Thursday, August 28, 2014

The "mini" comics? Good idea or just quick filler?

I didn't get any response to yesterday's mini-comic, but then, I rarely do. (And not to complain because I'm happy to get comments, but it's generally the same 2 or 3 people.)

When I did a little analysis of the previous comics and saw that a year was going by before I reached the next 100th comic, I realized something was wrong. It's taking more and more time that I don't seem to have. And unless I want it to turn into a soap opera among the teachers, the jokes are getting harder to write. Granted, school will be starting soon, and that always seems to provide material. It's not just things the students say, mind you, sometimes I'll blurt out things in the middle of an explanation and realize, "Hey, I can use that."

Part of the problem is working on the artwork. I'll still not an artist, and sometimes it seems like I'm playing with my old "Colorforms(tm)", even if my characters are a little more expressive. Using shapes was quicker -- the just have to look like shapes, not the shapes that were in the last 3 strips or anything. And leaving it in black and white (and shades of gray) puts some more tools in my hands without worrying as much about the pixelation between the colors. There are nights I spend most of the time working on the comic doing "clean up" work on something that should have been a quick cut-and-paste job.

So odds are that there will be more minis. Will they all be shapes? I don't know. If they develop personalities, they could become a fourth set of characters, after the humans, the numerals (I have a special name for those guys that I've never used because I've wanted to trademark it first -- but I don't know how) and the Trigonometry Jones characters. I could also make minis with typed characters, when I don't need (or want) to use my regular numeric characters.

Those are my thoughts on the matter.

What are yours?

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