New Car Small

I bought a Tesla on the weekend - two of them even!  Here they are chilling on my bookshelf with Bumblebee:

On the left is a Tesla Roadster, on the right is a Model S and in the middle, disguised as a VW Beetle (and feeling rather old fashioned about it - and perhaps even a bit self-conscious given the recent VW diesel scandal thing) is Bumblebee.  It is probably obvious at this point that these aren't real Teslas (I don't have anywhere near that kind of money), rather these are the Hot Wheels versions which I found whilst doing some Christmas shopping.  Now, I don't personally care much about the Roadster (as it's not the sort of car I would buy myself even if I did have the money) but as there was a Model S available and they were cheap ($1 each!) I figured I'd pick up the pair.

Anywho, that is all for the nonce.  There may be other posts coming before too long...

Freak Out,
-TFitC

The Long Night is Finally Over

Well, perhaps the post title overstates things a bit.  Nevertheless, yesterday's Canadian federal election delivered what is, in my opinion, a much welcomed (and perhaps overdue) change in government.

I have one piece of advice for our incoming Prime Minister, Mr. Trudeau:  don't screw up.  Easier said than done, I know!  To elaborate, there seems to be a desire for a more open, transparent, accountable (and so forth) governement.  I believe that there was a rather high anti-Harper sentiment in this election for a reason, so please don't let Canadians down, the country deserves better.

Sincerely,
Some random guy on the interweebs.

-TFitC

Unfaq Vol 5

As the Freak Log continues to do not much of anything, it occured to me that I never got around to doing the Unfaq for Word Smith Episode 8.  The lack of an outcry on this matter suggests that nobody cares, but why should that stop me?  So lets do this thing.

Episode 8 - Isn't it Ironic?

The episode's title is the same as an Alanis Morissette song.  The answer to the title's question (in both cases) is, probably, no, or, at best, maybe.  I was a bit wary about doing an episode related to irony as irony is a concept that I don't think that I entirely get.  Oh, I went and read the definition and all that, and whilst I sort of "get" it, irony is one of those concepts which to me seems a little bit nebulous, and I'm not sure if I really "get" it on a fundamental level.  Or at least when I'm trying to deliberately be (non-)ironic in some fashion.  Oh well, lets not dwell on this.

The title page features the "villain of the week," as it were - the Irony Chef, meant to be a spoof on the Iron Chef (a show I've never actually watched, ironically enough.)  I tried to associate him with a bunch of things connected to "iron," mostly prominently via a golf club and a curling iron as seen in the title.

Page 1 occurs in another bit of Kitchener/Waterloo - a part of Victoria park, in this instance.  We get a look at the transformation sequence of one of the behind-the-scenes villains here.  I practiced whirling my cape (that I own) around for the second last panel.

The next scene is another location in K/W.  We get to see The Pen and The Waitress hanging out "out of costume" and get to hear about The Waitress' new job working at MegaBook Co.  This is a reference back to Episode 2.  The unfortunate victim of the cashiers in the middle row is meant to be a cameo of me (and not actually my first appearance.)  The Pen's MegaBook Co membership was previously mention on this page.

We then have a series of flashbacks that reveal The Pen's origin story.  This sequence is kicked off with a super dorky Magic:  The Gathering reference.  (Flashback is an ability that appears in some instants and sorceries.)  The Pen became "The Pen" due to a co-op job that nobody else applied for.  The whole bit about "still better than making charts" is based on one of my own work terms (which involved making charts...)

The final sequence takes place at a mall in K/W, though it's probably not overly obvious since there's no long shots of the mall so only a small portion gets shown in panels.  We also find out that the Irony Chef's dialogue seems to involve a lot of iron-related things.

And there's not too much else to say.  The situation with the Irony Chef turns out to be a trap that succussfuly lures out The Word Smith.  The "book trap" at the end was meant to evoke the traps from Ghostbusters, ending the episode on a cliff hanger.

And with that, Episode 8 is officially finished.  The script for Episode 9 is actually mostly written at this point so with any luck, and a bit of self-discipline, work should commence on it soonish and hopefully the adventures of The Word Smith should continue.

Until next time,
Freak Out.

-TFitC

Wherein I Try to Convince People That They Should Vote

While I imagine the "regular" readership of The Freak Report could be counted on one hand, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the 2015 Canadian Federal election that just kicked off this past weekend.

