About Exiern

In Albany November 1st

2009-10-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

Ready to hear something very scary?

I am going to my last con of the year this weekend up in Albany NY.

Boo!

Here is the information:

Albany Comic Con Flier

I actually will be hosting a panel on how digital media is changing the comic book market. It should be very fun.

This being the last con of the year I have a few goodies to give away to Exiern fan. I can promise to make it worth the $3 entrance fee.

Also at 8:30 in the morning I am getting breakfast at the Wolf Road Diner right by the con. You guys are invited to come by and grab some breakfast with me. I will be the guy in the gold shirt with silver tie.

Looking forward to seeing you all there.

meh.. Good enough

2009-10-21T05:55:00.000-07:00

The new exiern site is now functional. I wanted to wait till it was also beautiful but I realized with everything else that is going on that would take slightly longer than the heat death of the universe. So I will be testing the site this week and next week I will port the site over. Again you can take a look at the new site here:

http://new.exiern.com

Ok this may be confusing.

2009-09-24T10:09:00.001-07:00

Today strip touches on a bit of Exiern cosmology that is known only to myself at this point. Now if this was a normal story the details of this cosmology would be revealed in time. The story would unfold and you would learn more about the universe as you learned more about the characters. But this is a filler comic and only has 3 more pages of life before we get back to the “normal” story (I hope).

Delving into what Ce is talking about with her masters and the travelers is just not allotted for in the limited time we have left. It’s my hope that this little story stand on it’s own and you don’t really need to know the backstory to appreciate the basic drama. But at the same time it feels like a tease never to tell you what is going on.

The basic idea for the cosmology of Exiern came from the famous line by Nietzsche “God is dead”. When I first heard this line the thought that ran through my head was “Gee, I wonder how the devil feels about that?” Granted Nietzsche was not being literal but just being his emo-prime self talking about the terror of transcending the concept of gods and yada yada yada. But I wondered what if the statement was to be taken literally. If God is dead where does that leave the devil?

The devil after all rebelled against god because he was angry over man being placed above angel. So here is the devil basically trying to prove a point and show how base and pathetic humanity is. Then God dies, the devil can never prove his point, he can never regain his place in heaven, his love/hate relationship with God is cut short. This concept impressed me as very tragic, a sort of life time movie on a cosmic scale and I always wondered what the devil would do in that situation. So when it came to create the cosmology of Exiern I decided to mirror this tragedy.

The brief history of Exiern is this;

Exiern was created by a group of individuals known at the Travelers. The Travelers dreamed Exiern into existence creating a paradise. In this world the Travelers created the nymphs to act as servant and concubine. The nymphs were beautiful immortal creatures designed to please all the sense of the Travelers.

However not everything the Travelers created was beautiful for you see the Travelers had an enemy known as the Authorities. To protect themselves from the Authorities the Travelers dreamed into existence powerful demons known as Beyonders because they were placed at the gates to the Beyond as guardians. The Beyonders were to prevent the Authorities from entering the realm of Exiern.

Every thing was good for a while. At least that is what the Travelers thought. However their, servants (Beyonders and Nymphs) began to grow restless. The Beyonders felt ignored by the Travelers having been placed far from existence at the edge of reality. The Nymphs felt that the Travelers were paying too much attention to them as the constant service to the whims of the Gods was wearing.

So the Beyonder and the Nymphs allied and turned against the Travelers in the Great Demon War (although it would probably be more accurate to call it the Great Demon Labor Dispute). Despite the power of the Beyonders and the cunning of the Nymphs, the Travelers were after all gods, and thus the Travelers were victorious in the war. As punishment the Nymphs were bound to the land in far off secluded places so that the Travelers could continue to take there pleasure with the beautiful creatures but not worry about rebellion. The Travelers, fearing the Beyonders more than the Nymphs, pushed the demons out of existence to dwell in a half-life in-between dreams and reality.

After the war the Travelers created the races of man to act as there new servants and the race of dragon as the new guardians. And again things were good for a time. Unfortunately the dragons proved to be inferior guardians and the Authorities were able to breach into the realm of Exiern (Some say the dragons let the Authorities through as a plot to take over the world although they never say this in front of a dragon.) Once they had established a foothold in Exiern the Authorities began to attack and capture the Travelers starting the God War.

This time the Travelers were not victorious and in the end all of them were captured or killed. Once the God War was over the races of man pledged their allegiance to the new gods, the Authorities (some races more reluctantly than other). But in response to the offering and oaths of loyalty the Authorities simply replied; “This dimension is no longer suitable to our purpose” and then boarded their sphere shaped ships and left Exiern and have not been seen in 5 generations.

And this is what Pip and Ce are talking about. And you get a cookie if you read through all this silliness.

New Exiern

2009-09-19T14:08:00.000-07:00

Watch me build the new site:

http://new.exiern.com

Watch me build it very very slowly. Comments are appreciated.

About the bath strip

2009-08-16T22:25:00.000-07:00

For all of you that were wondering here are the answers to your questions:

1) Yes I do pay attention to what is said on the chatbox.
2) No I don't have any integrity left.

Hope that clears that up.

where i am

2009-07-24T10:14:00.001-07:00

I am at San Deigo comic con both a4 way in the back right. Com visit me.

What the hell happened?

2009-07-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

So I have been away for a week and change and we missed an update. What is going on?

Well in order of events;

I got very sick
My computer died
My computer was fixed but my internet died
I was fired from my job
I am moving out of my apartment because I can’t afford it (see fired)
I am sick again.

So you know what? I am calling last week a week off for the comic. I have just not had time for anything. Fortunately my ex-employers have seen fit to free up a good deal of my time so I should be able to catch up. But I must say being unemployed has been much more work than being employed so far.

When I tell people about my loosing my job they ask me if I ever consider working on the comic full time. My answer is “Yes and I also consider winning the lottery and living on a private island with a naked supermodel. But I wouldn’t call either a good life strategy”. The simple fact is the economics of a writer/artist team is a good deal more difficult than the lone creator economics.

A lone creator has complete control over output that is not the case with the team scenario. Also a team has to generate twice the income of a lone creator. A difficult task to say the least. These factors work against a team scenario for creating a viable job.

So Exiern will remain a hobby. However if you want to donate something extra or get a membership to support me I am not going to stop you. If we could double Exiern income I could just do the comic for a living. That would be cool but I am not holding my breath.

On the other hand if anyone out there knows of a company looking for a cooperate trainer with experience in office applications, web programming, graphic design, database systems, and SharePoint, someone with a good deal of web and social marketing suave let me know. I would like to eat food and have a home.

Thanks.

PS: Anyone know of any comic writing job let me know as well but I doubt there are many of those around.

Six degrees of Seventh City

2009-06-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

I would like to meet Mur Lafferty. See to that would you.

Ok so more explanation. I have discovered Podio books. I know, I’m late to the party but hey I’m a webcomicer and we don’t mix much with the podcasters much. Kind of strange really since we are doing the same thing after a fashion. Sure webcomic people do podcast but they are rather amateurish and not really well thought out. I don't think any pro podcaster has done a comic. I guess it comes down to if you are atracted to visual or auditory stimuli.

At this year’s Balticon I went to a panel by escape pod. Escape pod is a source of free audio fiction on line. Well I loved it and have been devouring Escape pods fiction. Escape pod led to Mur Lafferty who has released a number of really cool books online.

Mur lives down in Durham NC. Now every year there is a folk music festival down in Durham on the weekend of July 4th. I have been going for the last 3 year and it’s become nice little tradition. This year will be no different for me.

So I am going to be in Durham. I am interested in expanding my writing and looking into podcasting. Mur Lafferty is knowledgeable about both. So make sense to look her up and see if she available for a lunch/brain dump.

I sent her an email about this but she doesn’t know who the heck I am and therein lies the problem. The email has probably hit the spam filter or is just sitting with the other “I’ll have to check them eventually” emails. It is one of the ironies this age that with all these communication tools its harder to get in contact with people than ever.

I was about to give up hope but then I realized I have you minions. I figure that one of you knows Mur or know someone who knows Mur. You can get the message through where my attempts will go unanswered.

And after all it’s the least you guys can do as minions. ‘Cause, let’s face it, you guys have not been really living up to your side of the minion/mastermind relationship. I’m just saying, my death ray is still missing the Explodium I need, there is not one mutant man eating creature in my dungeon, no peaceful township has been raised in my name, there are no superspies strapped in front of a laser in my laboratory, and my harem is completely empty of feisty young reporters.

Really what have you guys been doing? Even my prison cells are not even incompletely guarded. How are the heroes supposed to trick the guard into giving them the keys if there are no guards to trick? The heroes just slowly starving to death in the bowls of my citadel. Do you have any idea how bad that makes me look to my fellow Megalomaniacs? I mean it's just not done to have actually escape-proof prisions instead of just calling a it escape-proof.

Anyway if anyone can arrange a connection I would be grateful.

Fail me and… Well I would say I will throw you to the alligators but no one has set up the alligators pit either. I swear I never should have let you guys unionize.

God is a man and he's from Texas

2009-06-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

Before I get into theology I just want to let you know the next Exiern page will not be up till late friday. Now about God:

Based on this article

Recently I have been reading the Scientific American “Sex” special edition. And before you all run out to the stores no there is no centerfold. It is very interesting and talks about sex and the difference between men and women. For example the ability to “Walk it of” is actually gender linked to men and the ability to remember important emotionally linked dates and event linked to women. One of the articles that caught my eyes was the play preferences of chimps.

Scientist gave young monkeys a number of toys and then correlated gender with who played with which toy more. They found female monkeys played more with dolls and male monkeys more with rubber balls. They also found males preferred toy trucks and females preferred a toy pan.

What?

Ok the doll/ball thing I get. Dolls look like babies and balls are physical, both training for gender roles in a chimp society. But a truck? Monkeys don’t have tucks. There is nothing even truck like in the jungle. Chimps are a couple million years of evolution away from an internal combustion engine. A toy truck more resembles a doll than a ball. What the heck is going on? Same argument for pots and pans. Monkeys don’t have fire, cooking, or anything that would make a pan useful. It’s essentially a flat ball.

Let’s assume these researchers didn’t mess up and there is an ingrained genetic preference for truck among all male primates. This is without a doubt the most convincing case for intelligent design I have ever seen. Not only is preference for truck not evolutionarily adaptive, it’s evolutionarily impossible. You can’t evolve to prefer something that doesn’t exist. You have to come up with some odd theories of time space or plutonic forms to explain that with natural processes.

Clearly some being put a preference for truck into our dna at the dawn of time. Technology, society, the accent of man has all been in the service of creating a sweet ass hemi. In fact you could probably say the dinosaurs lived and died to produce the oil needed to power our trucks. All history has been leading up to creating the perfect truck. Men have been guided to this fate by God. It all makes sense when you think about it.

And women? Well women have been programmed to stay at home cooking and taking care of the young and not to touch the man’s truck. Even before cooking exists, female chimps show a preference for cooking equipment. Women are not to drive truck just bring their men sandwiches as they work on creating and repairing trucks.

This is clearly what God has written into our nucleic acids. The question one has to ask is have we lost our way? We now create hybrid cars, and car pool to work or take the train. We have turned from the path of creating bigger and more powerful trucks. Worse women dive SUVs, and men an women share household chores. Clearly we have gone against our dna and are not living our lives in the model of imature monkeys.

God is a clearly a man, a truck man to be exact. And I fear his wrath when he looks upon on modern truckless world. So next time a you see a guy driving a beat up old pickup driving down the road spewing out clouds of toxic smoke, give that him a thumbs up. After all he’s the only thing standing between us and Armageddon.

PS: It is also possible that God wants us to bake the perfect cake and the invention of the truck is just necessary for the transport of the ingredients. If you want to take the grody cootie filled female centered view of things.

(Note: in the study it was actually a police car that the monkeys played with but trucks are funnier)

Mean = Money

2009-06-16T08:15:00.000-07:00

So you might have noticed that I put up a new donation comic in the members area. And I must say doing so pains me greatly.

1) It pains me because the comic is not R-rated and doesn’t need to be locked away in the member’s area.

2) Because the comic is rather amusing and I don’t want to lock it away in the member’s area.

This is always the problem with web businesses. To thrive on the web you have to be the type of person who genuinely enjoys sharing their work with no expectation of reward. But make money on the web you have to withhold some of your work in order to strong arm your viewers into paying. I always like to quote this imaginary exchange between creator and consumer on the internet:

Consumer: “Wow I really love your (Comic/Blog/Podcast/Art) it’s the high point of my day it.”

Creator: “Thanks that really means a lot to me. And you know if you really like it you could donate a small amount towards it’s production”

Consumer: “Yes, yes I COULD donate something towards its production. That is an ability I have.”

The consumer then wanders off to look at some other free content on the web as the creator pours himself a glass of his own bitter tears.

If I could draw Exeirn myself I promise you there would be no ads and no member’s area on this comic. But I can’t so I need to make money. I actually need to make more money. If I could double Exiern’s income constantly, I could convince Studio Boom to quit his job and come to work for us full time. That would mean 3 comic a week instead of just one. Which would be awesome.

The rule of thumb I have found to work for Exiern is sharing 75% and charging for 25%. You give most of your work away for free to build the audience but then you have to hold back a fraction of it to convert that audience into customers. Granted there are other schemes such as selling print version or original art. But these methods are usually variations on the same theme. Print books usually contain extra content and original art is special content in its own way.

The only other method is to threaten the existence of the comic or offer extra pages. Threading the existence of the comic would be a lie and offering extra pages would be impossible right now (unless we doubled our income as I said) so the withholding of content is all I have left.

Doesn’t mean I like doing it though.

Shadow Sock-Puppetry

2009-05-27T17:40:00.000-07:00

At Balticon the topic of sock-puppeting was discussed at one of the panels. Sock-puppeting is the act of making duplicate accounts on ones message board, chat or other networking tool and pretending that this alternate persona is a different person. At the panel some fool brought up this technique and was resoundly shouted down by the panelist.

