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TV's Mr. Neil

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Can't.... Concentrate... [Nov. 22nd, 2009|11:43 pm]
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There are days when I come home, sit down, and flip through my emails to see what's going on in the Crossoverlord canon, and my eyes seem to be looking past the screen. We've juggled around so many ideas for the ending, that I'm seriously beginning to lose track of them all. I'm reading one right now where I have no idea what is even being said here.

It's like, there's something there, but the words have no meaning, because the context that I had stored in my brain is now gone. I'm looking at one right now, and I'm like, "What the heck is X-person even talking about?".

This ought to be fun, since I'm pulling editing duties from now until the end of the comic. That means I have final cut on a lot of things. It also means that I'm in a mode to just say, "Yeah, let's go with that", so I can restore my sanity.

But then I don't want to agree to something to expedite the comic's production and then realize later that I said yes to something I originally told people NOT to do. ...because that's happened.

And it's at this point that I realize why normal comic production has a hierarchy. What we have is about six authors, all with equal control. Fortunately, it's just three of us hashing out the ending, but even then, it's amazing how we keep retreading the same things over and over.

Some of these emails, after about six months, will probably be very funny to me. Especially the ones that start out promising an easy-to-follow synopsis of the end, which then meanders on for about twelve paragraphs, eventually ending in, "See? It explains everything!". And meanwhile I'm thumping my head on the desk, because my eyes glazed around paragraph five, making my contact lenses stick to my retinas.

The thing is, I have an unwritten rule...unwritten, because I haven't expressed it until now...which is that you can either have a McGuffin or a Chekhov's gun, but not both, and I think we're trying to have both. And the names keep changing, too! And that's where I keep getting lost. Are we talking about the McGuffin or Chekhov's gun? I don't know anymore! McGuffin or Chekhov's Gun - PICK ONE! If I'm ever in an editorial position again, that's going to be embossed in gold and hung on the doorway of my imaginary comic studio.

Here's an interesting and moderately unrelated tidbit. Just now, I went to go look up Chekhov's gun on Wiki, just to make sure I was using the right term, and I discovered that the page had been vandalized. So I got the opportunity to do a much easier editorial job by unvandalizing a Wiki page. Fucking vandals with nothing better to do with their time.

Anyhoo, I'm going try to interpret the last few emails and come to some sort of one-person consensus on what's being said so that I can respond to it. And then I'm going to peel my contacts off and get some sleep so I can restore some brain function.

Brain...thinking...not...good.

Hey, I have an idea. I'll go over to TV Tropes and pick on the Irate Gamer article some more. Hatred is such an easy emotion, and I can take it out on one of the internet's most infamous "celebrities". If you don't know who Irate Gamer is and want a crash course, just Google search for Irate Gamer and Super Mario Bros. 2. You will find his video and be astonished at how fractally wrong he is on EVERYTHING. Yes! Fractal wrongness!

And then you will spread the hate as well.

Also, at some point in the next day or so, I'm going to post my review of Turtles Forever. I'll give you a sneak peek at my review: AWESOME! The Mirage era could not have ended more perfectly. ...well, except getting the original voices from the 1987 cartoon, but I digress.
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They were talking about Dasien at Fallcon! [Oct. 18th, 2009|07:40 pm]
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No...no... That's just a big fat fuckin' lie.

"They", if you could call them that, were Fessy "The Fes" Fesworks (that's not his real name) and Abby of Green Avenger, and they were just chatting it up about Abby's projects, which included Crossoverlord. Dasien was only mentioned as being part of the cast, but our intrepid podcasters made sure to muck up poor Das' name. AGAIN! Hey thanks, guys.

You can hear the show over at the Webcomic Beacon. Abby appears in part 2 of the podcast, and she almost... ALMOST let something slip. If you want to almost hear a spoiler, then head on over to the link above. And if you want to check out all links mentioned (because I'm too lazy to do all of the anchor tags), just click on the three addresses below.

http://www.fesworks.com
http://www.green-avenger.com
http://www.drunkduck.com/Crossoverlord
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Comic Woik [Oct. 10th, 2009|08:00 am]
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I'm going to be doing a lot of comic work today, so if something updates in the next day or so, don't be too shocked.