The short version is this:  if you are an eligible voter, you should make a point of voting in the election.  Seriously.  Do it.  Take a few moments this October and go vote.  Don't make excuses, just go do it.

If that short plea from a random stranger on the internet didn't convince you to go vote, well, consider the following.   (Be sure to read past the next paragraph!)

I can't address all the reasons why someone might choose not to vote, but a common one that I do want to address is that "my vote won't matter."  To this I say... yes and no.  In some sense, it's true that an individual's vote doesn't really matter.  Populations these days are just too large for any one single vote to materially change the outcome.  Without harping on things too much, a single vote is less than 1% of eligible voters - much less than 1%, really - so no, it doesn't really make a whole lot of difference whether any single individual votes or who they vote for.

"But wait", you might say, "aren't you trying to convince people to vote?  Because all this talk of votes not mattering isn't really all that encouraging."  Well, no, not if one looks at things individually.  But when you look at the aggregate, when large segments of the population are underrepresented at the polls, well, that does matter.  And can matter quite a bit. 

There was an article on CBC a while after the 2011 Federal Election which reported on a study that examined the effect of underrepresentation of young voters (defined as being under 30) during that election.  (The article is here for those interested.)  While the election had an overall voter turnout of a little over 60%, the youth turnout was under 40%.  The study found that had the youth turnout been the same as the overall turnout, the results of the election would likely have been much different - notably, the Conservatives would likely not have won a majority.

That article suggests to me that when large swathes of eligible voters choose not to vote, the outcome of the election can change significantly.  So in this sense, whether or not someone votes very much does matter, not as an idividual, but as part of a group.  And this is why I say everyone should make sure to vote.  Because it matters that all segments of the population are represented.  Because groups do have the ability to make a difference for the better.  So go vote.  Don't say it doesn't matter, because it does.  Just go vote.

Lastly, on a personal note, I feel that if someone who is eligible elects not to vote, then they have no right to complain about the outcome.  So if nothing else, vote so you can proudly complain about the results of the election for the next four years or so.

And with that, I shall get down off the soap box and will hopefully return with something more light hearted in my next post, whenever that happens to be.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Schroedinger's Blog

The Word Smith continues to be on hiatus.  This is due, in part, to some Real Life stuff that happened last month that threw a bunch of stuff out of whack.  As such, the continuation of The Word Smith is delayed and, while I'm hoping to get back to it before too long, the Real Life stuff is, for the moment, ongoing and occupies a (not small) chunk of the time I would normally have used for working on the comic.  So, expect delays, is what I'm saying.

Until such a time as The Word Smith resumes, I may try posting some other things here.  Or I may not.  Treat it like Schroedinger's Cat, if you will.  Or don't.

Until some time in the future,
Freak Out,
-TFitC

Hanging From Cliffs

And the final page of episode 8 of The Word Smith has appeared on-line.  Yes, this is ending the episode on a cliff hanger, so, dun, dun, dun!

There'll be an intentional hiatus for maybe about a month or so as I finalize script details for episode 9 and (hopefully) get a bit of a head start on drawing the actual pages.

Please look forward to it!

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Processing Time

The latest page of The Word Smith is not quite done - it's in the process of being coloured (nearly finished!) and should be up sometime this weekend, but in the interim, I thought it might be interesting (for some definition of interesting) to talk a bit about my comic-making process, such as it is.

It all begins with a script, or something like one, anyway.  I do, in fact, have the entirety of The Word Smith planned out, in point-form, at least.  Before I start actually drawing an episode, I write that episode up in detail, on a panel-by-panel level.  Sometime I'm a bit lazy with dialogue and don't finalize it until I need to start actually putting it on the actual comic, which is a bad habit that I need to try to avoid.  Anyway, the script stage is all just typing into a word processor so I'm not going to dwell on it.

The first actual drawing that happens is creating thumbnails.  My thumbnails are pretty rough and (usually) drawn four pages to a single piece of (scrap) paper, like so:

Pages 5-7 of Episode 8.  The last quarter shows a couple of alternate ideas for page 6 - in particular it shows the composition I ended up using for the first panel, which was different from my original idea.

There are some artists out there who do pretty detailed thumbnails, but I keep 'em simple mainly for two reasons.  One, I'm lazy.  Two, as this is just a hobby and I try to get things done in a timely manner, I prefer not to spend too much time on something that's just going to get redrawn anyway.  Even so, I do view thumbnails as an important planning tool.  Sometimes I do change the final layout from the thumbnailed version (as shall be seen), but overall, I don't think I'd want to attempt drawing the actual final page without some sort of plan in place regarding how I'm going to do it.