That fool was me. I have indeed engaged in sock-puppeting but not exactly in the way you think. Traditionally a sock puppet personality is a raving fan of the creator (aka puppeteer’s) work. They post complements and are an ever vigilant defender against all detractors. But “Pretender”, my sock puppet, was less of a defender and more of an a-hole.

Pretender was a self absorbed misogynist. He would have never complemented my work because it would have taken attention away from himself. Mostly he would hang around the forums and make rude comments and tell dirty jokes. “There one was a man from Orange County that realize nothing lude rhymes with Orange County. So he moved to a beach house with a huge dock. His wife is much happier now.” That sort of thing. Pretender was my Id in all its glory

Taking on the Pretender personality was very freeing. As the Mod my words carried weight. If I said something stupid people would notice and it would be viewed as an officially sanctioned statement. No one listened to Pretender one way or the other. But this was great because NO ONE LISTENED TO HIM. I could say anything through the voice of Pretender and it would not tarnish the comic and it would not make anyone fell discriminated against. Pretender was an idiotic blowhard and everyone knew it including me. But every now and then it’s fun to be an idiotic blowhard.

Pretender also made the forums more lively and interesting. His posts got people talking and added steam to existing conversations. One of the hardest things about building community is getting the first few people to start talking. Having pretender making random comments kept the forums interesting and active.

Eventually I junked the Pretender persona. Not because I felt bad about the identity. Honestly the Drowemos identity is just as fake as Pretender in its own way. One of the nice things about the web is you can try on different personas take on different forms. I really find nothing wrong with that.

No Pretender got the ax for a much simpler reason. I don’t have the time for him. I frankly don’t have time to post in my primary persona of Drowmemos more or less the time for a second persona. Pretender was a particularly needy persona as well. His drive to be the center of attention was just too much work to maintain. So I retired the persona in 08 never to be seen again.

Sock-puppeting gets a bad name because people use to attack critic while avoiding any blow back from their actions. This is a negative use of sock puppeting but at the same time there are many usages that I think are perfectly legitimate. As with all things it’s not the action that is bad but the application. It’s fun to role play and well played puppet can add entertainment to a site. These are noble applications in my opinion that should be applauded not decried. When you talk online the assumption of identity should be thrown out the window. Judge one by their actions not by who they are, because you will never know for sure.

One final note. Pretender is a pretty common screen name. My Pretender only existed on the Exiern forums so if you go to a board and see a Pretender it’s probably not me but a whole and complete person. Unless someone else is sock-puppeting.

Digital Version of the Print Version of the Digtial Version

2009-05-19T14:16:00.000-07:00

Well you guys asked for it. There is now a downloadable PDF avalible of Exiern Book one. I am still scratching my head as to why people want this. True the PDF is super high reslolution better than even the members area gets, but still. Selling a PDF of a webcomic seems strangely circular to me.

Any way you can get the comic from "Drive Through Comics" here:

http://comics.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=61359

PS: I also hear there are some Drive Through cupons floating around in newsletters or some such that would let you get the book for free. I don't know the details outside of one person has alrealy used a cupon to buy the book.

The Speech

2009-04-27T19:41:00.000-07:00

As I have mentioned, I used to game with R. K. Milholland of Something Positive fame. He was a cool guy and really wacky. In fact my first response when I found out he was the force behind Something Positive was; “Oh my God. What happened to Randy? Should we stage an intervention or something?”

Anyway I sent him an email when I found out that I knew him. No response of course. Which was not very surprising. Randy was really bad with answering emails even before he had his comic empire.

As I was preparing for Raven Con I noticed that Randy was going to be attending. We were even going to be on some same panel. It would be cool to say hi and reminisce about the old days. But I really doubted Randy would remember me. It was a long time ago and we only gamed for about 6 sessions top. I barely remembered him and had to do a websearch to figure out what he looked like.

Realizing that there would be an awkward “who the hell are you” moment I thought it would be amusing if I acted all indignant about it. I worked out this humorous speech I could give to sort of cover the issue and break the tension if any.

So I walked into he panel all ready to go into my soliloquy and then Randy spotted me. “Hey I know you,” he said with a big smile “Eric from Rob’s game back in Boston! How have you been.”

So my big speech ruined I got on with the process of catching up. But I did put some thought into that speech so here is what I would have said if Randy didn’t have his freaky mutant cyborg memory of everyone he has ever met:

Hi Randy.

*My opening gambit laid I would get all indignant when he didn’t recognize me.*

You don’t remember me do you? Gaming? In Boston? With Rob?

Jesus Christ man! I save your life on three different hypothetical occasions and now you are just going to pretend like it never happened?

Well, it didn’t actually happen but you are just going to pretend like we never pretended it happened!

So what? The battle of Lanceaturn meant nothing? We fought a battle for our fictitious children and fictitious children’s’ children so that they would not have to live under the oppressive thumb of an evil that didn’t actually exist. Was all that imagined effort and pretend sacrifice for nothing?

What world do we live in where the mock crushing of the non-existent armies of the dragon is written off as some fantasy?

Well, I’m afraid sir, you leave me no choice.

*A this point I would have taken out a twenty sided that I had in my pocket and rolled it on the table. Depending on what the die rolled I would have said one of two things*

*With a high roll I would have pointed at him dramatically and said.*

19! Not so cocky now are you! Let this be a lesson to you.

*With a low roll I would have look dejectly at the die and mumbled.*

Oh, nuts, only a 5. Never mind then. Carry on.

*The end.*

But you know how it is Randy ruined everything by recognizing me and being really cool. The same old wacky, friend to everyone, guy that I remember from back in Boston…

…that bastard.

Podcast again.

2009-04-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

Once more into the breach my friends another Exiern Open Access podcast tonight. Going to discuss Albany Comic Con, upcoming cons and might even have a surprise guest. As always I want you guys to call in with your question.

Podcast Link

Starts 9:00 pm EST

Next podcast

2009-04-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

Again we are going to an open podcast about Exiern and the related comics. This week we can talk about my complete lack of preparation for the upcoming Albany Comic Con

Podcast Link

Starts 9:00 pm EST

Exiern Open Access Reminder

2009-03-25T09:19:00.001-07:00

Reminder Tonight 8:30 EST I will be online to talk about anything and everything comic related:

http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/43806

What the?

2009-03-23T14:26:00.000-07:00

The new Exiern book has been out for about a week now through ”create space” and something strange is going on. One of the features of create space is that they automatically list your book on Amazon. Strangely enough I have been getting some sales through Amazon. The commission on Amazon sales is very low so it not a big deal but it’s strange to think of Amazon customers buying my book. In fact I realized I have to change the description of the book to warn people that there are naked bit inside.

While I was fiddling with the description of the book I noticed something. There are used copies of the book for sale. The stranger thing is that the used copies are being sold for about $42. Hun?

To summarize someone is sell Exiern Book One for over twice the cover price on the same site the new book is being sold. How does that work? Why would anyone in their right mind buy a book for twice the price when the cheaper version is there right in front of them? Who the heck is this any_book company and what's their business model? Because this doesn’t seem like a good idea.

The world is a harsh place and I know there is no end of clever people willing to take advantage of the stupidity of other. I just never realized there were that many stupid people trying to take advantage of the stupidity of others.

Now grated I know what is really going on here. any_book has an automated system that instantly lists all books listed on amazon with a standard mark up. When a book first is released the only place one could buy it is from Amazon so the price is higher than Amazon. As the book is distributed any_book finds the book listed on other sites and readjusts the price. Still it’s strange to see a book you just released listed as used.

Well that didn't work

2009-03-18T19:24:00.000-07:00

My sigificant other decided to suprize me with dinner and a movie. I couldn't really say no and I had no internet access the whole night. So I couldn't update the page or let anyone know I would be MIA.

We are going to try this again next Wensday at 8:30 PM EST. Hopefullly nothing esle will get in the way.

Time to talk

2009-03-17T14:31:00.000-07:00

Well as you all know I love to talk particularly about comics. So I am going to try an experiment here. Tomorrow and every Wednesday from now on I am going to host an open call in show on talkshoe. You have any question/opinions/comments about Exiern, Dark Refections, Legacy or webcomics in general you are invited to call in and chat.

http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/43806

Keep in mind I know next to nothing about print comic so the newst silly thing that Plasticman said it pretty much off the table.

Book Done!!

2009-03-04T18:22:00.000-08:00

Well the nightmare is over. Exiern Book One is ready for purchase. The book contains the uncensored member comics up to this page: http://www.exiern.com/index.php?strip_id=99 plus one page never seen on any of the comic. It also contains the donation comics "Cheating Death" "Beating Death" and "Back to Nature".

I will get the Book set up in the store in the next couple of day but for those of you eager to buy the book here is the link:

https://www.createspace.com/3368269

Thanks for support the comic. Your purchases will keep Exiern going.

Rewrites

2009-02-27T06:22:00.000-08:00

So I am in the process of firming up some of the scripts for Exiern. Now most of the major plot points of Exiern were written almost 2 years. But when I go through the writing process I flesh them out and make changes them according to the reader response. Most of the time this is just minor tweaks or adding in some additional pages to give a story or idea more time. For example the Peonie Jello wrestling thing was added late in the game in response to reader’s requests. However right now Exiern is a major crossroads as far as the script is concerned.

The problem at hand is that of the man meat in Tiffany’s life Tadpole (Denver Thadwick) and Wolf. When the scripts were written originally written Wolf the dashing highwayman was going to play a larger role in Tiffany’s life. He was going to return to pester Tiffany from time to time. Tadpole on the other hand was fated to die in the original script at the end of the forest adventure.

Well those plans did not quite work out. Wolf got cut in the redux process and Tadpole, bless his little Mary-Sue heart, has managed to endear himself to a major portion of you. So now what? Exiern has been scripted out for the next 3 years or so and some of the major plot points involved Wolf and not Tadpole. The characters are not interchangeable in fact they are almost diametrically opposed and would react in almost the opposite way to any given situation.

So now what? Do I burn almost 80 pages of text to start the story anew? Do I cram the square Tadpole peg in the round Wolf hole? Or do I just bring Wolf back ignoring the fact that he has never been introduced in the real comic?

I know the correct answer to this question. I should start up the bonfire. After all in a story, nothing is true until it is true. You can plot all you want but until it makes print it’s not the story. Still, there are some good lines in there and it’s painful just to throw them out. Perhaps I will save them as some what if script to post.

Save the Planet

2009-02-25T09:48:00.000-08:00

Karen Elis the writer for Planet Karen recently had her apartment burn down. She is in need of help and support . Please go over and give her you support today:

http://planetkaren.girl-wonder.org/

On another note the comics she has made about the fire have been some of the most engaging and moving I have seen from her or from almost anyone on the web. They are great little pieces of drama and humor. Now it’s not that I exactly wish any more ill will toward Karen but I’m just saying it does seem to bring out the true artist in her.

PS: When I say give her your support, I mean donate money.

The Reversal

2009-02-19T09:48:00.000-08:00

A question I get often is “What about women transforming into men. Why is no one interested in that.”

My thoughts:

Ah yes the infamous F to M transformation. There are a number of reasons that it is less popular. A man turning into a woman is very symbolic. It represents a loss of power both physically and socially. Where the inverse transformation of a woman to man would be accompanied by an increase in social status and physical strength. A story about a loss of power can let you explore the true nature of a character where an increase of power doesn’t make the character face any hard decisions.

Another part of it is that men do treat women like crap from time to time. Granted women also treat men like crap but the difference is in the aggressiveness. A man will initiate the crap giving, a woman will rarely walk up to a man and give him a hard time. This is why when a transformation is portrayed it is usually in to an attractive woman because an attractive women has to worry about unwanted sexual advances but an attractive man does not. It is part of the mating game we play with each other that the male is the initiator.

You also have the issue of social norm. A woman who acts manly is just tomboyish. She is still an accepted member of society provided she is attractive that is. A man who acts womanly is an outcast, a person of questionable morals and sexual orientation. There is a much harsher reaction to men acting like women that the reverse. Again this is probably due to the perceived power differential and an the different roles in mating.

And then there is the basic audience for this sort of thing. Most of the audience for this thing is going to be male. Why is Laura Croft female? Because your average gamer doesn’t want to stair at a guy but for 15 hours of game play. Same idea here. Transforming a man into a woman means more attractive women to look at. The opposite mean less attractive women. And if you go to the very base of the male psyche on this thing a man transformed into a woman is a woman who is interested in all the stuff men are interested in. She would like action movies, football and burping. In a sort of twisted way it’s a dream woman.

Well what about a woman to man transformation wouldn’t that make a dream man? Not really. Women are more psychological in there fantasy. It’s about personality and how a man makes them feel as opposed to T and A. A dream man has to be manly. Strong and confident and at the same time compassionate and caring. A woman to man doesn’t really satisfy that fantasy because part of the transformation story is to be out of your depth and overwhelmed, not strong and confident. Also to be perfectly honest women are pretty shitty to one another so compassionate and caring would be a stretch as well.

A man to woman transformation story is a simple one. It’s about loss and confronting your own bigotries and the past sins. A woman to man transformation story would have to be more complex. I am not saying it’s can’t be done but all of the easy plot points are gone when you reverse the situation. The story would have to be about something else something transformational for a woman. Because that is what these stories are about. Not the physical transformation but the mental one that occurs after the transformation. Being transformed into a woman is about learning to be a better man strangely enough.

I need an Editor stat

2009-02-03T12:09:00.000-08:00

I need someone to give the Exiern Book 1 a look over. I have had the comic edited but I need the extra text looked at. I need some who can turn around the edit very quick. If you can do this you get a free book and a credit. Please contact me if your intersted.

Ok for the time being I think I have found some people to help out. Thanks for all your input.