Right now, however, I'm just downloading some podcasts and making my breakfast (it's in the toaster). I like picking out video game podcasts, for obvious reasons. And hey, there's a new Retronauts this week, so that's first on my list. I'm also grabbing the latest Destroy All Podcasts, Fast Karate For The Gentlemen, CAG Cast, and maybe a couple science casts. Lab Out Loud and Amateur Scientist have fresh shows this week. There should be a new Skeptics' Guide To The Universe today, but it's not up yet.

Oh, and by the way, I don't feel like linking all of these, so if you want to find them, just Google them. They should be easy to find, and they all have my quality stamp of approval.



Speaking of podcasts and webcomics, I had a rather amusing email exchange with Tanya Higgins of the Webcomic Beacon about a week back or so. She's doing some kind of comic series in which she goes after respected charlatans, like Ray Comfort and Benny Hinn. I suggested William Lane Craig and, of course, Ben Stein. She hissed at the mention of Ben Stein's name but gladly accepted the recommendation.

By the way, in case I haven't mentioned this before, Tanya Higgins is my hero, and everything she says is right. Everything. Half the joy of tuning into the Webcomic Beacon every week is listening to her slip in some of her heathen opinions. It's great. ...Actually, they appear to all be heathens, but Tanya certainly advertises it the most.

Well, I'm finishing up breakfast now, so off I go.
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The Return of Liberty The American Girl [Oct. 6th, 2009|04:25 pm]
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YES!

Liberty The American Girl can now be read in its entirety at liberty.darktouch.net.


She's back!


Liberty was a superhero webcomic that originally ran in the early half of the decade. It's very cheesecakey, campy, and all that good stuff. It's also one of the very first CG webcomics that I'd ever seen. Probably THE first.

It's amazing how well the comic has stood up to time. I mean, the technology to do this sort of comic is limited now, and I can't imagine what a freelancer like Alan had at his disposal back in 2001. How he made it work at all is amazing. The first chapter kind of looks like early stills from PlayStation 1 era cut scenes, but the second chapter is astonishingly good. I think the only thing that I find jarring is that the characters aren't casting shadows in certain shots. But that's getting kind of nitpicky.

Although there were only two chapters to the comic, both chapters were complete adventures, so the comic is, for all intents and purposes, finished. Of course, there's no reason that Liberty couldn't come back in some form. And it might actually be on some of us to make that happen. In fact, some fans had been doing so, even while the original site was on the internet.

Three additional short stories were written for the character by various authors. Unfortunately, these short stories still seem to be absent, and I'll have to run that by the guy who hosts Liberty to see if he can maybe get the rights to them. I mean, you guys don't mind READING, do you? Of course not.

And just because I feel like being a nice guy, here are the archive links to those extra stories.

Story 1 · Story 2 · Story 3

Of course, you should read both chapters of the comic first.

The possibility of a Dasien/Liberty crossover is certainly back on the table, now that I have a point of reference for doing such a thing. I'll have to nudge Alan for that one. There are certain events coming up where I could plug a Liberty crossover into the storyline and it would work perfectly.

There have already been references to Liberty in both early pages of Dasien and The Crossoverlord, so Liberty is there, somewhere in Dasien's world. In fact, Gizmo Bug actually cameoed in The Crossoverlord. I've always wanted him to have a run-in with Dasien, and I finally got my chance to do it.

Anyway, that's all for now, kiddies. Drool to your heart's content. Drool, I say.
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Random shit [Sep. 2nd, 2009|05:25 pm]
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In the comment box on yesterday's Crossoverlord, I made a bunch of jokes about possible Disney/Marvel crossovers, which was promptly met with crickets. Hey, I thought it was all pretty funny. I was rather proud of where I said that Namor found Nemo.

