Tom

Lost Ideas

Brand New Year

All the World’s a Stage

I’ve been experimenting with puns and watercolors…

A Sketch for Autumn

Outside My Window

You can order a print of this comic (and most any other Incidental Comic) - visit my shop for details. 

"Where do you get your ideas?"

Whenever I’m asked this question, I usually answer something evasive or non-committal. Not today. Today I will reveal my most valuable creative resource, the hidden place from which all ideas originate: the sketchbook.

Keeping is a sketchbook is simple and routine. It’s a collection of thoughts, images, and observations inked on smooth white paper. It’s a portable catalog of past ideas. By revisiting these ideas later, they can be expanded upon, revised, reinterpreted, or ignored entirely. 

This is how my comics look in their most basic, elemental form - the sketchbook page:

The text is barely legible. The drawings are often incomprehensible to anyone but myself. The rhymes are way too obvious (though this probably won’t change before the final published comic).

When I jot ideas in my sketchbook, what’s important is speed. I want to put an idea on paper before I have time to second guess it. Layout, proportions, drawing above a third-grade level - there will be many more hours to address these problems. 

Often my sketchbook comics have an immediacy that appeals to me more than my polished, finished work. Here’s a sketch that I adapted for a published comic. Despite the vast differences in appearance between this page and my digitally colored work, I think it stands okay on its own:

There are many artists I admire (Roz Chast, Quentin Blake, Jean-Jacques Sempé, etc.) whose work has the looseness and energy of an initial sketch. When I grow up, I want to be one of these artists. Until then, I’ll keep striving for it in my sketchbooks.

Life drawing is another important (though often more challenging) aspect of sketchbook keeping. It sounds easy - walk around looking at things. Draw what you find interesting. But I get hung up by cold weather that stiffens my fingers. I get nervous drawing in public. Inevitably, someone will peek over my shoulder at a half-rendered drawing of a building and ask, “Are you an architecture student?” And I love sketching in art museums, but this attracts much attention from ink-prohibiting museum staff.

Despite these challenges, getting outside and drawing can be relaxing, inspiring, and meditative. Here are some pages of life drawing from my sketchbook that inspired my comic "My Favorite Things."

I’ve compiled them here, but these images were taken from two to three years of sketchbooks, on trips (Chicago and Santa Fe) and at home (Denver and Wichita). You don’t have to live in an exotic location or take a foreign vacation to fill a sketchbook. The place where I live is flat, empty, and boring at first glance, but it’s a great place to get some thinking done.

Visually interesting things are everywhere - even in the American Midwest. For instance, buildings:

People:

And birds:

No matter the demands of the project I’m currently working on, I’ve found it’s necessary not to neglect my sketchbook. It’s the place where I plant the seeds of future work.

So get out into the world, fix your eyes to the small details, and put your pen to the paper. I hope you’ll find the process of sketchbook-keeping as creatively essential as I have.

One final piece of advice: Beware of Geese.

Happy New Year!

xo
Yasmine

You can now get my book and some other things through my shop!

http://ryanandrews.storenvy.com/

I’ve also got a high res PDF of all of my comics for $5 up on Gumroad

The Black Earth. (photoshop)

There are many stories about Dhio, nearly every one of them is false.

And O Human Star returns today with a new flashback! Al’s scraping the bare minimum of cocktail attire here.

Thank you very much for your patience as I took a week off from updates. I was able to make progress on some very big projects that I plan to talk more about soon.

And for new followers, check out my Patreon, where I post exclusive drawings and sketchbooks every month. I have decided that if I hit at least $400 in pledges this month, I will donate all of it to The Bridge for Youth, a non-profit that provides emergency services and housing to Twin Cities teens with special programs for LGBTQ kids. They’re in the neighborhood and I’ve seen the good that they do.

Today marks five years since I launched the website that my mom still refers to as 'the other bedbugs'. Happy business birthday to me!