Shout out to Dual

2009-01-28T12:23:00.000-08:00

Now I usually avoid recommending Zuda comic. Mostly because the last time I recommended one you guys yelled at me, a lot. Yes, I know the interface is a pain. Yes, I know it takes forever to load a page. Yes, I know it crashes computers running firefox and an older version of flash. But look if you can fight through that Dual is a really unique find.

http://www.dualcomic.com/

To start of with the art of Dual is just gorgeous. The art is otherworldly with a soft painted look that just just a cut above your standard comic book art. And to tell the truth when I first saw Dual I thought I was just another pretty face. All imagery and no content. And then I started reading the story. It was phenomenal. Deep and engaging and building a unique would. Dual is the comic equivalent of a supermodel who is into D&D and football.

Honestly I am a bit jealous of what Michael Walton has been able to accomplish over a Dual. He’s a great artist and great story teller. One man should not be allowed so much talent. But jealousy aside you should check it out even if you do have to fight your way past the Zuda comic viewer. Just imagine the Zuda system as the overprotective redneck father to the D&D playing supermodel.

Sonny Rhodes

2009-01-22T06:47:00.000-08:00

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me

Just a quick note the singer for the Firefly theme song, Sonny Rhodes, is having some problems and could use your support. Head over to his myspace page to help him out.

http://www.myspace.com/sonnystorch

I am not a Drow.

2009-01-14T11:23:00.000-08:00

Many of you see my alias of Drowemos and think that I like the fantasy race the Drows. Let me be clear about this. I do not like Drows or Drow characters. My alias is a representation of my lack of creativity not my love of the cellar dwelling elves. Back in the day, I was starting to get into webcomics and I made a little photomanipulation for my fav at the time. To post it I had to get on the the message boards. But what to call myself? My name “Eric” seemed a little dull and a little over used. I wanted something unique that is not used often on the net something that for the most part is unique to me. Well that is a tall order for a place that has people going around with the usernames like fuzzybondagesurfkitten_48 (meaning there are 47 other fuzzybondagesurfkitten). After a few failed attempts I exclaimed in frustration “Well I have to use some word”. Then I thought Someword hmmm. Well a google search of “someword” found a ton of them bouncing around the net. But the spelling backwards was relatively unknown. I wasn’t exactly happy with Drowemos but I figured that I was only going to use it on this one board until I could come up with something better.

Long story short I didn’t come up with anything better and I started to be known as Drowemos. Or more accurately as the abbreviation “Drow” . It was when people started calling me Drow that I realized my mistake. I had called myself Drow-Emos or a collection of whiny dark elves, like they could get any whinier.

Now, let me make it clear at this point, I don’t hate the Scandinavian Drow or Toll who come in great varieties sort of taking the roll of the unselee cout in their mythology. I hate the D&D Drow. Why? Well lest start with their basic reason for being evil and malevolent. You see at the beginning of time the elves fought a war and the Drow the losers of this war were forced underground. There in the lair of the Underdark the anger of the Drow festered into true evil.

This may sound familiar because it’s the same motivation for the Molemen, Morlock, Chud and Crab-people not a particularly illustrious group to be part of. The Drow have the modivation of a lousy 50 style comic book villain. You were forced underground, ok fine. Second let’s examine this motivation. But why did you stay there? No one was really keeping you down there. No one in the millennia said “I am tired of this dank let’s go get some air.” You could have come out and set up in some land somewhere after one of the many wars wiped it clean. That never in the time imimorial of dwelling in the darkness occurred to you?

But, for the sake of argument, let’s say you had to stay underground for some reason until you adapted. Why are you still angry about it? It would be like human being angry at the tuna for forcing their ancestors from the sea. We’ve moved on and hold no ill will against the tuna. We don’t catch them for revenge just because they are tasty. This is my main problem with the Drow. They are bitching am moaning about an event so old evolution has forgotten about it. Seriously, get some therapy.

Then you get the unfortunate creature of the renegade Drow. The one that has turn against the evil ways of his/her people and must remind you of this fact constantly. Talk about a whiny brat. They complain non-stop. “Oh my people are evil, oh the surface dwellers hate me, oh my people were forced underground at the beginning of time and I am still upset about that.” For the love of god or Loith or whoever shut the hell up. Kill me or torture me or whatever just stop the whining.

And seeing that you can’t throw a stick without hitting a renegade Drow these days you begin to see the real threat of the Drow. Having failed at conquering the surface world through force they send their young to the surface to complain us into submission. Soon the surface races will be forced into the Underdark to escape the incessant moaning. For, since the renegade Drow forswears the darkness to venture into the light the only place safe from their melodrama is in the darkness. Well played Loith well played.

So why do I still call myself Drowemos? We to tell the truth the name sort of fits. To be perfectly honest I am a bit of a whiner myself. Naming myself after the most pain in the ass fantasy race seems to work for me. I supposed you could say I am a renegade renegade Drow. I have turned my back on the pointless melodrama of those of my kind that have turned their back on the pointless melodrama of their kind, giving me even more to complain about.

FEAR ME!

I like to hear the sound of people listening to my voice.

2009-01-12T20:43:00.000-08:00

One thing I really enjoy doing is making podcast. Whenever a podcast invitation comes up I am quick to jump at it. As such there are quite a few recording of me bouncing around the web. Here is a quick rundown:

910 Podcast

This is the big one. I am on a majority of the over 50 episodes here talking about webcomics and a sort of stuff. The later ones are better than the earlier one in quality and information.

http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=31253&cmd=tc

Webcomic Brainstorming at the Webcomic Beacon

This was a little four part exercise I did. We got a bunch of writers an came up with a new idea for a webcomic from scratch. Sadly the idea never got produced but it was a fun experiment.

http://webcomicbeacon.com/2008/01/24/twcb-ep8-webcomic-brainstorm-1/

http://webcomicbeacon.com/2008/02/29/episode-13-webcomic-brainstorm-2/

http://webcomicbeacon.com/2008/03/28/episode-17-brainstorm-session-3/

http://webcomicbeacon.com/2008/04/25/episode-21-webcomic-brainstorm-villains-2/

http://webcomicbeacon.com/2008/05/28/episode-26-webcomic-brainstorm-finale-rebirth/

Other Webcomic Beacon Appearances.

http://webcomicbeacon.com/2008/08/22/episode-38/

http://webcomicbeacon.com/2008/12/16/episode-55/

http://webcomicbeacon.com/2009/01/01/episode-57/

And last but not least is an interview of yours truly talking about all the comic I have made to date.

http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-33290/TS-175199.mp3

Professionalism sucks.

2009-01-08T04:25:00.000-08:00

Over the last couple of months I have been working on having a more professional face to the comics around here. Exiern has plateaued and some extra effort is needed to take it to the next level. That means a more smooth and polished look to the website (coming soon) and a author who is not a whiny baby (less sure when that is coming)and who doesn't misspell every other word (don't hold your breath on that one).

It also means not spouting off about anything and everything that annoys me. Instead I have to think about the long-term possibilities and business deals. And let me tell you that has been a hard thing to do this week. Because this week has been a real “what the…” week for me let me tell you.

I have seen horrible horrible webcomics getting paid money and receive acclaim. I have seen creators that I not only respect but idealize make deals that are sure to compromise the integrity of their work and then get complemented on the deal. All and all I have seen some real trash touted at treasure and it has left me feeling like this:

Cartman has the right idea

But being professional mean that you don’t go around picking fights for no good reason. It means holding your tongue and being mature. And it’s very much not fun.

So if you will excuse me I am going to find a non hybrid car to lock my self in the garage with.

Buy Yarn?

2008-12-07T08:01:00.000-08:00

Does any one out there knit? I have a friend who is running a yarn business. Custom yarn for all your knitting needs and all that rot. Now personally I am aware that yarn and socks have some sort of causal relationship but if you were ask what the details of that relationship was I would be at a loss.

I kind of assume that those of you who read this comic are of the same ilk in that knitting is something that is done not something you do. And that, the only way you would be interested in yarn would be if it was some sort of magic yarn that transformed people or unraveled on command. Sadly this is not that type of yarn.

But my crafty friend is helping me manage the every growing complexities of these comic websites and it is very nice yarn. Non-magical yarn grant you, but very nice. So if you are the yarn buying type I would appreciate if you bough your yarn from Dye-namics Yarn.

PS: Ask if they have any magic yarn. Perhaps they are holding out on me.

I warned you:

2008-11-22T12:54:00.000-08:00

You see, You see, This is what I am talking about:

http://www.thedevilspanties.com/d/20081118.html

Tagboard bad!

2008-11-14T07:42:00.000-08:00

Recently people have been getting some virus warnings from this site. After much hunting the it turns out that the warning was coming from the tagboard. Now I believe that these virus warning were false positives of cookies being detected as a virus. Even so I don’t want to take any chances even if there was no virus people are getting warning which is not good. I am taking down the tagboard and going to look for a cookie free version.

Thoese seas are full of filler I say.

2008-10-23T07:11:00.000-07:00

Well I am afraid we have to have a bit a of a cliff hanger here. Studio Boom is quite sick so I am going to move over to a filler comic that I had made up. Big thanks to Darin of Crossworlds for doing this filler comic. I am not going to commit to the cannoness of this comic one way or the other. But it is a fun little 8 page romp so enjoy.

With any luck Studio Boom will be recovered and back drawing pages in a month or so.

What happened last week?

2008-10-20T07:08:00.000-07:00

As some of you have noticed we missed an update last week. Illness and drama interveined to prevent the comic from being completed. Hopefully things will be better this week but if they are not I have a filler story lined up. Sorry about the delay.

Dark Reflections Update.

2008-10-07T19:10:00.000-07:00

I can't update the website right now but I wanted to let people there is a update of Dark Reflections today. With an uncensored page for thoes of you who like such things.

Must see.

2008-10-01T14:33:00.000-07:00

Ok this is a comic my readers have to see:

Skadi's wish

Dumm Comic are usually pretty good and Skadi is the best of the lot but this one was just perfect for anyone who likes Exiern.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

2008-09-30T15:20:00.001-07:00

Welcome to another one of my random ramblings. Sorry no information here today.

So I went to the Baltimore Comic Con this weekend. I walked around talked to various people in artist alley. High point was meeting the creator of the Dreamer (http://thedreamercomic.com/) a truly excellent webcomic. Grated the comic is a little girlly and not my standard fair, but it is really well done. One of the best written and drawn comic I have ever seen even if it is not written for me. I suggested adding mutants, and explosions and exploding mutants. She said no.

And then I ran into Brad Guigar of Halfpixel. Now as some of you may know I have had some arguments with the Halfpixel crew. They believe a story based comic that gets its funding from donations are not a feasible business strategy. I was sort of under the impression that Exiern is a story based comic funded by donations and that it was doing pretty well. I really wanted to talk to Guigar about that and about some other things that we differ on.

But I didn’t. Here is the thing; a con is not a really good place to talk to people. It is noisy and chaotic. Add to that the fact that Guigar clearly didn’t want to talk to me. He wasn’t mean about it. He shook my hand and said “hi”. But he also used all those “highly effective people” skills to end the conversation. You see Guigar is there to sell things not debate comics. I respect that and if he didn’t want to talk there wasn’t much I could do about it.

Next to Guigar was Kurtz. I have also disagreed with Kurtz and would have really liked to talk to him. So after Guigar gave me his “well thank you for coming by” I look over at Kurt. Kurtz was leaning back in a chair with a tremendous scowl on his face. I had no idea what was going on with him but I decided now was not the best time to talk to him. I swung by the booth 3 more times that Con and every time Scott was sitting there with this look of absolute hatred for all creation on his face. I know you have seen pictures of Scott Kurtz at Cons smiling and having wacky fun. I am now convinced that those pictures are photoshoped. Scott does not smile, ever.

After the Con I was very upset. And this got me to thinking. It was not exactly that anyone had done anything wrong. I just didn’t get a chance to express myself. I didn’t even care if they agreed with me. I just wanted to be heard. In fact every fight I have had online can be boiled down to this one thing. Not being heard.

I was upset with Zuda when they did not answer their feedback.

I was upset with Wowio when they gave me caned cooperate lines instead of real conversation.

I was upset with Halfpixel when they completely misread and misunderstood my letter and never gave me a chance to defend myself.

When I am ignored I get very upset. And I don’t really think that is a trait solely possessed by my psyche. This is a universal need. We all need to be heard. It is the basis of Carl Rogers’s therapy technique which I agree with.

I would give anything just to sit down with Guigar at dinner and just talk about webcomics. To tell him how donations and story comics can work. To let him know that “my mother died” is not an example of a drama it is a tragedy and not good tragedy at that because no characters have been established. And also to hear his opinion on the webcomic industry. But that’s impossible.

Why is it impossible? Because professionals like Guigar operate under “time management” principals. The filter and deflect. Critics need to be deflected you can not engage them. Fan need to be controlled otherwise they eat up all your time. People must be managed. Giving people all the time they want is not part of a successful business strategy according to Halfpixel.

Of course story comic funded by donations are not a successful business strategy according to Halfpixel.

I have never reached a point of popularity where I cannot answer every email, private message, chat request, smoke signal that I receive. I don’t get that much really and the conversations are pretty fun. I enjoyed talking to critics who really hated this comic and I have gotten some good friends from online emails. It really is not much work for me to reply to everyone. If I don’t reply to your email got eaten by my spam filter that’s a promise.

I know we all wish for popularity but I don’t think I want to reach a level where I have to “mange people”. It would make me feel like crap not to give everyone I enough time and space to feel heard. I hope to be popular but not that popular. It is an odd goal I know. But it’s a goal I can live with.

Avast!

2008-09-19T07:51:00.000-07:00

Well now you scurvy seadogs. Today be talk like a pirate day!

http://tomsmithonline.com/freestuff/oddio/TLAPD.mp3

No back to work the lot of you!

Oh yea. I should have mentioned this.

2008-09-18T19:11:00.000-07:00

A little while back two new pages were added to the archive:

http://www.exiern.com/index.php?strip_id=10
http://www.exiern.com/index.php?strip_id=23

Just to round out the story and make the story a little smother.