C'mon, peeps. Laugh.


So, when I draw comes, I usually have to have something playing in the background. Usually Retronauts or RetroforceGO. The only problem is that Retronauts didn't update last week and RetroforceGO is on hiatus. What's an illustrator to do?!

So, I decided to try a DVD. I put in Dirty Pair Flash. I'm apparently still the only person on the planet who LOVES those OAVs. Not only that, but I always chose the English vocal track. (In this case, I kinda had to, anyway.) I don't care what anyone says about ADV's actors. I'm not that fucking fussy. The acting has to be pretty bad for me to hate on it.

Now, if you want to talk about ADV's dubs of the Dirty Pair movies, that's another story. (Kei sounds like she has a lobotomy.)

I also love it because Sunrise blatantly stole the whole rogue Angel storyline from the Adam Warren adaptation of Dirty Pair. Shasti was a rogue Angel well before Lady Flair.

Anyhoo, I have the DVD blaring, and I'm laughing at all the funny quips that they put in there (because I also love western humor in my English-dubbed Japanese cartoons). Funny thing happened, though. I soon realized that I was able to follow the story a lot better when I was not watching the screen.

I don't know why, but that show has a plot that, while not terribly complex, is hard to follow sometimes. I think it's because some of the secondary characters have very similar designs, and so I was getting some characters mixed up. The character Dr. Capps is one such character. There's another character that looks just like him.

On the other hand, there's this one 3WA agent that is seldom referred to by name but is always at odds with the girls. He actually shows up quite a bit, but for some reason, I wasn't paying close enough attention to realize that it was him in almost every episode. Only by not watching the screen did I suddenly realize that he's all over the place. Bizarre.

I watched the other two DVDs later on. By the way, each disc represents a particular series of episodes. The first two discs have their own overarching story lines. The second disc's story isn't as good as the first one, although it does have one of the few instances of Yuri being bisexual. So, that pretty much makes up for it. The third disc is just a bunch of random and unconnected stories, although for some reason, I don't remember ever seeing the last episode. It was kind of cool to watch. I'm sure I've seen it, but I don't know why it's such a blank on my memory.


I'll get back to my on-going trek through Arc The Lad II later this week. I am quite a bit further now, though. I've got Shu and Tosh, and I guess I'm supposed to blow up a train.

Of course, I had to FIGHT Tosh before he would join me. Surprisingly, I didn't die in the process, although I was heeling every other round. In battle, he does around 400 HP worth of damage in one attack, which is A LOT for this game. He's like three times as powerful as my next strongest character.


And finally, you know what annoys the piss out of me? Something happened to Firefox within the last few months where the tabs are now really sensitive. Apparently, if you click on it a certain way, it will close the tab in the current window and open it up in a new one. It's really irritating, because it seems to happen most to any window that may have a YouTube video in it, which promptly ends the video and makes it start loading all over again. SONOFABITCH!

I don't even know how I'm doing it. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. It always happens when I'm clicking on or around a particular tab, but when I try to repeat whatever it is I'm doing, it doesn't work.

I assume it's some new shortcut feature that came bundled with one of the last couple of version updates. If that's the case, then Mozilla needs to fix this shit.
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SHOCKER!!!!!!! [Aug. 11th, 2009|05:50 pm]
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Calling On Brock Heasley [Apr. 21st, 2009|11:15 pm]
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Okay, first of all, I've not blogged in a while, so here's a quicky update on Crossoverlord. We've been posting weekly, and this week's comic is especially cute.


Now that that's out of the way, I have another Crossoverlord-related thing I need to cover. Some of our ideas for the future require the employment of specific cameos in our crossover series. To do this, we've been contacting authors here and there, but one continues to elude us. We can't seem to figure out how to get a hold of Brock Heasley, author of the sensational Super Fogeys.

If anyone knows how to contact him, could you please pass this along to him? We really want to use one of his characters for a one-shot cameo, but we need his permission.

Hey, maybe if I Google-spam his name, he'll find this. (Oh wait, his last name isn't Crosby. Damn!)

