Before I get a slew of emails I wanted to let everyone know that yes, I’m aware that Page 1 isn’t loading right. I have no idea why this is, but we’re working on it. It will hopefully be fixed in the next 24 hours. Ah well, what’s a website launch without some bugs? Thanks for the patience!

-j

Whatever the bug was, I managed to fix it. Now I’ll sit on my hands and wait to see if it sticks.

-j

Hello and good morning, internet.

It’s been a heckuva week, but we sailed through it with minimal damage. Catastrophes were all averted, and though my blood pressure has raised 10 points during the process, the site now runs silky smooth.

The updates will come regularly on Mondays now, supposedly at midnight, but due to that being a very heavy traffic hour for Comicpress, it will more likely be up around 2am, along with the Top Web Comics vote incentives.

May I start out with a great big thank you: Brian Hykes, you are a darling and a prince for giving up a few evenings to help out with the templates, Mike Cuccaro, again thanks for the hours and the effort, the colors and the text look awesome, and Casse L, your pixel pushing has paid off because everything looks spectacular. Oh, and Dad, thanks for helping me install everything.  I can’t tell you how grateful we are. 

You computer people, you are pretty awesome. 

As for the State of the Tempest this morning, everything is looking good. Anne is back to her normal schedule of page producing, and we are experimenting with her doing more than one page per week. We’re going to try it for a few months and let the buffer run up and if it seems to be working, we might consider going up from a Monday update to a Monday/Friday update. We will wait and see.

Also, I want to say THANK YOU to all the readers: out of over 9,000 comics you managed to put the Tempest at #167 with your votes over at TWC, which is incredibly exciting for us. But we need the support, so please, continue clicking that happy little button and let’s get us in the top 20!

In another piece of news, I did some web surfing and found two new comics for you:

1. If anyone is interested in the horrifically wonderful world of H.P. Lovecraft, I highly recommend Larry Latham’s Lovecraft Is Missing. It’s well written, it’s creepy, the art is fantastic, what more could you want? Plus, Larry is a swell guy, so go check him out.

2. Also, if you’re an American history buff, I just ran across what has to be the most adorable comic ever about civil war re-enacters called The Battle of Dovecote Crest. It’s not very far along yet, but I’m already quite in love with it. Hailey Bachrach and Bridget Underwood are a fantastic author/artist duo, so you should surf over and visit them.

That’s all for now. See you next Monday.

Jen

Hello!  Look, a shiny new blog thingy!  Jen was so kind as to instruct me in its use (as well as the 40 zillion ways I could mangle the site if I pressed the wrong button, eep!).

Thank you, first of all, to everyone who helped to get this site up and running.   All the tech support, the encouragement, the patience with midnight coding emergencies, and the people who let me “borrow their eyeballs” are greatly appreciated. 

I’m trying not to panic, as my art has suddenly gone from mostly private to about as public as it gets — the internet.   But ever so slowly, I find myself adjusting to the idea, and seeing all potential reactions & criticisms as a challenge and a chance to improve, rather than a reason to feel inadequate as an artist.   (…Yeah, I have issues with perfectionism.   Me and, oh, just about every artist ever.  I’m managing.)

Right now, I’m itching for the comic to move forwards.   Only not really, because I want to keep a buffer of several comics ahead of the current post.   But my art has been improving so very quickly, much to my surprise and pleasure, that I squirm every time I look at the first few pages.   I seem to be stuck in one of those phases where the page I’m working on right now is the best I’ve ever done, the page I did before it is at least passable, and everything before that, I would just as soon sweep under the rug.  It’s a good sign that I’m improving, if I could only hang onto my pride in my earlier work….

I’m up around page 16, right now, and the art has taken a leap for the better.  Suddenly, we have dynamic angles!  Varying distances!  Proper perspective!!!   And I’m feeling less and less scared to try unfamiliar approaches, and more and more eager to, because I’m starting to trust my own abilities.   I may not know how to do some things, but I’m smart and a good artist and there’s no reason why I can’t learn.

(Also, I’m finally out of the diner scene.   Thank heaven.)

Really, the worst thing is that this is my first graphic novel, and there’s just no getting around that.  I can either go back to the beginning and draw every single page over again, or I can make my peace with that fact, get over it, and keep moving forwards.  So, on I go!

Hello and good Monday. I checked the stats and found that the top three countries viewing the comic are the USA, Canada, and a surprise with Germany passing up the UK now. Hi, Germany! Glad to have you!

Let’s see, first I’d like to apologize for the delay of comic today - I’m still getting used to all of the functions of comic press, and as Anne mentioned in the last, there are plenty of buttons you can touch that will break things. But it’s all arights now, and the next month’s comics are all all uploaded and ready, along with the vote incentives, so we’ll cross our fingers and hope that works. On to better business.

Upon seeing the first 10 pages I realized, with some dismay, how painfully slow the story moves. They’re all important pages, as you will see later, but I think it took me seeing them in order to figure out how to make things move at their proper pacing. So I went and revised the script from page 10 on and it is a lot tighter now, but that still leaves us wading through the swamp for now. Anne and I have discussed eventually going back and redoing some of those pages, and perhaps we will. But for now, we will go ever forwards, safe in the knowledge that both the writing and the architectural perspective get better from here.

On a non-comic related note, I went to see Neil Gaiman’s Coraline last Friday and it was, in summary, wonderfully creepy. First, as far as the animation and the cinematography is concerned, the choice to go with stop motion was perfectly apropos for the story, as it gave a very doll-like quality to the characters. Things weren’t as oozy as they generally are in Gaiman stories, but it still made the movie as far as ambiance went.

As far as the story itself, though there were some things changed from the book, overall I thought they did a good job, and I understand why some things were added or altered. I’m a little surprised that Gaiman himself did not do the treatment and the screenplay, as he already proved his chops with Stardust and Beowulf, but Selick did a good job. Nothing can quite compare to the prickling sensation one gets on the back of the neck when reading Gaiman’s narratives, but I found myself jumping out of my seat plenty of times nevertheless.

So if you’re looking for something to do this weekend, Coraline. I recommend it.

See you next week,

Jen