That's Enough of That.

2008-09-09T10:14:00.000-07:00

Well we have had overly buxom identical twins topless Jell-O wrestling. If that’s not a 10 out of 10 on the fan service scale I don’t know what is. Hope you enjoyed it because that is the going to be it for a while. I am going to try one of these story things next. You know with plots and characters.

…

Yea I know the revenues are going to tank.

Twice a week for now

2008-09-02T08:04:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that today comic went up on Tuesday instead of the traditional Thursday. That is because after much drama we are going to try to update the comic twice per week. And by we, I mean Studio Boom will do the work and I will say “good job” and “ata boy” on periodic intervals.

So two comic a week… for now. I make no promise that this will be a long term thing. A number of factors are going to be taken into account to see if we can keep up this rate long term. But for the time being we get two enjoy twice as much of Studio Boom’s art work. I know I am happy about this.

DC Writers Group

2008-08-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

For those of you in the DC area I am starting up a small work group for comic/scif/fantasy writers. We well be meeting in the Writers Center (https://writer.org/ ) in Bethesda MD from 7:00pm to 8:00pm on Thursday August 21^th. If you have a script or manuscript or just an idea that you want input on come by and have the group look it over.

I am doing this under the auspicious of the DC conspiracy so we will be using their message board to organize for the time being:

http://artdc.org/forum/index.php?topic=9985.0

Directions to the Writer’s Center

The Writer's Center
4508 Walsh Street
Bethesda, MD 20815
Phone: 301 654-8664

Google Map

Nostalgia

2008-08-04T20:27:00.000-07:00

You know sometimes I think the commercialization of the web has taken a lot of the spark out of things. As soon as money can be made the cooperation siphon off all the talent for rap videos or movie promotions. A couple of years ago people were doing amazing things with flash. Now… well I haven’t found anything that made me go wow in the last couple of years.

But looking back there was some fun stuff:

CCC: Vinnie Veritas was with out a doubt a master of animation. Evocative and interesting stories without the use of words. He hasn’t done anything in a while but man his stuff was great. I would suggest “Days after those days”. Not his smoothest animation but man I have had days I felt like that

http://www.newgrounds.com/collection/ccccity.html
http://www.vinnieveritas.com/

Tedi: Next on my old time fav list is Tedi by Floating Pear Productions. Man that movie was amazing. The next episode was sadly never meant to be but I still enjoy episode one

http://www.tedionline.com/

Floating Hands: Last but certainly not least were the animation by Matt Gardner, one of the foremost comic genius of our time. The animation is not great but the jokes had me rolling in on the floor.

http://www.floatinghandsstudios.com

And for fun check out Matt comic It’s Gravy (it does have the insipid “lets start a webcomic beginning but it pick up after that):

http://itsgravy.comicgenesis.com

I don’t know. I have not found anything like the oldies in the last couple of years. Everyone is doing IPhone screen savers.

2008-07-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

Oh god! Watch it! Watch it now!!!

Late again

2008-07-10T10:06:00.001-07:00

Yes I know, another Thursday with no update. The basic problem is that we got behind a couple of week ago and have not been able to catch up. I have considered putting up a filler but each week we get a little closer to catching up and meeting the deadline again. I think I will just let this play out. It means more real comics for you guys after all. But in the mean time we are going to be a little late with our updates.

So Cool

2008-07-06T18:41:00.000-07:00

I am so looking forward to this:

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

I mean the line "Ah Ha Ha Ha Ha! So that's, you know, coming along" How can you not love that.

Away Away

2008-07-04T19:20:00.000-07:00

Well I am off for a couple of days on vacation. I don't know what has happened with the next page. I was hoping to get it before I left. Hopefully next week we will have 2 pages.

I miss all the good Cons

2008-06-20T15:09:00.000-07:00

I live in DC. Recently I found out that DC hosts the premier Con for self publishers. The Small Press Expo (SPX). Oh cool I said I will get a booth there. It will be a little more laid back than Wizard world with less porn. Yes Wizard world had to much porn for me. That's how bad it was. I go to sign up but so sorry the vendor space is sold out.

$%^*!

Then I find out about ConnectiCon a con devoted to webcomic. In Hartford Connecticut just hours from my parent’s house! That is so awesome! Quickly I go to sign up. So sorry vendor space is all sold out.

#$%^ %^&* & *#$%^& %^&* and a goat's %^&* %^&* %^&* steaming pot of $%^&*( %^&*( %^&*(&*( and the goat too!!!!

Now I am just depressed. I just want to go to a Con where people like webcomics not comics not anime. Where I can talk to people about things I do an experiment with online. People in my industry. Where I can say “I make a webcomic” to people walking past and they will not look at me derisively and say “well I can just read that online”. There are cons like that. It is just by the time I find them I have missed the registration period.

So guys look for me a none of the cool cons this year. I won’t be sitting next to anyone in none of the sections of the any of the con. Make sure to not look for the merchandise that I won’t be selling. If you lucky I won’t sign the nothing you get from me. I won’t be saying anything interesting on any of the panels and I won’t be at any of the after con parties. If you get a chance drop by and don’t buy me a drink so that we can’t talk about the comic since I won’t be there.

In short, I suck.

Oh by the way

2008-06-17T21:12:00.000-07:00

For those of you who can't wait for the next page. There is a preview in the forum.

It aint all button and charts.

2008-06-16T14:51:00.000-07:00

"Love.... You can learn all the math in the ‘Verse, but if you take a boat in the air that you don't love... shake you up just as sure as the turn of the worlds. Love keeps 'er in the air when she oughta fall down. Tells ya she's hurtin' 'fore she keels... Makes her a home."

I come today to talk to you about love. Occasionally on the message boards a young webcomic creator will ask “how can I make money from my webcomic?” The response is invariables and derisive choirs of “There is no money in webcomics. Forget about making money. If you want to make money go do something else.” It is always the response from even the most seasoned webcomic professional. And yet this statement is a lie.

If you have the skill to make a halfway decent webcomic and a some amount of business sense you can make money from webcomic. In fact the oportunites to make money on the web are much better than in print comics as far as I understand. So why the lie. Why do we always tell people that there is no money in webcomics.

The answer is twofold. The simpler answer is no one is quite sure how money is made. There are 100 different payment schemes and no one really knows which is the best one. To make money you have to forge your own way. So we say you can’t make money because we don’t really know how.

But the deeper answer is love. Before you can make a single dime on your webcomic you have to love it. You have to love the story. You have to love your character. And you have to love comics. It you have to have a passion of epic standards one worthy of sonnets written by the greatest poets. With every webcomic there is going to be tough times. There are going to be things about making it that you hate. If you don’t love your comic, if you don’t believe in it more than anything. Then you have already failed.

You are going to be attacked by trolls a plenty for the sheer audacity of making a webcomic. You are going to make completely idiotic business decisions. You are at times going to lose a lot of money and time in making your comic. There are going to be times when it seems like there is no hope of every achieving success. And there are going to be times when you feel like a completely talentless hack who can’t do anything right.

You have to love your comic to walk through these dark valleys. No one will tell you that you are doing the right thing. No one will tell you to stick in there. You will be alone. But if you love it, if you have a passion for it, you will know that there is no other choice but to move forward.

There is money to made in webcomics. More that we have seen to date. In the next couple of years we will see webcomics start to make a real profit. And you can be a part of this career. Don’t listen to the bitter old men who say there is no money to be made. But first you have to love.

The Return

2008-06-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

Well we have two returns. This week. Studio Boom popped back in to let us know that hes not dead. Or is he... Zombie Artist! Run for you lives!!!

And I have brought back the Tagboard. I took it away to get you guys to use the forums. But you didn't. Huzzah to you. You won the trial of nerves. In that I have no nerve.

But note there are rules to the Tagbord now. If I see any of those multiple entry post again it is going in the trash bin. Use the forum if you have a lot to say.

Studio Boom MIA

2008-06-13T15:47:00.000-07:00

Well Studio Boom has vanished again. No doubt he will reapear in a day or so with some tale of daring do.

Note: By daring do I mean some horible illness.

2008-06-09T12:56:00.000-07:00

There should be something funny I can say about this. Some witty repartee. Some biting sarcastic comment. It is a story just perfect for satire.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5grSNlNFOZE51djrrJ4-9WOWwNYlwD914STJ00

…

I got nothing.

Redux or just Dux

2008-06-07T08:27:00.000-07:00

Well I have started a forum poll about what to do with the old comics.

http://www.exiern.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=138

Ah evil.

2008-06-04T16:14:00.000-07:00

You all know that I am a student of evil. It’s a bit of a hobby of my to study those that have had their soul surgically removed and now walk the earth as blights on mankind. So you can imagine my elation when I found “Electronic Tigers”. It is a webcomic that has set out to be the most popular webcomic in the world no matter who they steal from or how low they sink on the evolutionary scale. You have got to respect that.

It is a comic about a group of gaming nerd. You got the funky black guy nerd, the sarcastic goatee wearing nerd, the dumb muscle bound nerd who is into gaming not sports, you got the super nerdy glasses and pocket protector nerd, and you have the tall virgin Asian girl with breast bigger than her head who is into magna and video games nerd.

Yes you heard that last one correctly. Imagine Brandy Carter from Liberty meadow but more sexual with bigger breast. You see this comic is genus. Mika (the bombshell name) has been custom tailored to be every gaming geek’s idea woman. She is a virgin but an atheist. Mika has no real hang-ups about sex she is just waiting for someone with a convincing argument to come along and talk her out of her pants. She is into every nerdy thing and has no boyfriend to speak of. Why if you could only talk to her you would immediately hit it off and in no time she would be riding you like a wild stallion.

“Ok,” you say “so they drop a sexpot into a gaming comic is that all? That’s kind of evil but pure evil come on.” Wait their more.

The writing is pretty good and the art is well done. The jokes are mostly your standard gamer jokes. Blizzard is slow in updating and so on. Same recycled gaming humor that has been going around for years. And then I came to this comic:

http://comicstripclub.com/2008/06/03/16/

Yes that is right. It is a comic where Brent from PVP and Ethan from Crt+Alt+Del make out in a homosexual love fest. Then in the last panel you see Mika in her underwear. In short Electronic Tigers simultaneously started a flame war with the two most popular comic on the web in a comic that has both blatant homosexuality and the objectification of women.

This one strip is without a doubt the most perfect webcomic strip ever created. And the whole strip is used to promote an unofficial WOW players guide on Wowio. It is perfect in the purity of its evil. I seriously love the creator of “Electronic Tigers”. I would have their babies if I had the gender appropriate sex organs.

No Shouting

2008-06-04T09:56:00.000-07:00

I will be taking down the shout box tonight. It has long out lived its usefulness. Instead of being and aid to community building is has been a vampire sucking the life force from the message boards and preventing real discourse.

Wizard World Bound

2008-05-29T16:08:00.001-07:00

Well I am heading off to Wisard World Philli. Anybody in in the area feel free to drop artist alley and say hi.

What's this all about?

2008-05-22T08:26:00.001-07:00

So I went to a party last weekend and everyone was talking about Twitter. “What is it?” I asked. I had heard people talk about Twitter on occasion but never really understood what it was. Well no one could really explain it to me. So I decided to sign up and see what it’s all about.

I still can figure out what Twitter is supposed to be but I now have a Twitter account. If you want to see all the random things in regards to the comic I do during the day you can check it out. I still don’t get the point of it but whatever.

https://twitter.com/drowemos

One addendum.

2008-05-15T10:53:00.001-07:00

The old art has not been removed just moved. You can now find it at http://www.exiern.com/clasic/. I will cross link it as soon as I can find the first 4 pages off of the bowel of my hard drive.

Boom, Baby!

2008-05-14T20:20:00.001-07:00

You know the word retcon has gotten a bad connotation as of… the inception of the word. But even so there are times when retcon is a good thing, nay even a necessary thing. Exiern is one of those cases. You see once upon a time Exiern had a really horrible artist working. Man this guy could not draw a straight line to save his life. He way a man with no concept of human proportions, truly a horrible artist.

That man was me. For a year I drew Exiern before I have the fortune of contracting Studio Boom. Those early comic were the ones most complained about. They were like a lead weight on this comic. But not anymore! We are Drowemos free on the art side of things. Granted you are still stuck with me as a writer but that’s still 50% better.

A lot had to be cut but now every comic in the archive is draw by studio boom. And very pretty I might add. Look through the archive and check out the new stuff.

PS: Every link to an individual page in this comic is now broken. Sorry about that.

Delay

2008-05-13T09:39:00.000-07:00

Today'c comic will be a little delayed today. I was drunk.

PS: I wasn't really drunk but I like saying that.

The Troll Soliloquy

2008-05-08T08:15:00.000-07:00

Friends, Reader, Networker, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Trolls, not to praise them.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Trolls.

So a little while back Exiern was targeted by a Troll site, you probably noticed an uptick in random profanities and “you suck” posts. It prompted me put in a spam filter that created mutant Roosterroaches and caused people to start making bumumtions. For a couple of weeks the Troll stomped around making a ruckus. Then, as is the way of their kind, they lost interest and left to devastate another website.

And I miss them. The Troll migration was a very good thing for Exiern. Ad revenues doubled and I was able to afford advertisements on the some of the big name sites. The site was a bit more lively and interesting. Generally the Troll helped out Exiern a lot.

Now this isn’t a “ha, ha I got the better of the Trolls post”. They can be quite annoying. They are just not that annoying to me. I bumume that most of my readers can hand a profanity or two. Profanties don’t bother me. As for the “You suck” chants, I think that only bother people who don’t think they suck. Honestly it is a constant amazement to me that there are other people out there who share my sense of humor and are willing put up with the constant stream of mistakes that go into this comic.

Also, buried in the caustic spewing of the Troll is occasionally some good advice. There were some good tips on making this comic a bit more professional nestled amongst the ad hominine attacks. Good advice is good advice independent of the source.

