There’s a Better Way

First things first, I’m stopping the Mon/Thur update schedule for Merunga. Instead I’m opting to assemble a complete chapter, and then release it all in one big chunk. For the immediate future, that means no more fully realized Merunga until Aug. 1st, which would also be the posting date of the second to last page of the ‘The Lesser,’ our most recent chapter. For an optimist, that means you’re getting that very last page three days ahead of schedule.

I see this as a solution to the major problem of Merunga, a page at a time is not a good way to tell this story, and two pages a week is a painfully glacial pace to tell this story poorly. My first solution to this problem was to work more, moving to a M-W-F update schedule to get more pages out there, but honestly I think that’s still a terrible idea. Trying to create half-pages for a short period of time led to some terrible art, and even worse story telling as the time crunch spiraled out of control almost immediately. Additionally, more individual pages does nothing to address the underlying problem of a page at a time being a terrible way to tell this story.

Besides to the story-telling benefits, I’m going to be working more on improving the site, focusing on the archive and access to the chapters already out there, navigating easily between them, and gathering them into chunks as well, downloadable as PDFs, CBRs, or Zs, whatever other formats make sense. I’ll also take this opportunity for a little retro-editing to make more sense of those previous chapters.

What this then means for the immediate future and the countdown until August, I’ll be posting more of my work process, here, DeviantArt, Patreon, Facebook, Twitter, maybe I’ll finally get a Tumblr because I’ve been told I need one of those. I’ll also be streaming on Twitch at a more consistent time, with a more consistent workload. I’ll stream as I work on new pages for the collection, art for the site, and any side projects that come along.

The one thing I’ve heard most since starting Merunga is that it reads better in chunks. It’s not the story, and I’m not the storyteller, that can break this thing down into a page here, a page there. I need to be able to write it all out, lay it all out, look at the project front to back, and make sure it’s a quality I can be proud of, instead of desperately slapping it together at eleven o’clock Sunday night.

For everyone that has read thus far, really truly thank you for sticking around, for all it’s faults, I hope that Merunga has entertained. I’ll still be here, posting WIP work and process art, doodles and sketches, but Merunga will return August 1st in our next complete chapter, ‘The Lesser.’

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Hippies and Homesickness

This was the week Mick was gone for his frisbee golf tournament.  It is normally just the three of us at home (myself, Mick and our daughter), we are close knit and pretty boring, so most evenings we cook dinner at home and hang out until bedtime.  So, one of us being gone for an extended amount of time is pretty out of the ordinary these days, and we were all very happy to be back together again finally on Sunday.

Actually, we were all pretty ready to get back to normal by Saturday.  The two of us were missing Mick terribly, he was homesick, ready to see his girls, sleep in his own bed and return to his normal body temperature.  Mick likes to be extra toasty, he always dresses in at least 3 layers and bitterly resents cold and wind.  The frisbee golf tournament afforded a couple of very nice days, but also boasted a couple of cold, windy and rainy days, a deadly combination where Mick is concerned.  Most of his texts to me on Thursday and Friday included some colorful combination of the words “freezing”, “wet” and “miserable.”  Overall, though, he seems to have had a good time, and he came home with some pretty impressive swag.

Us girls used the occasion to make homemade lobster mac and cheese, as Mick turns his (admittedly large) nose up at any form of seafood.

We also finally made it to the Fayetteville Farmers Market for the first time, which is kind of embarrassing, since we have lived in nearby Rogers for almost three years now.  Walking around the square, taking in the booths and the music and the unique people, made me a little bit homesick, too.  We lived in Columbia, MO for 7 years, and we were farmers market regulars during that time.  We had our regular items that we always bought from the same vendors.  They became like friends we saw once a week.  My daughter reminded me about the breakfast burritos they made and sold at the market.  We would always get two first thing, and the three of us would share them while we walked and shopped.  I will say, even though the Fayetteville Farmers Market doesn’t quite feel like home yet, we did meet a great herb vendor, and I’m pretty sure the homemade chocolate croissant we bought went a long way towards making up for their lack of breakfast burritos.

We are now all three home again and loving it, not one bit sorry to be back to our normal routine.

 

 

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Lords, Vicars and Other Disappointments

It probably won’t come as a surprise that we spend most of our evenings doing one of two things:  playing geeky board games (or card games) and watching t.v.  And like most good (geeky) Americans, we like to watch British t.v.  Between Netflix and the (now defunct) PBS app, we were pretty much set.

This year, however, PBS has kind of let us down.  I guess we have to take some of the blame. We don’t actually have cable and our homemade antennae had to be propped at an extremely vicarious angle to even pick up Masterpiece or Masterpiece Mystery.  If we could get the signal to come in, we would have to keep our exact spots in the room, no moving around to get snacks or go to the bathroom, or the signal was lost.

But now PBS has decided not to support it’s app through the XBOX anymore.  Are we the only people still streaming through the 360?  Apparently so.

That being said, suffering through Play On’s ridiculous technological glitches would be worth it, if our favorite British soap operas didn’t all suck this year.  By midway through Downton Abbey’s final season, we had decided the season where they killed off not one but TWO main characters was definitely the best to date, and the only way to save the show would be for the Granthams’ to start dropping like flies.