Still, it couldn't hurt to try. BROCK HEASLEY! BROCK HEASLEY!!!! Let Google be thine guide. Come forth, so that I may request of you permission to use your silly characters in our crossover series.

Seriously, if any of you out there in internet land know how to get in touch with this guy, do me a favor and drop him a line. Let him know that I'm looking for him.
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Green Avenger joins the cast of Crossoverlord! [Mar. 17th, 2009|06:05 pm]
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Clickity-click!


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Smiley Face in the Sky [Nov. 30th, 2008|02:15 pm]
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Fans of The Crossoverlord will remember the page in which the Crossoverlord himself aligned the stars in the night sky smile down upon him. Well, according to an article that Remus found this afternoon, Australians will be able to look to the sky Monday night and see a very similar phenomenon. The crescent moon and the planets Venus and Jupiter will be in perfect alignment to form a smiley face!



http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/a-smile-that-will-light-up-the-night-sky/2008/11/28/1227491827180.html

I hope someone gets some actual pictures of this.
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Comic Update: Two-In-One [Nov. 25th, 2008|12:55 am]
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Two updates today involving Dasien! One for Heroes Unite and one for Crossoverlord. As usual, click on the images to see the pages!





And yes, that's the Saved By The Bell pink dream border. I couldn't resist.
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I don't understand your comic! [Nov. 12th, 2008|07:40 am]
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Another cross post with my Dasien blog. Now that the election is over, I have nothing else to fucking talk about. Maybe I should go back down to just one blog. Nah...

Okay, so there's this new manga-style comic on Drunk Duck called Transcerebral. I can't tell you what it's about, exactly, because the story moves along like molasses hardly serves us with the courtesy of even telling a story. It's been a long time since I've ranted about another comic. Not many comics have really gone so far as to actually offend me since the days when Sonic and Mega Man were the subject of nearly half the comics on the internet. ...Oh wait, that's still kind of the case. Nevertheless, I've been able to withhold my rage on this subject for some time. ...That is until I read Transcerebral.

And what's worse is that this comic is getting almost universal praise. Even worse than that, it got praise from ME before I realized that this author doesn't know how to structure her comic at all. I feel like I'm part responsible for this comic now having the top spot on the Drunk Duck popular comics list.

Now I realize the irony of criticizing another comic for being slow, when mine's been stalled for over a month. However, mine doesn't take two months for the lead character to get out of bed. And yes, it's been two months, and the lead character has just now gotten out of bed in Transcerebral. And now she's dealing with the maid, who is trying to serve her breakfast, an act which bemuses the lead character for reasons I can't even begin to understand.

Seriously, what the fuck is going on? Let's read the comic's listing description to find out...

"Ronald Neumann is a young but virtuous brain-computer interface researcher gone missing. Andrea Welles is a girl that has recently recovered from a long time coma. What connections do they share with each other??."

Okay, so I assume that the girl waking up is actually this Ronald fellow who is now trapped in this girl Andrea's body, for some reason. And of course, he goes through the typical "hilarious" panic/joy of discovering that he's in the body of a girl, something which was accomplished much better in Shining Generation Valkyrie Yuuki.

Let me just reiterate here that it's the PACE of this comic that drives me nuts. She keeps making these pages in which one very small thing happens. It's like, "Oh no, I'm a girl!", "Oh no, I don't know who I am!", "Oh no! There's someone opening the door!", "Oh no! It's the maid!", "Oh no! She's saying things I don't understand!", and "Oh no! Here's a flashback that has no context." Seriously, I want to shake the person who draws this and say, "GET TO THE POINT!"

Today, I just couldn't take it anymore and gave this comic probably the first negative comment it's ever received, because everyone else is too nice to do otherwise. I told her that the comic is too slow and that she could easily structure each page so as to cover a lot more ground than the snail's pace she's been going on since the comic started.

You can see that comment rightchere.

