulling together a compelling plot that fully engages all those involved. That would be a lie however, and most of my planning would fall apart a few hours into the first session. It's almost impressive how quickly your friends will abandon a noble quest in favor of enslaving a boat full of orphans and throw a bard into a pile of burning lumber...

Anyway, when your characters are constantly changing the events of the story on you, it teaches you to be a more adaptive storyteller. If a player character's pet boar randomly kills a character essential to the plot, then you need to be dynamic and change the scope and spectrum of the plot (this is an actual example of what happened).

The same can be said for webcomic writing. Since we're more or less creating a comic every week at the moment, we can only plan out a panel so much. Though we have a completed script, there is a fair amount of condensing and rearranging; a lot of which is done as late as a few hours before we make the actual update. I still do a fair share of staring at the screen, but honestly the past few months of dialogue were cooked up relatively on the spot from my mind brain. It is by no means the ideal way to write, but it is often what ends up happening when reality flips over your breakfast table and kidnaps your son...wait what?

This quickened process is by no means a solitary exercise. After all, Dungeons and Dragons is contingent on teamwork and interacting with other players. Improv comics have a rule called "Yes, and..." that applies similarly. The idea is that to keep a sketch running, you affirm your partners idea and run with it as opposed to shooting it down in order to assert your own input. Most of the fun in a campaign comes from serving an event to the player, letting them take it in a certain direction, and then react accordingly. It's more interesting to work alongside the journey of a character than stomp them to pieces for deviating from the linearity of your story.

Just the same, Katy and I adapt each other's mode of storytelling to one another so that the plot frames the artwork, and the art in turn informs the dialogue. There is a lot of back-and-forth between the two of us as we work on each aspect. I find that our best panels come from a long-discussed compromise or a very positive sequence of ideas communicated between us.

Writing is bolstered by your experiences and your ability to recollect them, but it certainly helps to have an ability to pull things out of your brain on short notice. I'd say more than anything else, working within severe limitations can sharpen your creative skills quickly. I have D&D to thank for teaching me to create with otheres when time is a very limited.

When God Hands You Spiders, You Have a Hard Time Making Anything Due to Spider Bites

Avast ye readers of web-based comics!

As always, an enormous thank you to all those who follow our comic. We've had a very good half for this month in terms of content and views, which helps take my mind of the enormous bite a spider took out of me while a slept. In spite of said spider having it's way with me while I was unconscious, it's been a fast upward swing since the last post I made. I'm fully aware that I may have laid it on a little thick with that one, but it was the result of Google Analytics reporting that we had less than 10 hits for the month of February. Recently I found out this was a problem with Analytics itself and not the traffic we were generating; once I set up our originally primitive yet reliable traffic counter, it was immediately that our numbers were much better than what were initially reported.

Freaking out about a perceived lack of results isn't entirely negative. In the few days I thought we were in the toilet, I scrambled together a lot of updates and new avenues that I may have otherwise put off til later. I'm most proud of the fact that we were able to start using custom lettering created by our signtastic friend, Jim Cottage. Jim has an incredible amount of experience working on posters, signs, and lettering for consumer products. By doing so, he's able to conjure up very unique and evocative characters faster than a gypsy's whisper. It is pretty mind-boggling how much more comic-booky our panels look with a proper hand-drawn font.

Little by little, we're getting faster and more effective at creating. Please keep reading "After" as you've graciously been doing, because we're only scratched the surface of the story. We want to keep telling it! YOU CAN'T STOP US!!! (sorry)

Thanks again, and check out www.after-comic.com every Weds for new comics!

Don't be a Donkus!

In terms of our numbers, I'd have thought I would have been able to improve them month by month. When you take several steps back in terms of progress, it sometimes means you have to stop drinking gin and acknowledge the fact that you've been selfish with your time. It's easy to say I've quite a few pots stirring, but it's not like I have a monopoly on being "too busy". 

Long to short, I started grad school a month ago, and have also tried to counter-balance my basal state of anxiety with a load of exercise and broccoli. During the interval, I decided on my own that the comic was fine for a few weeks and concentrated on my own projects. I'm mentioning this because this is the equivalency of ignoring your day job and expecting to get paid. This webcomic more or less should be my second job, and letting it sit can potentially result in a marked drop in progress. 

Otherwise, we're at our 25th page and it is a'looking great! This comic isn't slowing down, and we haven't even scratched the surface. THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP IT!...sorry

After Music

Kablaaah!

I wanted a grabby introduction that would properly convey my excitement. Very recently, an old friend of our's, Bob Merkl, composed two songs that were inspired by our webcomic. What? The tracks themselves are pretty wonderful, but it's even more insane and humbling to know that we can act as a source of inspiration for anything. I've known Bob since I was twelve years old and he was in a band with my older brother. I looked up to all of those guys, as most younger brothers tend to, so this whole experience is kind of weird for me!

Check out both songs, After and Bird Lady. Also, Bob is an amazing musician, so check out his other work at soundcloud.com/bobmerkl.

How Not to Add Dialogue Good

This is how to bother your artist friend

Hey team!

So we're past 20 pages! Crazy! How did it get to this point!? I blame my parents, honestly, but we never imagined our first chapter would be as many pages as it's turning out to be. In the end it doesn't' really matter, it's just insane to think of how much story there is to tell. And what do you need to tell that story? DIAL LOGS!

We sometimes have an issue with fitting in character dialogue, especially when it is from a script that I wrote long before the page was drawn. Having a panel full of text isn't very aesthetically pleasing, and it can block out too much of the background and confuse the position and placement of the speaker. Simultaneously, it's easy to be precious about what you've written. I'm breaking a habit of trying to fit in the sentence exactly as it was written, and getting better at sizing up how much text can actually fit within a panel.