Above: Buster makes his shameless bid for playtime. He often jumps on to my lap as I type these posts and edits my work with a very critical eye. This is a fellow with melodramatic acting skills made for the silent film era, such is his repertoire of purely visual emotional expressions.
Two major comix gatherings have taken place since my last
State of the Morty Blog report:
SPACE in Columbus, Ohio and the
Olympia Comics Festival in Olympia, Washington. Attending both of these events was a wonderful experience and helped reconnect this old Morty to the spirit of the creative cartooning community.
I was thinking of collecting old work and reprinting it in squareback books, like those I have seen available at both conventions I attended. I have even talked to a couple printers about it. But after a lot of thought I have backed off. Apparently there is a modern a-go-go requirement for the art to be in digital pdf. But my work was made for straight-ahead photocopy, which carries much more power in the fluid lines that are part of my style. Digitizing my drawings seems to diminish them somehow. Also, a lot of my older work was made for folded legal size, a format now called obsolete by every modern printer I've talked to.
Perhaps I'm a bug trapped in amber, but there it is. So if I ever do publish a squareback, it will be a photocopy, and maybe in
legal size folded ("enlarged digest" as we said in Newave days) . Unfortunately, that option appears to be much more expensive.
Call me a dinosaur, but when I see a photocopied comic adrift in a sea of color cover publications, I zero in on the black and white toner produced work. The format just has more of a visceral punch for this ancient Newaver. There
is a difference between offset vs. photocopy, between toner vs. digital. The photocopy format itself is a rejection of the slick. And I like the subversive feel of that.
I guess it comes down to being able to master the technology that lands in your lap. There are many great new artists producing wonderful works in the digital and online formats. It is first nature to them. So interesting how technology and the generational landing spot shapes our methods of expression.
But I am working on a way to deliver my stories in a multimedia format. The Fabulous Sarah, the technology brain behind this Morty the Dog outfit, is helping me figure out how to realize an insidious Morty vision that has been forming in my cranium. BwahahahahaHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Hopefully you'll see the results of my evil plan within the year. It will be a new toy that will be too obnoxious for words.
The numbers:
Total number of visitors so far (since Aug. 2010): 20,504
This month (May) we topped over 4000 visitors, so we enjoyed a big spike from the previous average of 2500
45% use IE, 38% Firefox, 8% Safari
82% Windows, 12% Mac
Top Ten Posts:
McCleary Time Capsule, 1943-1963Tsunami Warning System, Ocean Shores, Washington
Olympia Comics Festival 2011 Report, Pt. 1
SPACE 2011 report, Pt. 3City Limits Gazette: Sample DiscussionSPACE 2011 Report, Pt. 1About That Donate Button
Brad Foster Has Lit The FuseThe Bulletin BoardI Am NOT D.B. CooperWhere the readers are from. The top ten states:
Washington
New York
Oregon
California
Missouri
Ohio
North Carolina
Texas
Illinois
Minnesota
Top Ten Countries:
USA
Russia
Spain
Slovenia
South Korea
Germany
France
Canada
United Kingdom
Malaysia
Unlike Russia, the sustained hits from Spain appear to be from real people and not spammers. Why? This interests me. Picasso was always a fraud to me, but I love Dali's work. In the pre-Internet days I had a good audience from Portugal (where my comix were translated) and parts of Spain, and although I was flattered I could never figure out why although I suspect it had something to do with Morty the Dog's universal call for liberty. Anyway, the current interest in this blog from Spain is intriguing.
Top referring sites:
Facebook
OlyBlogComics ReporterBack Porch ComicsThe Jim and Frank PodcastPoopsheet FoundationAnd no, I am not a member of Facebook, or Twitter, and have no plans for signing up.
