HURFADURF

Hey, so me and Oscar recorded the first RCM podcast last night. It’s a little longer than we wanted (I think it caps out at about 45 minutes) because we sort of went unscripted — but have a listen. We talk about Strip #1, my own artistic hangups, robots we love, robots we don’t, and many, many tangents. Download it here!

In the spirit of building a community here, and to get a chance to rebuild my bank of strips, I’m making the call for fan art! If you want to send us your drawings of our three dudes, we’ll post them here with a link to your site/email addy! The deadline is July 26 of this year (because we’re going to start posting them on July 27. Everyone is welcome to send in something, and after the fan art series is over, we’ll build a Gallery page, and store the work in it for all to see. A few rules, though:

1. You can make your piece as tall as you want, but it needs to be resized to 700 px wide, and in GIF, JPG or PNG format.

2. No cussin’, no lewdness. We try to keep it PG-rated around here.

3. …That’s it. That’s all I got.

So send us your stuff! You can send it to me personally, or to the site’s email: sharkpeople@hurfadurf.com — and remember — the deadline is July 26, 2008!

Peace out,
–JL.

A lot of web comics out there are selling their original artwork, which is an awesome thing; it gives you a one-of-a-kind item that the artist touched with his hands, signed and personalized, and sometimes even framed.

The problem with offering this kind of thing here is that, to be honest, there is no “original art.” I do the entire strip (start to finish) on my Wacom tablet, so aside from conceptual brainstorming, my hands never touch paper — but I want to be able to offer you guys the opportunity to buy prints, so I have to come up with a solution. And since creating an original piece every time someone pays me for it is going to take time away from the strip itself, I might suffer burnout.

So. What I’m going to do is this: If you want to get a print, you can pay the usual cost (I think it’s $15), and get a glossy 11×17 poster of any strip you choose, which I will sign and personalize for you.

But if you want to “own” a strip, I will print, sign, frame and courier it over, and then retire the strip so it can’t be purchased at all any more. Beneath the strip will be a banner or tag that says “OWNED”, so everybody knows it’s been retired. Obviously the price on this will be higher (I don’t know what that will be yet) , but it makes every strip a potential one-of-a-kind item, because once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Of course, this is just an idea. Comments are open, so if you can think of a different (or better) solution, let’s hear it!

See you Wednesday,
–JL.

Just this morning upgraded ComicPress, and am going with the new “Graphic Novel” layout. I’m not sure how much I like it yet, but my comic pages are a bit bigger than most, so I thought I’d test drive it for a bit and see what happens. I still want to tweak the colors a little, because flat black and white’s a bit dull — but we’ll see.

I’ve had nothing but good feedback on the strip so far. Everyone seems to be really pleased with what we’re doing here, and that’s encouraging — and now that we have a workable store and a banner ad (I’m hoping to add another one in here soon), the site’s going to start generating revenue. Donations have been coming in as well, and I apologize for how backlogged I am in getting custom ‘thank you’ pieces out there — I’m having enough trouble staying ahead of my buffer — but don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten about any of you, and we certainly appreciate all the help!

–JL.