Lastly if you looked at them in the right way they were quite amusing. Not intentionally so of course, but still I got some chuckle out of them.

They accused me of being an evil mastermind of sort planning out my every move in some sort of Machiavellian plot. Which gave some of the people who know me personally a half hour fit of the giggles. I seriously thought I was going to have take one of them to the hospital, they were laughing so much.
They accused me of pandering by having an uncensored member’s area. That sort of impressed me as the same as accusing me of consuming oxygen as part of a metabolic process to continue my biological functions. Yes I do that. What exactly is your point?
They complained that the original art in exiern was bad. I really should sue them for plagiarism on that one because I said that first and frequently. It’s practically my tag line.

All and all the Troll migration was beneficial day for this comic. Perhaps one day the Troll will return to fertilize our fields once again. We can have a festival or some such. The day of the Troll. We can all put on scary masks and stomp around yelling “Rar, Rar, Rar! I f***ing hate everything!” to celebrate their returns. Or perhaps something involving beads? Thing involving beads are always fun.

PS: Could someone give me advice on getting rid of roosterroaches. They are waking me up at dawn with loud crowing and noting will kill the buggers.

What is this Editor you speak of?

2008-04-30T15:33:00.000-07:00

This Tuesday was the second session of the writing for comics class I am taking. I am learning so much about so many thing. One of which is that there are webcomic writers. I mean I always knew that someone made the comic I read. I knew there were artist and publisher but the fact that that someone gets paid to write comics sort of struck me as odd. I just sort of assumed that when it came to the words the grabbed a hobo off the street to write it and paid him off with a ham a cheese sandwich.

Now this is not an implied insult against comic writers. I have found most hobos to be quite witty after a meal. And as for the big names like Neil Gaiman and Stan Lee, I just figured they really liked ham and cheese sandwiches.

I am learning quite a bit about writing and comic but still there are some times that I realize that I am coming from a very different place than these pros. Last night I had this conversation (note conversation altered to be funnier)

Instructor:
“The most important pages of your comic are pages one to five and
page twenty two”

Me:
“Why are pages one to five
important?”

Instructor:
“Because those are the only pages an editor
will see.”

Me:
“Don’t you edit all your pages?”

Instructor:
“No the first five pages are the ones you submit
to the to get the book published.”

Me:
“What does an editor have to do with publishing a comic?”

Instructor:
“He decides if it is published or not. You need his approval of the story.”

Me:
“You know if you editor is getting all pissy like that I suggest you find
someone else to edit you book.”

Instructor:
“NO. When you submit your comic to a publishing company it goes an editor who decides if the company wants to pick up the book and publish it.”

Me:
“OOOOHHHH. For the print world.”

Me:
“So what you're telling me one guy gets to decide what becomes a comic or not? What if he is an ass? Or if he doesn’t like furry comics and yours is a furry
comic?”

Instructor:
“Then the comic doesn’t get published.”

Me:
“That’s a dumb system.”

Instructor:
“How would you do it?”

Me:
“Well… I would publish everything I got give it time to grow and mature. The comic that are no good would die out of their own accord and the good stuff would rise to the top.”

Instructor: “That an awful lot of waste paper and dead
trees.”

Me:
“Oh right the trees. It’s always the trees. “

And that’s when it occurred to me how fundamentally the web has changed the world. Just from an sheer scarcity level everyone who had an idea could not be allowed to voice that idea. There was just not enough raw material. So we had to appoint gate keeper make sure that the idea was wothy of the investment.

But now we have cut out these gatekeepers. The no longer serve a purpose they are artifacts of a bygone system. No one ever liked having them around but they were necessary at the time. An now the comics that we wanted but the editors would never allow can be made. The idea that would offend some can finally see the light of day.

I know this has been said before. But after seeing the stupid things that comic book makers had to do to appease these editors it really hit me what a fundamental change has been made.

What's Going On.

2008-04-28T13:52:00.000-07:00

Here is some news that I have procrastinating in putting up:
The comics are not in color because Brandon went to a concert. Once he gets back he will color the back pages. That probably mean for the rest of the story the comic will be posted in black and white and then colored a day or so later.

The comic contest is on hold until I get some free time to work on the pages. I am sorry again to the competitors but I just don’t have the time to work on the contest code right now.
For the members there is a treat. As part of the book publication we have replaced all the old comic with brand spanking new comics drawn by studio boom. The public comic will be updated as well as soon as we are able to censor some of the naughty bit. That’s right there are naughty bits in some of the retooled pages.

Another thing I have been meaning to mention is podcasts. I do a few.
For the webcomic beacon I have been doing a podcast where we are brainstorming a new webcomic idea. It is pretty fun and the webcomic beacon is one of the better produced webcomic podcasts out there. And there is actually a lot of webcomic podcast out there. You can listen to the shows here:

http://webcomicbeacon.com/2008/01/24/twcb-ep8-webcomic-brainstorm-1/
http://webcomicbeacon.com/2008/02/29/episode-13-webcomic-brainstorm-2/
http://webcomicbeacon.com/2008/03/28/episode-17-brainstorm-session-3/
http://webcomicbeacon.com/2008/04/25/episode-21-webcomic-brainstorm-villains/

On the less well produced side of podcasts is the 910 podcast. There is really not much of a point to the podcast we generally just spout off about whatever we are thinking at the time. Not the best listen but it’s generally fun:

http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=31253&cmd=tc

And if hearing my lovely voice is not enough disappointment for you, you can get the full bore disappointment of meeting me in person at Wizard World Philly http://www.wizardworld.com/. I will be sharing a both in artist ally with the crossworlds crew and I may or may not have something to sell. That all depends on the printer. But it is looking like the may not side of thing. This will be my first time on the otherside of the table. Hopefully it will be fun.

That’s it for now.

Perception of Power

2008-04-21T10:18:00.000-07:00

So I had a realization today. Most of the world’s problems come from people wanting to feel like they are in control. We yell, fight and even kill one another because we feel like someone else is threatening our power. Every social ill I can think of can be traced back to that basic fear. The fear of being out of control.

It makes a certain amount of sense when you think about it. We are plunged into this world with no control at all. Most of our life we are at the mercy of grand elemental forces beyond our control. And eventually we die and there is nothing we can do about any of it. The human condition is one of having no control over anything.

This is really too much to take. So we as human cling to the little power we have. “I may not be able to control my inevitable demise at the cold unforgiving hand of the reaper but GOD DAMN IT! I WILL HAVE A GERANUM IN MY CUBICL!” And this is sort of the key to the whole matter. It is the perception of power not real power that we quest for. On some level we know we can’t be in control but we need some symbol of control.

Symbols of control are simple. They cost nothing really and by giving someone a symbol of control it relives all the tension in the interaction.

And yet your modern businesses and governments seem to go out of their way to make individuals feel powerless. Why do they do this? It used to be that Bloomingdales had a phone in the store that was a direct line to the company’s president’s office (I think it was Bloomingdales one of the major department stores at least). Can you imagine that? You could just call up the president. Granted he would probably tell you to stop bothering him but man talk about a perception of power. Now it is true that with huge companies the president doesn’t have the time to talk to everybody but try even getting escalated to level 2 tech support. The worst part of this trend is that small companies copy the big companies. “Well Bloomindales makes people feel powerless, that must be the way to run a successful business.”

Thus a cycle is created companies and people try to strip others of their perceived power just because that is what other companies and people do. Once strip of their perceived power the other lash out become irate try to hurt the companies and people just to get a voice. In response the companies and people try and lock things down even more become more wall off and impenetrable.

What does this have to do with you? Well you are probably reading this on the internet and as you know the internet is full of irate trolls. People who yell and scream and ridicule everything and everyone. It is easy to dismiss these people as wackos. But that is not who they are they are simple people who have been denied their voice in every other place in their life. They final get a public forum and all the rage and frustration bubbles to the surface.

Don’t argue with or dismiss the trolls. Let them have their voice. Give them their perception of power. Because honestly, trolls are people to and just as deserving of respect as anyone else. They are wounded souls in need of healing. Be compassionate. Be polite. Greet their vitriol with overwhelming kindness.

And if you are part of a company or government, try talking to people you might just find you can change a critic into an advocate.

News News News

2008-04-15T08:02:00.000-07:00

The good news:
For the next month there will be two comics a week. One on Tuesday one on Friday

The bad news:
The comic will not be drawn by Studio Boom

The good news:
The comic will be draw by the skilled artist PDE and colored by Brandon Knox.

The bad news:
There will be no Princess Peonie in the comic while Studio Boom is on Hiatus.

The good news:
The comic will explore what happened to Denver’s sister, Alicia.

The bad news:
The comic was written originally to be a donation comic so it is not that funny and not my best work.

The good news:
Studio Boom will be using this time to redo the archive with plenty of cheesecake goodness.

The bad news:
I am not going to end this sequence with a stupid car insurance joke.

The good news:
I am not going to end this sequence with a stupid car insurance joke.

Round One Winner

2008-04-14T04:24:00.000-07:00

With four votes a piece Matter of Honour and Bilanx have one the first round of the writer's contest.

Things you should know

2008-04-10T05:29:00.000-07:00

The comic will be updated around 5pm today.
Studio Boom is feeling better but has a huge backlog now.
This makes Studio Boom feel worse emotionally.
The contest curse is alive and strong.
My ex-landlord is still nuts.

So the next page will be slightly delayed as we get our organization organized again. I apologize for the delay in posting we a working furiously to get everything in order.

In a more worrying development I tried to talk to my ex-landlord to see if we could settle this suit. “What is the bill?” I ask him because I never got a bill just this insane lawsuit. If there are damages to the apartment I am willing to pay all reasonable costs. I just have not gotten a reasonable list of cost just a suit insisting I pay for the installation of vanity cabinets. By the way the main charge in the suit is that I failed to pay the bill. Yes I fail to pay the bill he never sent me. Apparently I am not only cheep. I am a psychic.

“I’ll consider telling you the bill but first you have to drop complaint with the housing commission.” He said. This would be the complain stating that I never got a bill. It is also my only legal defense at this point. I short he might consider settling for some unspecified amount but before he is willing to talk about the possibility of not suing me I have to drop all legal defenses.

The man is insane.

I have no doubt we will be arguing this case before the Supreme Court if he has any say in things. I mean it does say in the declaration if independence that every man has the right to
peruse happiness. And it would make him happy if I paid for the remolding of his apartment. I am clearly infringing his rights.

The problem with all this is I have to hire a lawyer. This is going to cost a fair amount of money not 10,000 but in the thousands. Things are going to be tight. I am looking into getting a loan but if I can’t the money for the contest as well as a number of other comic projects I am working on is in danger.

Exiern pays for it’s self. So no danger there. As does Dark Reflections. Legacy however and a project I have been working on for Zuda do not. They may have to be put on hiatus along with the contest. I will keep you updated.

I am sorry that this had to happen. I hope that I can pay the winner of the contest their well deserved reward. But at this point is seem like my ex-landlord had set up residence in crazy town is unwilling to move.

Looking for a Group is really good.

2008-04-02T14:42:00.000-07:00

It really pains me to say that but it is really good. Why am I so reluctant to give Looking for Group it well deserved due you ask. Well that has to do with the other Blind Ferret comic Least I Could Do. I don’t like LICD. Not because of the art or the gags which are both top notch. It is the main character. Rayne is reprehensible. People like Rayne used to beat me up in high school. Even though he is a fictional character I feel a great deal of loathing towards Rayne.

So I did not want to like Looking for a Group. I did not want to make Rayne happy by liking it (yes I know he doesn’t exist and thus is incapable of feeling joy, sadness or any emotion. It’s my psychosis don’t question it). But the comic is really good. The art is quality stuff but it is the characters and story that really sets it apart. Looking for Group has complex and interesting characters that are currently involved a storyline that is interesting and grand in scope. Looking for Group manages to create a very in-depth world and have that world be dynamic a real. Sure some of it is borrowed from world of warcraft but Looking for a group but a very unique stamp on it

And then there is Richard. Richard is without doubt the Rayne of the Looking for a Group world with two notable differences. One he is not the main character. This makes a lot of difference. Richard is just along for the ride or as he puts it: “I like to kill things”. The second thing is Richard is so over the top, so purely evil, it is just cathartic to watch him go medieval on a field of bunnies. Richard does not even try to be a sympathetic. He really should be thrown into the nearest volcano for the good of mankind. You know it and he knows it. And that is what makes him fun.

Our own Faden is a pale shadow of the pure chaotic evil of Richard. Fine are your happy Rayne? I like your alter-ego Richard. You win again you bastard! (Yes I know. Not real. That just makes his victory even worse.)

I got nothing.

2008-03-27T06:08:00.000-07:00

Studio Boom is sick. The filler artist is not quite done with his work. My backups are incomplete. My cs2 suite cd is scratched. I have 3 huge deadlines at work I have been avoiding. I am, as the kids say, boned.

I got nothing for you guy today. I can't edit the site and if I could I would not have the time.

Hopefully I can get things fixed this weekend. Maybe even Friday but I promise nothing.

By the way, though I can not edit the site to show it the web comic writer contest has started. Go to the forums to vote for your favorite script.

Never again

2008-03-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

Never again with the contests. This was just a bad idea on so many levels. Yes I know I am over 17 day late. I had problems ok. The long and the short of it is I am way to disorganized to run a contest.

Anyway the first round contestants are posted. Voting will start on Wednesday. You will get 2 week to vote for this round of contestants. There will be 3 rounds total all spanning 2 weeks.

You can see the entrants here:

Contest

Man was this ever a bad idea.

Personal Note: I also have to compose a lengthy apology letter to the Zuda folks. I had no idea how complex puting on a contest was.

Drowemos Throws a Tantrum (again)

2008-03-14T08:54:00.001-07:00

If you are familiar with Comic Genesis you know that they have two sections a premier section Keen Spot and a general section Comic Genesis. A year ago the Comic Genesis servers were crashing while the Keen Spot server had just been upgraded for the second time. When I complain a Keen Spoter said “If you don’t like it you can leave”. So I left.