And again, I betray my own purpose, because I had to be nice and give her a neutral score of "3". I should have given her a "1". I should have also said, "Learn to draw hands, stop copying manga, and have someone proofread your comic."
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Okay, Time To Start Talking... Where's Dasien? [Nov. 5th, 2008|03:30 pm]
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Aside from the fact that Crossoverlord has been updating solidly for five months, Dasien has kind of dropped below the radar again. Well, there's kind of a good reason behind that. And that is that some of the pages from the second half of the Ruby story arc have been dropped. It occurred to me about a month ago that the way I had ended the fight, although good, was not at all what it should be. In fact, it kind of lacked a grandness that really should be there.

So, I had to redraw a lot of stuff, and I've pretty much got the next chapter all patched up again with the new content. I'll probably post some of the outtakes as scraps on DeviantART, but otherwise, the fight is going to be somewhat different than what I had originally planned.

So what's gonna happen in the story? Well, I'm not going to say, but I'll give you one little hint. It basically revolves around the fact that I like classic movies. That's the only hint you get.

Don't worry. You'll pretty much figure out what I have planned as soon as I post the Chapter 7 cover page. It's epic!
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Crossoverlord: Chapter 1, Page 10 [Jun. 16th, 2008|11:58 pm]
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You asked for it! You can't unask for it! It's the return of Goldie!

http://www.drunkduck.com/Crossoverlord/index.php?p=419206

Goldie looks a little different than she did at the beginning of Dasien. I knew that if I brought her back, I'd have to give her a makeover, because she looked very much like a blonde version of the Crimson Gestalt character Rouge. Her suit is a bit more sensational than it was previously, and I changed her hair a bit. But in the end, she's still the same bumbling underling she always was.

My original concept here was that Goldie was robbing a jewelry store, but if you look at the crown she has sticking out of her back, it kind of looks like she just held up a costume shop! In the rough draft, the store was to be called Family Jewels.

And who is this person she's dealing with here? Could it be the first appearance of our villain?

Next week, Dasien and Mindmistress return, as they embark on a quest to meet another awesome superhero!
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Crossoverlord Call-Out For Webcomic Hero Cameos [Apr. 5th, 2008|10:35 pm]
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Do you have a heroic character? Would you like that character to make a cameo in The Crossoverlord? Would you like us to kiss your butt and link to your comic? Then this is the forum thread FOR YOU!

There are only a few conditions...

1. Your character may be any kind of hero from any genre whether superheroic, sci-fi, sword and sorcery, etc. BUT IT MUST BE A HERO.

2. It must be YOUR CHARACTER. No fan comic characters.

3. Wait... there is no 3. That's pretty much it.

Also, if you comic has an ultimate mythological weapon/sacred item (ala the One Ring, Infinity Guantlet, etc.), we may be interested in using it. We will plug you if we use your special item in the Crossoverlord comic.
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Dasien Update [Mar. 1st, 2008|03:15 am]
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Wow, things have been pretty silent on the Dasien front this month. Actually, Nepath and I have been working hot and heavy on the Energize/Dasien crossover. All I can say is.... Oh my god.... OH MY GOD... This is going to be good! I'm finishing off a couple pages a night now, and I'm pretty happy with the way the art's looking.

I'm really enthused about this crossover, because not only did Nepath write Dasien to perfection (my god, the guy must have STUDIED my comic!), but his interpretation of Das has motivated me to return the favor. In the pages I've drawn, I've thrown in an homage or two to his comic. In fact, there are homages to both comics.

Overall, it's pretty darn good intersection between the two.

This is going to be good.
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Tease-a-riffic! [Feb. 16th, 2008|08:00 am]
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Teasers! ARGH! Why must they exist?! Simple, really. They exist in place of actual work, because Nepath and I haven't finished the comic yet. But for now, you can get your fill of hype and foreshadowing by heading over to the E&D site this weekend and checking out some great teasers!

http://www.drunkduck.com/Energize_and_Dasien/

Hey, at least it's new art. And don't forget, there will be another teaser page tomorrow!
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