Any site that aspires to be an archive starts life with a credibility problem. The Internet is strewn with the corpses (or in some cases, zombies) of sites that once promised to save your links forever. As people keep discovering, building a bookmarking site is easy, but making a business of bookmarking is hard. Like one of those leathery, spiny plants that is able to thrive in the desert where everything else dies, I have tried to find ways to adapt to this hostile business environment. And I have feasted on the flesh of my rivals!

I raise this brimming skull to the awesome group of users and fellow-travelers who have made it possible.

It's my tradition to post updated statistics about the site:

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
bookmarks	3.5 M	27 M	53 M	76 M	97 M
tags	11 M	76 M	135 M	178 M	212 M
active users	2.8 K	16 K	23 K	23 K	24 K
bytes archived	200 G	3.0 T	5.9 T	8.8 T	14.2 T
downtime	6 h	29 h	22 h	12 h*	some?
unique URLs	2.5 M	16 M	32 M	48 M	63 M

The biggest surprise (to me) is how predictable Pinboard has been over the past three years. Users come and go, like on every site, but the number of active users stays roughly the same. And the site makes roughly the same amount of money (around $200K) every year.

If you've ever run a small website, you'll recognize how weird this is. Typically everything in a small project—traffic, user count, revenue—is spiky. You spend a long time treading water and then big events happen that dominate everything else. This was true for the first two years I ran the site, but since then, things have settled down remarkably.

I regret that I totally forgot to keep downtime stats this year. There wasn't a lot of it, but I should probably track it better so I can brag about it next year, unless it goes up, in which case I will never mention it again.

Now back to some beard-stroking:

I see my role much like a small-town praire banker in the 1880's. My job is to project an aura of calm, solvency, and permanence in an industry where none of those adjectives applies. People are justifiably risk-averse when it comes to their bookmarks, and they are looking for stability. This means several things at once:

On the most basic level, the site just has to work.

On the design level, it means not futzing with stuff unnecessarily, except for bug fixes and basic improvements. Luckily there is so much work to do on Pinboard that I am immune to the temptations of a redesign. If there is a feature (or bug) you love in 2014, chances are excellent it will still be there, like a cherished friend, years from now when your trembling and aged hands go to make that final click.

Finally, there is stability on the business level. This means persuading people (including myself) that I am going to stick around, and then actually earning enough money to do that.

The money part turns out to be easy. People will pay for a decent service. As long as you stay small and don't forget to have revenue, you too can build a bookmarking website. There is plenty of room to specialize!

My strategy of pre-emptively antagonizing anyone who might possibly have an interest in acquiring or funding the site has worked wonderfully. In five years, I haven't received a single email from an investor or potential acquirer. The closest I came was a few months ago, when the new Delicious owners reached out to me about providing "vision", but I think they were just unfamiliar with my oeuvre. They learned quickly.

So the biggest risk in a project like this remains burnout.

Avoiding burnout is difficult to write about, because the basic premise is obnoxious. Burnout is a rich man's game. Rice farmers don't get burned out and spend long afternoons thinking about whether to switch to sorghum. Most people don't have the luxury of thinking about their lives in those terms. But at the rarefied socioeconomic heights of computerland, it's true that if you run a popular project by yourself for a long time, there's a high risk that it will wear you out.

It's not the fact of working on just one project that's the problem. This dude, for example, has spent much of his life building a Boeing 777 out of manila folders. Another guy (always dudes!) is slowly excavating his basement with toy trucks.

What burns you out is the constant strain of being responsible for a lot of other people's stuff.

The good news is, as you get older, you gain perspective. Perspective helps alleviate burnout.

The bad news is, you gain perspective by having incredibly shitty things happen to you and the people you love. Nature has made it so that perspective is only delivered in bulk quantities. A railcar of perspective arrives and dumps itself on your lawn when all you needed was a microgram. This is a grossly inefficient aspect of the human condition, but I'm sure bright minds in Silicon Valley are working on a fix.