We thought our saving grace would be the slightly less well known Grantchester.  It was good, mysterious fun in it’s first season last spring, and we were looking forward to it immensely after the boring disappointment that was the Downton finale.  Besides, who doesn’t enjoy a drunken, conflicted Vicar who smokes like a chimney and fornicates like a teenager?  No such luck this season, though.  Sidney,  the Vicar,  is all brooding and troubled this season, and if his cop friend, Geordie, doesn’t pop him in his ridiculously aquiline nose within the next two episodes, they will both be dead to me.  Here’s hoping Great British Baking Show can renew our faith in (British) public television.

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Travellin’ Man

I love to travel.  I love to plan trips, I like to see new things and eat at local restaurants.  If I could, I would probably take a trip every year.  I don’t think Mick would say the same.  He is always a good sport about taking trips, and he always says he has a good time when he is there, but if he really had the choice, I don’t think he would travel much.  Whereas I am the type of traveler that researches my destination and runs from one activity to the next to squeeze in as many memories as possible, Mick’s idea of vacation is to go to a new place and pretty much do exactly what he would normally do at home.  In fact, I’m pretty sure he would be perfectly happy to skip the “go to a new place” part and just do the “exactly what he would normally do” part.  He does drink more Dr. Pepper when we travel, that’s what says vacation to him.

So, for being a man who prefers not to travel, he already has a couple of trips planned this spring, and I had nothing to do with them.  Next week, he will be gone for four days at a frisbee golf tournament.  He has provided me with a tentative itinerary, which looks to me like about 10% frisbee golfing and about 90% dicking around, but he seems excited.  This effects you as the reader only in that he has to finish 5 pages of original art and his entire application for the DC Talent Workshop, as well as a week’s worth of Merunga before he goes.  Needless to say, he is drawing right now.  He’s actually streaming while drawing on Twitch currently, he’s been streaming on Tuesday nights some.  If you are interested, you should check it out.  Maybe we can convince him to make it a regular thing, kind of like the lady who body paints herself to look like comic book characters every Saturday night.  But that is a blog post for a different day…

The other trip Mick has coming up is a foray to Planet Comicon, the con in Kansas City.  We’ve been going since the con was pretty small, but it’s been growing every year.  Simon Tam and Wash from Firefly are both going to be there this year, as well as some Battlestar Galactica peeps, and Stan Lee.  They will also have some representatives from some big comic book companies there to critique art work.  You can basically bring them in a portfolio and they will look at it, and on the off chance they like your stuff, they may call you back.  So, the work Mick is putting in to the talent workshop can also do double duty as part of his portfolio for Comicon.  Not exactly a world traveler, but probably twice as much travelling as he has ever volunteered to do

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Hello from Becks

So this marks a departure from the norm, both for Mick and for myself.  I have been given strict instructions that I am to make it very clear that I am Rebekah, Mick’s wife, and that I am writing as myself.  Mick and I have been discussing my helping him with his blog for quite some time.  I am both Mick’s biggest fan and his harshest critic.  I have been telling him for a while now that his blog is, well, boring.  We have discussed what a big part social media should and could play in the success of his webcomic, but the truth is we are both grossly inept at its use.  I even signed Mick up for a workshop for writers on the use of social media once, and he very nearly went.  Mostly, I just give him unsolicited advice on how to make his blog posts better.  I also critique his grammar a lot and beg him to let me edit his posts beforehand.  So, recently, Mick nonchalantly mentioned that a lot of webcomics have guest bloggers, and that these “guests” are often the artists’ spouses or significant others.  He set me up with editing privileges and said to have at it, the only caveat being that I had to make my own posts under my own account, I could not pretend to BE or post FOR, Mick.

So here we are.  The truth is, this has all come about now mainly because Mick is in a serious time crunch.  In addition to drawing, posting and updating Merunga twice weekly, he is feverishly working on his application for the DC Talent Development Workshop.  I think he may have mentioned this (briefly and not at all clearly) in a previous post, but the gist of it is that DC has opened up an opportunity for amateurs to get real comic art experience.  You submit 5 consecutive pages of original comic art, as well as an online portfolio, a resume and a personal statement of sorts.  Out of all of the submissions, DC will select some to participate in a two week online course over the summer, and of those, a select few will be asked to attend an online workshop in California in the fall.  Some of those participants may then in turn be offered jobs with DC.  Mick is alternatively giddily excited and nauseated by nervousness.

So, I figured this was as good a time as any to help with his blog and take some of the pressure off of him.  I don’t have a creative bone in my body, so I am of no help in the artistic process, but I do understand editing and grammar, and I’m a good sounding board for ideas.  Sharing the blog posts will also allow for a little experiment, or perhaps a friendly rivalry of sorts.  My two biggest complaints with his blog posts is that they are impersonal and they completely leave out his creative process.  As I said, I am not remotely creative, so I find the process of artistic creation fascinating.  I could be wrong, but I bet a lot of Merunga’s readers do, too.  So, here is where you all come in.  You may not know (since he says so little about himself) but Mick actually loves to get comments and feedback, even negative ones.  He checks his site incessantly for new comments and gets downright mopey if he goes for a long stretch without any comments.  If you, as his faithful readers, could let me know what you want to hear more about on his blog, it would not only give me bragging rights, but it would also make Mick very happy.  If I’m right, and you want to hear or see more about how he creates his comic, or more about what he does outside of Merunga and comics, I will feel justified in having my own username, and I will make sure you get more of what you want.

I will be leaving most of the update day blog posts to Mick, but I made an exception in this case as it is now pretty late and he is still up drawing.  Tomorrow sees us back to work and school, as I’m sure it does for most of you.  Pleased to make your acquaintance, please keep the comments coming.

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