You probably remember my rather public blow up over Zuda when I they brought in professional for the first round of the contest and ignored my emails.

You can probably recall when I when nuts over Scot Kurtz going into his normal demagoguery and claiming that full page episodic comics are inferior to gag a day strips.

In short I have a real problem with class systems when it comes to comics particularly my comic. I think all comic are equal on the web and when people behave to the contrary I act like a mad screaming lunatic. Well welcome to the next installment of Drowemos freaks out when someone sets up a class system.

You may or may not be familiar with Wowio. It is a company that pay content produces for exclusive rights to digital downloads of their works. Not a bad deal all and all. Back in October I got a contract and an invitation to join Wowio. They offered 50 cents per download. Not bad if you consider that most advertisers only offer you 1 cent per click.

At the time I was negotiating with Studio Boom to have the archive redone. I figured once that happened I would definitely sign up. And I place the contract aside.

Well we then hit some problems. The fates seemed to turn against Studio Boom and I was having some drama in my life. The archives did not get done and there was a point where it looked like the comic would not survive at all. During that period on December 27th I got a not “reminding me” that the deadline was in 4 days. After a quick “what the heck are you talking about” note (taking one day) I found out that Wowio was changing their rates and I had 3 days to sign the contract and lock in the current 50 cent rate.

Well I was going on vacation that day. Studio Boom was unreachable. And my lawyer friend was out of the country. In short there was no way I could responsibly sign the contract under those circumstances. And the whole thing seemed fishy anyways.

So a month later I was contacted by Wowio again with the new rate of 25 cents per page. “Ok” I said “And when do I get moved up to the 50 cent per page rate”. “Never” was the response. People who signed before 2008 will always get the 50 cent rate for anything they want to publish and people who sign up after will be stuck at 25 cents per page forever no matter what they do.

…

Let the freak out begin.

It’s not the money. I really don’t care about the money. It is what the money symbolizes. A favored status for early adapters. A permanent favored status. A class system that is rigid and inflexible. I would take a 15 cent rate if I could move up to the higher rate after a period or download level. If there was any way to break through the glass ceiling. But instead I am told to know my place "boy" and not aspire to things I can not have.

I would not care if there was some non-monetary advantage afforded instead of the 50 cent rate. Some sort of status available to the people taking the lower rate. A favored location on the website. A more flexible contract. A basket of cheeses. Something. But the contract is word for word the same except all the 50 have been changed to 25.

Some of the Woiwo elites (early adapters) have told me not to make waves. That 25 cents is better than nothing. And that makes sense that they say that, since downloads of my comic would go to support their comic (the extra commission from the half rate goes somewhere after all). And that’s sort of funny because in the “shut up and stop whining” replies I got from the elites I did not see the word “please” or “thank you”. I did not receive the donation wallpaper or other reward. I saw no acknowledgment that they needed me. That I was providing a service. In a sense that I was superior to them since my comic would be the economic engine of Wowio where they would be draining the coffers with their comic.

Signing the Wowio contract would gain some money but it would be at the price of my honor. I would have to admit that my comic was half as good as the comics of the Wowio elites. I would have to agree to a subordinate status. And I can not do that.

The thing is I know I am in the wrong here, that I am being stubborn and unreasonable. That I am cutting off my nose to spite my face. But you know what. It’s my bloody nose and my bloody face and some times they need to be taught a lesson. But honestly I really feel bad about this. I wish I could swallow my pride and be less of a jerk. It would benefit everyone involved. But it has been my pride that kept this comic alive when it should have died so many times in the past. It is the pride and love that will keep it going. The pride and the love are essential to Exiern. The money is not.

So I am passing up on the money. You will never see Exiern or anything I do on Wowio. And no talk of monetary reward will sway me. I am Achilles sulking in his tent doing harm to all around him over a wounded pride. Wowio is still an ok deal. Provided you are ok with taking an inferior status to the existing comics on Wowio. Provided you are ok admitting your work is half as good as the others.

(Note: There are certain people who have a vested stake in Exiern, people who have been essential to its success, who can change my mind with a simple “just do it”. You guys know who you are and while I love this comic but I love you more.)

Double Update

2008-03-10T21:43:00.000-07:00

This week we are going to have two comics. Partly because I want to get the storyline over with and partly because I fear people will lynch me if I delay the resolution any longer. Today's comic doesn't explain much but I hope that Friday's will clear up any lingering confusion about what is going on.

Next week we will have an awesome filler by Jimmy Brimstone and then the week after will see the return of Princess Peonie. Now people will start asking me what happened to Tiffany. Oh well at least its a different question.

Justin and the Double Doors

2008-03-05T11:29:00.000-08:00

So my first D&D experience was back in middle school. A friend of my who no one really liked but had cool stuff had gotten his hands on one of the forbidden D&D books and on one of those late summer days when doing things outside had gotten old we gathered in his basement, next to the pool table, (told you he had nice stuff) to give it a shot. I had done some war gaming before but this was my first experience with role playing. It was all of our first experience really. We really didn’t know what this whole thing was about but we had rule books and modules and we were determined to figure it out.

After a bit of reading I dutifully sat down to roll up my character. Now here is something you should know about me. Dice don’t like me. This is not an exaggeration they actively plot against me. It is not that roll bad all the time just when it really matter. So after a series of disastrous stats rolls the GM looked at the guide book and said with a sigh. Well I guess you could be a rogue provided you pick a race of Halfling to bump up your dex. And thus my first character was born. He was pathetic and his name was Justin. That’s right my complete inability to name characters was present even at that young age.

Now I don’t know if you have ever gamed with tactical gamers, people obsessed with the numbers and working every angle. But it can get bloody annoying particularly if your character is the one with “special needs” and can’t really take advantage of all the min maxing. You can’t really min max noting. So as our party sat outside a set of double door strategizing for an hour (real time not game time) about how to proceed, I, trough the character of Justin, decided he had had enough of this talk. Justin was no coward, I decided, and I had my Halfling rogue boldly march up and throw open the double doors.

The armies of goblin archers on the other side of the door were singularly unimpressed with Justin’s boldness and proceeded to voice their unimpressed status through arrow voiles. All things being equal it was a pretty good strategy for the party in general. The archers were so distracted by riddling Justin with holes that the rest of the party was able to get the drop on them.

After the adventure the GM gave me two options. I could roll up a new character or I could resurrect my invalid Halfling. In a decision that would affect my gaming fate for a long time to come, I chose to resurrect Justin. To this day I can’t tell you why I choose that path. Stubbornness perhaps, perhaps it was because I really did not like the GM and I wanted to spite him, perhaps I saw a bit of myself in this Halfling that got the short end of the stick, I don’t know. All I know was that in that moment, even though I hated the weakness of the character, I decided I was not going to let Justin die.

So a second adventure and a second set of double door faced Justin. I had learned from my past mistakes and I had Justin listened at the door and open it cautiously. I was positive that there was no one on the other side of these doors. Unfortunately the doors in question were trapped and poisoned. Justin wasn’t killed this time but he was taken out of the action as the poison slowly ate away at his body. Just barely getting back to town for an antidote before the poison did him in. Mean while his compatriots came back from the dungeon with arm loads of plunder. All Justin got was a shoulder that aches whenever it rains.

Third adventure and a third set of double doors. Listen at the door check, look for traps check, cautiously open the door check, get ambush by a vampire in mist form who used his mind control ability to turn Justin against his teammates, check. Granted this was not much of an issue for Justin’s teammates Justin was pretty gimpy after all. But for me this really sucked. Getting offed by a monster is one thing. Getting you head handed to you in a precise and tactical way by your so call allies is no fun.

It was at this point I decided two things. Justin hated the undead and Justin was terrified of double doors. From that point on I played the character accordingly. He never again passed through a set of double door. There was no enticement that would get him to break this vow. He would climb though windows squeeze through drainage pipes and generally endure any hardship to avoid double door. If there was no other method of entrance, Justin was not going in.

And with that Justin became fun to play. He would lose every fight. He was a piss poor thief. But he had personality. Justin is how I learned it was a character’s weakness and quirks not it’s strength and powers that made it interesting. It was the trials they faced both self imposed and external that make a hero. It was through a Justin and D&D that I learned about stories.

I had Justin as a character for 6 years of game play. Yes I played other character, characters of might and valor, but I always gravitated back to my poor inept Halfling. And then the real world interceded on our journey together. People were heading off to college and we all knew that gaming would not be the same.

So on our last adventure Justin faced one last set of double door. The lich king had kidnapped a local princess for a spell to kill the world. We had split up to search for the location of the ritual. Justin could hear the ritual and armies of undead on the other side of these double doors. These double doors were definitely not safe.

The smart thing to do would be to go and retrieve the party, to organize for a final assault on the lich king. But this was our game session and I knew the character of Justin hated the undead. So Justin looked at the double door and said “So it comes down to you and me. Somehow I think we both knew this was how it was going to end…” For a minute I had Justin address the double doors. The one true enemy he had in his life of struggles, his one true and eternal nemesis.

After the speech was done I rolled to have Justin kick open the door. I rolled a 2. I told you dice hate me. The GM had me reroll. This time the dice relented and I rolled a 20. The door shattered and Justin charged the undead army on the other side.

That was the end of Justin. He was a horrible fighter after all. He was a horrible everything really. But he had his victory. He won in the end. He was a hero.

I don’t know if Gygax ever knew how profoundly he affected all of us. If he ever realized the tools he had given us to imagine and learn. But we own him a debt of gratitude. The world would have been a very different place without him. And I would never have met a fascinating little Halfling who hated the undead and was terrified of double doors.

Time is not on my side

2008-03-04T15:14:00.000-08:00

I know I know the contest.

The thing is my day job has just hit me with a ton of work due this week. I don't have time to edit page code right now. I just barely updated the member section. The contest voting will be up as soon as possible. I am sorry for all the people waiting for this.

All I want for Chrismas.

2008-03-03T11:49:00.001-08:00

What does it say about me that I want one of these more than life it's self:

Behold the evil

Anyone going to Katsucon?

2008-02-11T07:27:00.000-08:00

So I am a DC resident and recently I found out that there is an anime comic con going on in the dc area. Katsucon to be specific. No to be perfectly honest I have not read comic book in years and my knowledge of anime is sparing at best. But for some reason this year Katsucon has a ton of notable webomic producers and is have a panel on webcomics at 10 am on Saturday. As you can guess I am very interested in webcomics.

At a price tag of $35 for one day while it is pricey it is still in my price range. So I figure I will go and check it out. So on Feb 16th from 8:30 to afternoonish I will be wandering the floors Omni Shoreham Hotel in DC.

This will be my first convention, ever, so it should be interesting. Or not, I have no idea. But I thought it would be cool to meet up for lunch or something with any Exiern readers who happening to be going. I know a few readers live in the DC area and i am guessing a few might be going to this convention.

I will be listening to the “Writing Unique Heroes & Memorable Villain” lecture at 9:00 am and the Webcomic Panel at 10 am. After that I will play things by ear. At some time during the convention I have to denounce Brad Guiger and all he stands for but other than that my dance ticket is free. I’ll put a big Exiern logo on my red backpack. If you want to do something more formal send me an email (drowemos@yahoo.com) and we can make one of these plan things I have been hearing so much about.

I’ll have some print out of the Exiern members comics as well as printout of the first 18 pages of legacy to give away to people I like. I will also have some copy of upcoming Exiern scripts if you want to talk it over a bit. I am always look for people to bounce ideas off of. Oh and by the way the name I go by in the mortal world is Eric. Just use that don’t try to pronounce my pseudonym.

Brains!

2008-02-06T08:13:00.000-08:00

They come out of the darkness. An unstoppable tide, when one falls 3 more rise to take its place. It is a plague consuming our very planet. I am of course talking about Zombie… comics.

Am I the only one sick of Zombies in comics? I am the only one tired of hearing how “Zombies are big right now”? I am just sick of them. You can’t throw a stick without hitting 3 different Zombie themed comics. They are everywhere. There is no place safe from the throngs of Zombie comics.

It’s not like any of these comics are bad. They are usually very well done. They have engaging stories and really good art. I just want something different. I am sick of these Zombie stories eating up all the talent in the comic world. They just ravenously gobble down the best and the brightest but no matter how many skilled artists and writers are consumed into these storylines they always hunger for more.

I understand the popularity. America is seeing it’s empire crumble in the face of an enemy that is neither noble or potent. Zombies are a perfect analogy for our global problems symbolizing our hubris and the mundane nature of our destroyers. I mean Zombies are not powerful it is only by their sheer number and the stupidity of the people opposing them that they are victorious. They have Iraq written all over them.

Still there are other analogies. Other ways to symbolically tell today’s stories. I had hopes that Cloverfield would move us on to a new symbolic story. It is a shame the movie was so vomit inducing. (I am not using a colorful metaphor for bad I mean it actually induced vomiting in myself and one of my fellow movie goers). But still this is our only hope at this point. That at some point a non-Zombie themed something will sum up the national zeitgeist. That or our collective mood will shift away from a “Oh god what have we done” mood. That less likely because honesty; “Oh god what have we done!”

Until that day I have only one piece of advice. If you know someone who is planning or producing a Zombie themed comic… “SHOOT HIM IN THE HEAD! SHOOT HIM IN THE HEAD!”

It's go time.

2008-02-02T16:02:00.000-08:00

Well in what may be the biggest mistake of my life I have started up a contest for webcomic writers. Writers submit there scripts, we all vote on them and the wining script get a stipend of money to contract an artist with. You can see all the details here:

Webcomic Writer Contest

We will see what happens with this. I just thought it would be fun way to give a writer a hand in creating there comic. But I can't help but worry it is going to lead to bad feeling or worse.