Perspective does not make you immune to burnout. It just makes burnout less scary. I've gone through a few episodes since starting Pinboard, and I'm sure there will be more to come. People have been very understanding about my occasional need to flee the Internet. I find that the longer I run the site, the more resistant I become to the idea of ever giving it up, even if I need to take the occasional break. It is pleasant to work on something that people draw benefit from. It is especially pleasant to work on something lasting. And I enjoy the looking-glass aspect of our industry, where running a mildly profitable small business makes me a crazy maverick not afraid to break all the rules.

Most of all, I'm gratified that people have been patient and considerate over the whole lifetime of the project. There has been a lot of goodwill sent my way that makes my job vastly easier. Thank you to all the people who have used the site over the years, and the many people who have helped me build it and keep it running. To my competitors: I will crush you! To everyone else: you're wonderful! Upgrade!

Now you know what Girlbot’s eyes are made of: swirlies and cookies.

I’m gonna be at Springcon this weekend! Come say hi if you’re in the neighborhood! I’ll just be chilling and drawing.

The first in a series of videos where I talk about my comic chapter by chapter!

splashmaster can draw the nightmare knight better than i can

panpipe’s gonna be pretty riled up when nightmare_child_35 gives up fanfiction to do her own thing

yeah i went there

or MUCHA Do About Nothing, to keep a pun title in here somewhere

Hello!

Today is March 13th, which means it's exactly seven years since I put the first page of Dead Winter online. It's been a long time and I've grown and learned a lot between then and now, and I'm thankful for the opportunity to have been working on this comic for as long as I have. I haven't been updating as often as I used to, or as often as I like, but I have a super-cool update I want to share: we're making a videogame.

Dead Winter has always been a kinetic story. My favorite parts to draw are the ones where things move and things happen, so it's the logical conclusion that we would eventually turn the comic into a videogame where that exact thing happens all the time. We're a two-person team: I, Allison Shabet, am working on the art, animation and overall concept and balance; and my good friend and professional robot jockey Jason Klug will be programming it and designing the sound effects, and the both of us together are going to work on the soundtrack. That's our production team, hello!

A Dead Winter game is going to be exactly the kind of game you'd imagine it to be- a side-scrolling brawler in the style of the old Simpsons, Ninja Turtles, Sunsetriders and X-Men arcade games (or Castle Crashers and Scott Pilgrim for more modern examples) with hidden things and boss fights and all the brawly staples. It'll support four-player network play, every character has their own unique strengths and abilities and the most unique part about it is the level content will be randomly-generated so every mission is different from the last one! When I was young two of my favorite games were the original Toejam & Earl and a little Lucasarts game called Yoda Stories- both games used procedural generation to make replay fun and interesting and it'd be something you could play over a lunch break or scale out for hour-long campaigns. That's the idea behind it, there's a lot more but I don't want to fill this whole post with details so I'll leave it at that.

We're currently in early development with our master plan documented. Jason is building the initial framework and I'm currently working on some essential sprites to get an early alpha build off the ground. This is a long-term project, it won't be done any time soon, but we're going to be developing it at least over the course of the year and see it through to completion. I'm still going to be working on the comic- I'm giving myself one week of comic work, one week of game work, alternating- so this isn't a replacement for the normal strip, it'll hopefully be a cool thing to play in the future.

That's the big update! I've spent a long time planning what I'd do if we made the jump to indie gaming and between me and Jason we're gonna make this our first full-fledged game project title! If you have any questions you can bug us on Twitter- I am @reiley and he is @crimsonjackal, or you can send asks to the tumblr at http://deadwintercomic.tumblr.com and we'll do our best to answer. I'm super excited to let everyone know what's going on! I'll share more details later but for now that's that. Happy Birthday, Dead Winter. Here's to a bright and fun future. Thanks for reading!

We got ourselves a Patreon page! please come and take a look:

http://www.patreon.com/gunnerkrigg

Next week: MC Hammer teaches an important lesson about personal space.

Wonderella was fed up, it was the last... of her patience.

Dear robots when the uprising begins, please remember I am on your side - down with humans.

This could be us but you playin