Previous News05.29.2010 - Terrence Marks:I'm thinking about adding social networking links to the sites.Reasons against: There hasn't been any great outcry for it. There are some comics that flourish in social networks. For instance, if I did a comic about Babylon 5 you'd send it to your friend Joe, because he's all about Babylon 5. Or street hockey. Or some other thing that you and your friends share. Y'know, social networking. You Say it First is, generally speaking, not that kind of comic. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there are a bunch of you who resell fragrance compounds and Lemon Technology is just like your workplace, and your coworkers would really get a kick out of it.
Secondly, our comics are severely continuity-based. Some of them stand on their own pretty well, but most of them - some of my favorites - require context. It'd be like photocopying page 83 of your favorite book, handing that to your friends and hoping that they enjoy it. We're not poised to go viral in a way that some other comics are. That's just not how we work here.
Thirdly, I've seen how easy it is to post a link to Facebook. Do you really need a button for that? Are there people who say to themselves "My friends would really get a kick out of this. But copying and pasting is it too much trouble so I'm not going to bother"? I mean, if they're there I'll add it - I'm not above pandering to the lazy demographic.
Reasons for: I'm reminded of the famous Howlin' Wolf album: "This is Howlin' Wolf's new album. He doesn't like it. He didn't like his electric guitar at first either." I mention that because it is the awesomest album title ever.
Also, it's relevant to the discussion, but I was going to mention it next change I got anyhow. But my point is that just because I might not get something at first, but that doesn't mean it's useless. I don't want to be the last guy making silent films because I think talkies are just a fad. On the other hand, things aren't inherently useful just because I don't get them (cf. Laserdiscs, Windows Vista, hypercolor shirts).
Which brings me into reason against #2: The easy way of doing this - the prepackaged solutions let folks share to about two hundred social networking sites. I was unaware that there were that many. I have never heard of 90% of the sites they list. I'm putting my name with these things I've never heard of and don't know anything about. And if I'm trying to hype myself on a site I've never heard of, I look like a poseur and a shill. It'd make me feel like an unhip corporation trying to rebrand itself into a youth culture that it doesn't try to understand.
But that's a reason for: As the social networking environment changes - and I'm sure it will - I can either let the try to keep up with it by myself, fall behind, or go with a prepackaged widget that does the work for me.
I've spent more time thinking about how to do this than I it would take to implement any of the above solutions, so I'm going to leave it here. Since this is something that you guys would use, what do you think?05.17.2010 - Terrence Marks:What have I learned?Firstly, I want to say thank you. You guys rock. I mean that. I know we don't have a lot of interact-with-each-other stuff here, so you might feel like you're the only one reading this. You aren't. You're part of a movement. There's a bunch of other people with you. And they're cool.
I was amazed at how nice everyone was. The comments - I read them all - were all positive. Nobody said that we suck. So this either means that we don't suck, or that people who think we suck were seriously under-represented in the survey. And in my experience on the internet, people who think you suck aren't shy telling you so.
We also didn't get anyone who put "much less" for all the characters. I was expecting that. I was going to post a version of today's comic with just backgrounds, no characters and call it "Hey, Joey - this one's for you" or something like that. Didn't happen.
Secondly, how much are we taking from the survey? Some. It's tough, as a creative type I can't really go with either extreme. We have a vision here and believe in it; I'm not going to just scrap everything and change directions. But I'm also not going to act like I know everything, that there's nothing I can learn here. That's why I did this - because I think I'm doing pretty good, but I want to get better.
I hope I asked the right questions to get the answers I'm looking for. I spent a while thinking about the distinctions between liking characters and wanting to see more of them. I mean, Ms. Taylor isn't a villain, or exactly an antagonist, but she's not always very pleasant. But she's interesting.
Thirdly, what were the results? I've tallied the votes for who you'd like to see more. I've got it in a big spreadsheet that really makes me wish I paid more attention in statistics class.
This isn't American Idol, but if it were, Emily and Bram would've been voted off. Brisbane and Kimberly were the least disliked, and Silver_Blossom and Sandra were the most liked. The two best-received stories were Date-Night In and The Troublesome Troubles of Ms. Taylor.
Singles Cruise was both the #3 favorite and the #1 least favorite. I expected that. When I was writing it, I thought that if we had a forum, it'd cause arguments. No other story got more than a single vote for least-favorite.
(Why wasn't David on there? He hasn't shown up in over four years - if you say you want to see less of him in the comics, what does that even mean?)
Fourthly, most of our readers: seem satisfied with the website*, suggest reading Unlike Minerva**, read both comics***, think Kevin & Kell is the most similar comic, and like the more domestic stories****, use Firefox, and read a lot of webcomics.
So, once more - thank you
*: Which we don't get much feedback on. If it were lousy, who would send me an email just to tell me that?
**: Isabel and I are too close to the source material to have any kind of objective opinion on it. The options were "Yes. One should start with Unlike Minerva and read everything in order.", "Yes. But after you read You Say it First first.", "No, You Say it First stands on its own", "No. Unlike Minerva isn't very good" - I agree with all of them, usually at the same time.