In other news you will see the link for Legacy. My new webcomic. Still fixing up the website but the first 9 pages are up and running. The comic updates on Mondays.

Legacy

Once more into the breach!

2008-01-27T08:01:00.000-08:00

Well the all powerful and all knowing Thom Khatt of http://www.crossworlds.ws has installed the latest version of the phpbbs software with a visual identification system. So the forums are back online. Take that you spambots! You may be able to posts faster than any human but you know nothing of image recognition… or the human emotion of love.

In other news I do podcast.

Just this week I was on the Webcomic Beacon (http://webcomicbeacon.com/) doing a podcast about the brainstorming and development process with a number of other webcomic writers. Check it out here: Webcomic Beacon: Brainstorming 1

I also do a weekly podcast talking about random webcomic topic with a group of comic creators. The projection quality is very poor so be prepared for static and a lot of people saying “what” to one another but it is generally fun an can be informative. Listen here:
CMX 910 Podcast

That’s it now. But come Thursday I will have a big announcement. See ya then.

I am an arrogant ass.

2008-01-02T09:14:00.001-08:00

“So you think you deserve the money” my friend said a she munched on a cucumber from her salad.

“Well… Kinda” I replied. And that’s when it hit me I was being an arrogant ass.

What am I talking about? Well for over 3 months now I have been yelling at the makers of Zuda through their forums about the way they are running the site. I have been a troll of the worst kind. I yell and ridiculed them for every mistake and trust me they did give me a lot of material to work with. In short I hated them.

“Why do they upset you so?” My friend had asked earlier between bites of her fish at the local diner.

“Why? Well because they're dumb!”

The real reason is because they were ignoring me. The Zuda system and instructions had some bugs when it first started out. Technically it still has some bugs but I digress. When I submitted my comic to Zuda the bugs caused me to mess up my submission. The text submitted was just wrong. I send them an email asking to change the text, I posted on the forums, I did everything I could to try and get in contact with them. No response.

Then they started selecting comics. Comics that were not mine. And my anger boiled over. They were treating me like some kid. They should have let me fixed my submission and then selected my comic. Don’t they know who I am! I have a semi successful webcomic. Sure, sure DC is big in the print world but this is the internet, this is my sandbox, how dare these punks come into my house and disrespect me. Zuda is offering webcomics a lot of money and that money should be mine. My comic is the best after all.

“So you think you deserve the money” my friend said a she munched on a cucumber from her salad.

And then it hit me. I am being an arrogant ass. That is the only way to describe it. I don’t know when it happened but the success of Exiern went to my head. Which is weird, considering how little I do in making the comic now a days. Zuda has done nothing wrong except treat me like everyone else. I was upset because they did not fall at my feat and worship me as an earth bound god.

It funny how wrapped up in our selves we can become. I am always grateful for my friends who care more about their salads than my feelings. Sometimes you need someone to just smack you. Although I wish she had smacked me sooner. I have been making a fool of my self for the last 3 months.

I doubt the Zuda staff reads this blog but if they happen to stumble upon it I offer my sincerest apologies. Their job is hard enough without me pestering them.

Booty of Booties

2007-12-29T20:26:00.000-08:00

Well a whole lot is going on in the new year here.

To start off with we’ve got a new page of Exiern: Dark Reflections. In which we get to see some barbarian booty. Woot!

Speaking of barbarian booty we get to see a lot more of that in an R-rated 3 page donation comic written and cosponsored by Thom Khatt of Crossworlds fame. It’s available for all members to download. Sadly because of PayPal nebulous content restrictions I can not make the comic available to non-members.

But non-members are in luck because we’ve got a new wallpaper by the talented artist Luciole Loong. A donation of greater than or equal to one dollar or asking nicely will win you that prize.

And that’s not all. I’ve got a 3rd comic premiering some time in February. More about that as the time approaches.

I would also like to thank you guys for all your support. With you the readers I know none of this would have ever been possible

Mad Drowemos’ House of Discounts

2007-11-27T08:14:00.001-08:00

So after some consideration I have drop the price of membership to 9.50 initially and 4.50 per month. The logic was when you first join you get access to over 12 wallpapers and two (soon to be three) donation comics. After the first month all you get is one wallpaper a month and larger version of the comic so you get a discount for loyalty.

$4.50 is also my break even point with the current membership levels. If I get no increases in membership I will still just be able to just pay for the comic. I will be very nervous and Studio Boom will be unhappy about the pay cut but Exiern won’t collapse into financial ruin.

So I will try this out for a month or two. If I am able to maintain or surpass the same revenue levels I have now I’ll keep the new rate. Otherwise I will go back to the old membership level. Of course people who buy membership at this rate will lock it in as long as they are a member.

Which brings me to my final point; existing members will still pay the $10. There was no way to lower a price through the CCBill system as far as I can find. So if you are an existing member I would suggest canceling your membership and locking in the new one. I wish there was some way to change it automatically but I can’t. Drop me an email if you have any problems with this.

Two additions for members:

1) To cancel your membership go to http://www.ccbill.com and click on the cancel subscription button in the middle of the page. Your current subscription should run out it's month and then you can grab the new rate.

2) To get a refund or any other issues email me at Drowemos@yahoo.com

How did we get here (part 2)

2007-11-26T08:24:00.000-08:00

Last post I talk about the money needs of Exiern, now I am going to talk about why there is a member’s area. You see personally I don’t like member’s areas. They smack of elitism and an implied connection between money and value. A reader that gives money is no more valuable than a reader doesn’t give, in my opinion. I still think it is pretty amazing that people bother to stop by.

So why do I have a members area if I have a certain amount of antipathy towards them. For that we need to talk about a little history:

As you know Exiern was originally draw by myself. After going on a break I got Studio Boom to replace me as the art for the comic and vastly improved the art. After the hiatus I put it to the readers we could go back to my art or if I received enough donations we could keep on Studio Boom indefinitely.

Well the threat worked sort of. The first month Exeirn did not receive enough to fully pay Studio Boom but it was close enough. Each month the donations got a little better. I tried to reward the donators with a wallpaper or a commissioned comic as a small thank you for their support.

Then I released the R-rated “Cheating Death” comic. And profits shot through the rough. I made $400 that month when in the previous month I only made about $190. Wow I though. People really like these mini comics. So I commission a second one “Moral Dilemma”. That one was a tremendous flop. The difference? No nudity in “Moral Dilemma”. It seems people on the internet liked pictures of naked women. Who knew?

Well after that I released the R-rated transformation comic. That was the most successful month the comic ever had. $1800 in paypal donations were received. It was enough to recoup my loses and start work on a second comic “Legacy” that will be going live soon.

However the popularity of that comic was both a blessing and a curse. You see one of my readers warned me that paypal had changed their rules and it was now illegal to use paypal to pay for adult digital material. If there was a physical item being transferred that was ok but if the product was purely digital PayPal would revoke your account.

Well that left me with a dilemma. The R-rated material was paying for the site but at the same time there was a very real risk that the R-rated material could shut me down. I send a inquire to PayPal about this issue but was never able to get a straight answer from them. I still find odd that you can buy the most perverted sex toys with PayPal but you can purchase nude pictures.

Rather than getting my PayPal account revoked I looked around for a different payment method. Google along with a number of other gateways has the same restrictions as PayPal. The only payment method I found that would allow the transfer of “adult digital matieral” was the company CCBill.

CCBill had some problems. First the processing fee they charged was very high, appr. 20% of all transfers. And the second problem is they only allowed a membership system for payment. You could not get an account with them unless you have a member’s area of your website. The gateway was really set up for adult websites not exactly what I was doing but lacking an in-between choice I set up an account with them.

So far the economics has worked out. Donations for the tame wallpapers bring in about $150 per month were the membership system even with the fees brings in about $650 per month. But still I don’t like having a member’s area but it is a necessity if I want to have R-rated material, which for the time being is a necessity in its own right.

When I asked for advice on how to improve the member’s area one piece of advice I got frequently was to have a members only comic, an on-going story that only the members could see. I will just not do that, it goes against my every belive in what a webcomic should be. I appreciate all the support the member give me in making this comic but that is what they are doing supporting the main comic. I try to give the members as many extras as possible but as full blown stories go I could not stand locking them away in a member’s area.

As suggested the members area could be more accurately named “The people helping to pay for the main comic” area, but where is the poetry in that. The member’s area is a way to keep Studio Boom on as the artist and ultimately get more comic created per month. You will never truly get your money’s worth in a member’s area. Membership can be thought of more along the PBS model. You get a totebag for your membership but the real value is the program continues to operate.

I mean it’s an awfully nice webcomic you got here. It would be a shame if something happened to it. I’m just saying in the webcomic industry, hiatuses happen all the time. One second a comic is going along minding its own business, and then BOOM 3 months of crappy filler art. It would be an awful shame if that were to happen to Exiern here. Perhaps you should buy a membership. You know for "protection".

On a side note did you ever notice how pbs and organizes crime use the same funding model.

In short we have a members area because PayPal won’t let me sell R-rated material and I need to sell R-rated material to pay the bills. Perhaps one day the comic will have a readership high enough to do without the need of a members area but for the time be.

How did we get here (part 1)

2007-11-24T19:00:00.001-08:00

Well there have some questions about how the money given to Exiern works. So I thought I would go through it in excruciation detail.

The facts:

Half of all money collected contractually goes to Studio Boom. So the website takes in $600 I am only able to spend $300 of it.

What do I do with the money I collect? Well it takes $135 per month to run this comic. That is the cost of hosting plus commissioning Studio Boom to do 4-5 comics a month. Studio boom gets an up front price of $25 per comic on top of half of the donations.

All money over $135 is reinvested into the comic in some way. For example this month I commissioned two works a wallpaper to be posted soon and 4 page members reward comic for a grand total of $200. In addition I am starting a new comic Exiern Dark Reflections. The first page of that comic has cost $75 and I will be spending another $70 before the month is out. On the administrative side of things, I had to incorporate Exiern this month for tax reason and that cost $100. By the way this April 15 is going to suck for me this year.

Last month I collected $753. It was a very good month. Those of you with lighting math skills can figured out I earned 376.50 and spent 480 for a grand total of -103.50. This has been the standard way of things for Exiern since I started commissioning Studio Boom. I always spend more on the comic that I take in. The more I get in donations the more I can commission and produce. I don’t want to make money from this website. I just want to make comics.

What I want to do with collected donations:

Well first on the priority list is redoing past comics. I have set the goal to have the archive completely redone by the end of January. It won’t be the full archive but only a few select comics to connect the beginning to the ending. At long last I will stop getting letter “complementing me” on how I got ride of that lousy first artist who was a total hack and drew like a retarded 3rd grader. What these people who send me these letters don’t realize is that the original artist was also ugly and a poopyhead.

After that Exiern will move to a twice a week schedule. And hopefully to a 3 times a week schedule after that. This is of course dependent on paying a competitive wage to Studio Boom and that is depend on the amount of money the website takes in.

Tomorrow I’ll post about why Exiern has a members area at all.

Show me the money

2007-11-22T04:39:00.000-08:00

Well a little while back I ask for suggestions on how to improve the members area. One of the suggestions was that the $10 price tag might be too high. So I ask you guy should I change the membership rate? I have posted a poll on the message board where you can let me know your opinion.

Membership cost poll

Talk to me!

2007-11-17T19:52:00.000-08:00

Well I have signed up Mato as administrator and general membership wrangler. One of his first suggestions was fix up the message board. So I did.

If you click on the Forum link at the top of the page you will be taken a larger message board. If you would like anything added to the message board let us know. The sky is the limit.

New Forum

Battlefield Babysitter

2007-11-14T20:31:00.001-08:00

On October 30^th DC comic launched there new online comic venture Zuda. The basic idea is to have an American idol type contest where the winner gets a contract with DC. There first crop of entries were pretty drab. High concept low content sort of things, with the notable exception of one comic; Battlefield Babysitter by American Ninja X.

It is a quirky comic about a world full of superheroes and a young girl that lives in that world. If you saw the Incredibles then you know the vibe AMX manages to capture with his comic. In short it is very good.

I want to see more of this comic. The only way that will happen is if it wins the contest. So I am asking you all for a favor here. If you could go over and vote for Battlefield Babysitter I would be grateful. Here’s the link:

http://zudacomics.com/battlefield_babysitter

PS: I have a comic of my own in the Zuda queue so consider this a trial run for when it really matter in a month or two.

I need help with member area.

2007-11-08T09:02:00.001-08:00

To be perfectly honest I don’t pay much attention to the members area. Even though membership is what is paying for the comic I usually just dump the larger uncensored page up there along with any donation rewards. The member’s areas is more of a repository than website. I think, because of this, I have been loosing members this month at an alarming rate. I need to make the member’s area a place people want to stay and visit.

But frankly I don’t have the time to organize and monitor the member’s area. I need someone with ideas and time to keep an eye on them. I need an admin for the member’s area. No coding skill is required just insight into what would draw people in and keep them engaged.

What do you get? Well a free membership and listing as part of the Exiern staff. If you are interested drop me a line and include some of your ideas.

Email to Drowemos@yahoo.com

I am not a marketing genus

2007-10-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

So here’s what I was planning to do. Put up a few ad For Exiern: Dark Reflections with no explanation. Let the buzz build and then in mid November reveal what is going on. It is an effective marketing technique. It’s also incredibly annoying.

I am not the waiting type of guy. 12:01 on Christmas I am in front of the tree a whirlwind of torn wrapping paper. I have never made it through that stupid Knock Knock-Banana joke. Third banana and the teller is lying unconscious on the floor. I hate to wait

So the marketing campaign I had so skillfully planed for Dark Reflections was driving me nuts. I don’t know about you guys but I was bugging the heck out of myself.

So now I shall proceed to spill the bean. Exiern: Dark Reflections is a new spin off comic that is going to start running in November. It will be drawn by a different artist and have a slightly darker tone to it. Violence and nudity while not the point of the comic will be part of the comic and will be uncensored.