After thumbnails, I move on to the actual page.  I draw pages on pieces of bristol board which measure approximately 28cm x 35.5cm.  My current batch of bristol board (which I started using as of page 2 in episode 8) is also made of partly recycled material, for what it's worth.  I start by drawing the panel borders, usually measured out using a ruler, though occassionally (as with page 7 below) I just draw them in roughly.  I do this if I'm not entirely sure what proportions some of the panels should be or if I'm still a little unsure on some parts of the layout.  By just drawing in a rough sense of the panel borders I feel freer to draw outside of them, if need be.

Rough pencils of episode 8, page 7.  Note the layout of the lower right corner has changed from the thumbnailed version.

After panel boundaries are in place, I do the rough pencils.  In theory, I actually put in any dialogue/text first so that I know that the text will all fit and I don't waste time drawing stuff that's just going to get covered up by word balloons; however, this doesn't always happen, especially if I haven't gotten around to finalizing the dialogue yet and sometimes it comes back to bite me.  Fortunately, I did everything in the correct order for this page.

Once dialogue is in place, I draw everything in pencil.  I generally start out fairly rough and then refine it.  For instance, I'll often use rough shapes (boxes, mainly) to position and size characters in relation to each other before getting too caught up in the details; some of those guidelines can be seen in the above pencils.  I currently use a mechanical pencil for the pencilling stage, mostly because I don't have to worry about sharpening it constantly.

When pencils are done, I ink everything using a set of inking pens (one brush pen and a set of pens of varying widths), erase all the pencils, scan it in and colour everything in Photoshop.  Colouring could really be its own post so for now it'll suffice to say that there's several annoying things about it.

Anyway, that's an overview of everything up until the colouring stage, at any rate.  Perhaps in some future post I'll go into the details on colouring.

Until next time,
Freak Out,

-TfitC

Quick Note

A very quick update to announce that the next page of The Word Smith is in its usual location.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Isn't it Ironic?

After a much longer delay than intended (I have no excuse) the latest episode of The Word Smith makes its internet debut at the usual venue.  I hope to get the next page up much quicker than this one, but as this weekend is looking to be somewhat busy it's probably not going to be up next week.

And now a discussion about irony.

One tricky thing about writing a comic about a grammar conscious super hero who fights to protect the English language (or thus he would claim) is that I really ought to at least make the effort to be as correct as possible with my grammar in the comic, and I am not a grammar nut.  Granted, there's definitely some leeway with writing dialogue since real people don't always talk perfectly grammatically and they usually manage to understand each other just fine even so.  But still, it's the principle of the matter, and, while I think I'm reasonably competent when it comes to writing and stuff (technical term, that, "stuff"), I don't really have any personal pet peeves and I don't really nitpick about the finer points of grammar or things like that.  This can make coming up with topics a bit tricky.

Sorry, that was a bit long winded there.  Moving onto the actual topic of the moment:  irony.

As part of writing this episode of the comic, I did some reading up on definitions of irony to try to make sure I was using the term at least passingly correctly.  It seems to me that irony is one of those things which is a bit nebulous:  oh, there's definitions and examples and that's all well and good, but it's not something as well defined as, say, 2+2=4, and there seems to be some leeway as to what is or is not considered to be irony.

An example.  Some people seem to think that sarcasm is (or can be) a form of verbal irony, but this is by no means universal and not all sarcasm is ironic.

The situation that I have set up in this episode has attempted to employ situational irony -- The Pen has gone to some lengths (to the point of turning off her phone) so that her boss cannot contact her and drag her into some language related escapades but, as today's page shows, language related escapades appear to be happening anyway.  Is this ironic?  I'm still undecided on the matter, which is why I have the Waitress (real name as yet undetermined) babble a bit about the subject in the final panel.

TLDR version:  go look at this other comic which seems to match up with my thoughts on the matter fairly well.  Also go read my comic.

Until next time
Freak Out,
-TFitC

Rough Translation

Splurg!

That means, roughly translated, that the latest page of The Word Smith is up online in the usual locale.  But don't just take my word for it, go see for yourself!

That is all, Freak Out,
-TFitC