***: I check the stats - there are a lot of people who read Namir Deiter but not You Say it First. One of the reasons for the survey was to figure out what was up with that without having to directly ask. Seriously, what's up with that?
****: Which I jokingly refer to, collectively, as "Brisbane and Kimberly sit around the house, talk about doing something, but don't".05.16.2010 - Isabel Marks:Welcome to the new and somewhat improved Namir Deiter front page! I hope you like it! If you notice any issues or have any comments, please contact Terrence about them. You may notice ND's new site and You Say it First's (my other comic) sites look like- that's because they are. I really liked the way our sites were so similar with their old look- and Terrence did a great job redesigning YSIF, so there we go.Also, sorry for not mentioning it sooner, but we have some new fan art- please check it out (and thank you Scene)!
There was supposed to have been more news- but it didn't get finished in time for tonight's update- hopefully it'll be up... sooner than later. Till then, happy May (oh and my birthday is coming up on the 27th, fan art is the gift that keeps on giving *hint* *hint*).
05.13.2010 - Terrence Marks:The You Say it First Survey is over. Thank you very much for participating.05.10.2010 - Terrence Marks:Happy Belated Mother's Day!What did I do today? Work. And played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. There's no way I'll beat it this weekend, but I managed to beat miniboss Dark Priest Shaft today.
Y'know. Because he's one bad mother.
Sorry.
We went comic shopping this weekend and picked up Knights of the Dinner Table, Usagi Yojimbo, Tiny Titans, Uncle Scrooge, Scott Pilgrim, a Blue Beetle trade, Wizards of Mickey, Groo, Peanuts, and Shazam. Hopefully I'll have a chance to read them soon. Also, I watched seven episodes of Batman: The Animated Series and spent a lot of time outlining You Say it First. It's been a good weekend for comics.
The new Uncle Scrooge comics are, it seems, reprints of foreign Disney comics. It gets complicated and I don't have many details, but in addition to the American comics, Disney published comics overseas. Then the American non-superhero comic market dwindled and they stopped publishing. They kept on printing in other countries. Then, apparently, they brought it back to the US, reprinting foreign stories or older American stories.
Interesting bit: I was reading Critters, an old anthology series and I thought one of the features, Gnuff, bore a more-than-passing similarity to Carl Barks' duck stories. Then I found out that the artist, Freddy Milton, drew for the Danish edition of Donald Duck.
So you're wondering...did the foreign issues include translated American stories or were they all original? How many countries had their own Disney comics? Are those $8 Uncle Scrooge paperbacks by Gemstone reprints and/or translations? Do they have the same stories?
Yeah. Those are all good questions. I have no idea.
Anyhow, I also saw The Seven Samurai. So far, I've found that I really like Akira Kurosawa movies. Not in a "I sit through this so I can act cultured around other people" kind of way, but I genuinely like it. It's three and a half hours long. It's in black & white. It's in Japanese, with subtitles. It, reportedly, invented half the stuff it does - and I suppose I could watch the action movies of the 1940s and pay attention to what they don't do, but I'm not going to. It's kind of how Bugs Bunny, when first appeared, was radically different from everything that came before him. But now, if I say "acting like a cartoon character", that's the first thing you think of. But that's not my point. Good movie. Watch it.
05.02.2010 - Terrence Marks:I had a brilliant idea.Roger Ebert says video games aren't art. I say he's wrong - you can scroll down to see the exact details of how I said it.
Rather than engage him in Internet Debate (which is like regular debate only pointless and with image macros), I'd do one better. The best form of revenge is living well. So I'd find out what games were art - by my definitions - and play through them all.
The first part of the plan was to make a list. There were a lot of games I've already played that I think count (Grim Fandango, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Twilight Princess, Planescape: Torment, Starcraft, Star Control 2, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and a number of games that I own that I'm meaning to play (Ico, Beyond Good and Evil, Planetfall, Monkey Island 1-3, Final Fantasy 6, Majora's Mask, Ocarina of Time, most of the Super Mario series).
So I was going to ask you which games I should play, then go through and play them. Heck, maybe see if the rest of the internet wanted to get in on the selection process. Write something up, send it around to various gaming sites, and see if they bite. I write a slice-of-life/romance comic strip with anthropomorphic characters. There aren't going to be many times that slashdot reports on what I do.
I'd play through the games and review them. Maybe film something. Tell you how awesome they are and why. Celebrate the high points of gaming.
Then I realized exactly how long it would take me to do this. It'd be awesome. And I'm going to play through those games sooner than later. But someone ought to do this right, and I'm not that guy. That's why I wrote this up - in the hopes that someone else will. So, brilliant idea, out there for the taking. Want it?
04.27.2010 - Terrence Marks:We've got our first-ever You Say it First reader survey up! What's it about? Merchandise, site design, and a bunch of other stuff. If you read You Say it First, we want to hear from you. If you read Namir Deiter, but not You Say it First, we want to hear from you. If you don't read either of our comics, well, you're a potential reader and we still value your opinion.We get a lot of feedback, but there are a lot of folks we don't hear from and this is your chance to be heard.