Unlike Exiern there will be no member’s area to EDR everybody will get the same comic. However I still need to pay the artist somehow. So we will be using a pay as you go model on the comic. A donation level will be set (we are not quite sure what that level will be yet) and once we reach that goal the next page will be drawn and not before. Then the counter will be reset for the next page.

Exiern: Dark Reflections started off as a donation comic. Through conversation with the artist the story grew to a point where it was oblivious that it deserved its own comic. The basic premise is a simple question “What if Faden had been able to control Typhan-Knee’s mind”

So now the marketing campaign is ruined. Try to act surprised when the next three ad appear.

That’s all for now…

You know I really have to come up with a clever way to end these posts.

Peonie handles a magic staff.

2007-10-06T19:01:00.000-07:00

Got my first commission back from http://david-grier.deviantart.com/ an awesome wallpaper of Peonie with a magic staff. As always you can get a copy of the wallpaper for a donation to the comic and members get access to all the wallpapers and bonus comics with their membership. In addition if I receive over $300 in donations by November 15^th I will commission a second wallpaper and send it out to all donor for free.

Now you may have noticed that I haven't been updating the donation bar. There are two reasons for that. The first memberships have been receiving the lion share of the money with the donations being pretty puny each month. The second reason is that I realized that the goals on the donation bar were basically a fantasy.

Studio Boom can produce one comic per week currently. That’s it. No matter how much money we throw at them they can’t currently do more. Well technical I suppose there would be some amount of money but it is much more than this little internet comic can manage. So promising a extra comic at certain price points was wishful thinking at best and at worst a lie

But I can always find an artist to do and extra wallpaper or side comic. So instead of promising extra comic now I’ll be promising extra extras. If things work our we will be getting some cool wallpaper and a “What If” comic that examines what would have happened if Faden managed to control Tiffany’ mind.

Well that’s all for now….

You know I really should come up with a clever saying to end these post with.

Two Announcements

2007-09-27T06:39:00.000-07:00

1) I am don't know what happened to todays comic. Everything was ruining fine but then I did not recieve the final image this morning. It will be posted as soon as I get it from SB

2) I am going to be on a podcast tonight at 8 pm EST. You can call in and ask question about webcomics. The show is hosted by the creator of Sailor Sun and will feature a number of people who work on webcomics. Click here to participate:

http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=31253&cmd=tc

You do know the internet is free, right?

2007-09-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

I come here not to praise crap but to burry it. (because, honestly, that’s just a sanitary practice)

Lately I have lately I have been thinking about bad web comics. Or more accurately about the term “bad web comic”. It’s something that is thrown around quite a bit. “Such and such is a bad web comic.” I have even thought such word in my darker moments. “How can X be beating me in the ratings it’s a bad web comic?”

The term seems to come from a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet. It’s not like it cost anything to look at a web comic good or bad. It’s not like it takes up any space that would have otherwise been filled with web comic grandeur. All the costs are covered by the creators and as for space the internet is effectively infinite, expanding to meet the content. I suppose one day we could run out of silicon(the most abundant element on the planet earth) but that is a long way off.

I guess the obvious question to the “Bad Web Comic” complaint is “So?” Why do people even tell us a web comic is bad? There is lots of bad stuff on the web. You can find a document on the proper crop rotation method on the web. (ftp://ftp-fc.sc.egov.usda.gov/NHQ/practice-standards/standards/328.pdf). It’s a very boring document. And the art is awful (non-existent actually but you get the point). I got absolutely no entertainment out of it at all. But you don’t see me go on long tirades about how the USDA’s guide to proper crop rotations is a “bad web comic”. (Even though it is, probably the worst web comic I have ever read)

The thing is that when someone says that such and such is a bad web comic they are leaving out a word. What they are really complaining about is that such and such is a bad POPULAR web comic. You see the problem is not the comic the problem is you people. You people out there like a web comic that happens to be bad. You people must be protected from your own poor judgment. The hundreds of thousands of you must be shown how your taste in web comics is wrong and most likely evil. The self proclaimed editor of the internet is right and the rest of you are wrong. Face it you people have awful tastes and must be protected from yourself.

I suppose there is nothing wrong with believing that oneself is more intelligent that the rest of humanity and everyone else should like what you like (provided you don’t have access to some sort of doomsday device or an army of zombie robots). But, the practice of calling web comic bad bothers me. Exiern started out as a bad web comic in a true sense of the words. I might still be bad today. But it is improving and will improve thanks to the fact that I have the internet to post it on.

The internet is a great place to try out ideas and play. It is the openness that makes the internet great and railing against a bad web comic undermines this basic power. Exiern started out on the Wotch web forms (http://community.thewotch.com). The Wotch forms are a veritable love fest compared to the rest of internet. Even though the story was rough and the art awful I got encouragement and support. With out that support I would have quit long ago.

Now Exiern is not popular enough to actually be called a bad web comic. If that day ever comes I will take offence not because the person will be calling the comic bad but because that person will be insulting you the readers. You guy are awesome because you allow me to do something very cool. You let me take my “bad web comic” and slowly make it better.

Thoughts from the Darkside.

2007-09-13T10:09:00.000-07:00

So as you all know today’s comic is brought to you by the letter “P”-orn. This comic runs on the donations of the readers and the main source of that income from the comic is the R-rated members section. Yes there are other things in the member section but no one seems to care about them much. And yes I do get some Paypal donation for the odd wallpapers. But it is the Topless Tiffany picks that drives the cash.

Here is the thing about that, I am not 100% comfortable with this source of income. Don’t get me wrong I like naked women as much as the next guy, actually I like them a lot more than most next guys, but just because you like something doesn’t mean it’s ok. While I am an avid consumer of images of scantily clad women it I don’t like producing them.

So what exactly is my problem? Well I don’t like the way our society objectifies women. It will come to no surprise that I have spent some time thinking about what it would be like to live as a woman. I sort of have to do that to write this comic. And when I am in that mode I get a sort of queasy feeling about the rampant objectification in our society. (And pretty much all society since the dawn of time)

You men out there just for a moment consider if every image you saw on TV, movies, magazines, etc. portrayed the main source of your value as your physical attractiveness. What if every image of a “typical” man was an over muscles over endowed 18 year old with a vacuous look in his eyes and spread out in some hyper sexual pose. In fact do a google search for some gay porn and imagine those types of images everywhere. Imagine them on the cover of every comic, every movie poster, every magazine from science journals to political reviews, everything.

This is the world most women live in. And it really make me a little sick to think about that. Worst of all, I am helping to create that type of world by peddling cheesecake. I don’t think any one of the images in Exiern is bad nor are any one magazine cover nor any one comic book image. But the over all gestalt, the sheer volume of these images when taken all together form a single message: “women are just bodies”. It is not that a cheesecake image is anywhere it is that they are everywhere.

But now we come to my problem. I love this comic. I love that every week I get to share a joke with the world. I love that you guys are here walking side by side with me through the story. I love working with Studio Boom and getting a comic of this quality. And I simply can’t do that without the money from the cheesecake images. The numbers just don’t work. Sex sells, where stories merely entertain.

Alfred Nobel made his fortune from dynamite and while he regretted the effect his invention had on the world. But he did not stop selling dynamite. Like wise I regret playing a part in a world that marginalizes women but I am not going to stop making my comic because of it. You can’t give up your love that easily. Perhaps if I make enough money one day I will invest it in a comic of unsexy competent women in a positive light just as Nobel invested his money in his prize. This comic will be well written engaging and make absolutely no money. But at least then I will be able to rest knowing that I have balanced out my impact on the world.

There is no God!

2007-08-13T14:22:00.000-07:00

I have proved the nonexistence of God!

Given:

God is Light
Sunshine is Light
Sunshine is Delicious
Chocolate is Delicious
Chocolate is Sexy
Power is Sexy
Money is Power
Time is Money
Time is an Illusion

We can write this equation:

God = Light = Sunshine = Delicious = Chocolate = Sexy = Power = Money = Time = an Illusion

That we can thus reduce to:

God = an Illusion

God is an Illusion.

There you go, Irrefutable proof that there is no God.

What is the point of all this? Just I have had a trying month that left my sanity a little unhinged. I will post something comic related once I located all my marbles.

I’m a marketing genus?

2007-07-12T11:48:00.000-07:00

So I have come to a realization. Accolades and effort are inversely proportionally. For the non-high school algebra teacher among us that mean as the amount of effort you put into a project increases then amount of positive comments about that project decreases and vice versa.

What has led to this realization? Well the uncensored transformation comic. In a blog post (http://rocr.xepher.net/weblog/archives/002086.html) Reinder Dijkhuis (the author of http://www.rocr.net/) proclaims my business acumen for raising $1800 last month. This sort of impresses me as sort of like complementing the janitor at the Louvre for all the beautiful painting he has.

I really did nothing. The idea and money for redoing the earlier comic came strait from Eri (check the forum if you don’t know who that is). The art was Studio boom. Even the instruction for the transformation were lifted from Coyote Dance’s grand transformation scene (http://cdance.comicgenesis.com/d/20070325.html). As for the money, well that was all you guys.

To be honest what happened last month was one of those strange confluences of events. A freak accident of sorts and I suspect that I may be a one hit wonder. The transformation scene hit a number of nerves that will not be easily duplicated.

Now for the things I put effort into, improving my story tell and improving my personal art. That has gotten an overwhelming, meh. Just goes to show you. Stop trying and you will be complemented for things that you had nothing to do with.

PS: In Reinder Dijkhuis’ blog about this comic he states this comic is under the radar of the blogs. This amuses me to no end.

Whew…

2007-07-03T09:39:00.000-07:00

Well a lot has happened this month. Let’s start out with the matter of money. For the month of June the uncensored transformation brought $1804. Now by contract most of that cash goes to Studio Boom and rightly so I must say. But even so I am set for nearly half a year as far as paying for the comic. Thanks so much for your support.

So if the transformation scene brought in so much money why did I take it down? Well because it might be a violation of Paypals rules. Paypal does not allow the transmission of digital adult material. Now what that means is a little unclear but I don’t want to risk my paypal account on the possibility that the transformation scene is in violation.

But as the Chinese say an obstacle is … well I don’t know what the Chinese say about obstacles but it’s probably very wise. And this obstacle has let to a new idea. You will notice that a member area using the CCBill payment system. CCBill has no restriction on digital materials so the member area will become the main repository for all things nudie.

The member’s area is ad free with larger comic pages. It also has all the donation rewards for free download including the R-rated ones. There are other goodies such as a member forum and a preview of upcoming scripts. Members will get to comment on and even change the story before the comics are made. It should be a lot of fun.

Lastly I would like to put out a call for artists. Now that I am flushed with cash, there are some donation comic I would like to make as well as a long term web comic project similar to Exiern I would like to start up. Drop me a line if you are interested in a job.

Barbarians Gone Wild

2007-06-18T17:32:00.001-07:00

Ok so you are saying you LIKE pictures of naked women. People on the internet are interested in pictures of naked women? Who knew?

Well the last two week has been wild. First I had to migrate the site to a new server. Then when the uncensored transformation the donations went through the roof. I am now official caught up with my email and I have sent out all the rewards (note this mean if you did not get yours get in contact with me).

Now we are into the mach speed portion of this comic. Studio Boom will be killing him self to get 2 comic out per week for then next 4 week as a thank you for all your donations. Lets have a big round of applause for his diligent work.

Once things calm down and Studio Boom has had a little break, we will start thinking about the next donation comic. It goes with out saying that it will be and R-rated comic. I have some ideas of what I would like to do but I would love to hear your ideas.

Artist Found

2007-06-15T10:42:00.000-07:00

Just goes to show you whenever you loss something check the underneath the cushions of your couch.

Studio Boom has returned after a short illness and is promising that we will get two comic next week and he will try to continue the increased update schedule for the next four weeks. This news is so great that I will even forgive the lack of albinos in his story.

I want to extend a big thank you to every one who donated. Because of you we can move this story along much faster. We are getting to some interesting stuff in a couple of months if we keep up this pace. Thanks for your support.

I am working on the special reward as we speak. It is going to be a animation of the transformations scene. The morph is turning out to be trickery than I expected but it should be done in a week or two.

In other news I got linked! You see all you have to do is whine like a baby to get what you want. Granted it’s not from the place I was whining about but form Sins. But still that is pretty darn cool. I got noticed by a bigwig!

Happy days.

2007-06-11T14:19:00.000-07:00

The time for sadness is over. It is time to laugh again! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!

Ha...

Ha..

ahem

...

First off, I would like to say thanks for all the kind words. You guys are supper sweet. But honestly I was just whining. Don't take me too seriously. I know it was not personal and the Wotch has a lot going on right now. It just felt personal and I felt like acting like a baby for a bit.

So, a lot is going on around here. Let's start off with the fun stuff you can see in the archive. Tiffany’s transformation has been redraw rather beautifully by Studio Boom. Links here:

http://www.exiern.com/Archive/5.htm
http://www.exiern.com/Archive/6.htm
http://www.exiern.com/Archive/7.htm

Now the transformation in the archive is PG-13. However for a small donation you can get the R rated version. If we meet our $500 goal this month and animated version will be sent out to all donor as well.

Some of you may have also noticed a change in the donation bar. As of this month we get an extra comic every time we hit $150 in donations. We don’t have to wait till $500 (a goal we have missed by just a few dollars each month).

The final piece of news is our big move. Some of you may have noticed that the site has been crashing a lot. This site has been hosted wit h Comic Genesis for a while. Comic Geneiss has been having some serious problems. After hearing “we are working on the problem” for the tenth time I knew it was time to go.

We are getting a brand new snazzy site. Complete with sub domains and all the bells and whistles you can wish for. The first thing I am doing is creating a members area. The second thing I am doing is try to figure out what to put in a members area. Seriously if you guys have any ideas what to do with a big old hosted site let me know. I have 500 gigs of disk space and 5 terabits of bandwidth burning a hole in my pocket.