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I also assumed it would not show up as much as it does when I first started using them, so I was glad to figure out a way around that. I have actually seem people do the blue like sketches in just slightly darker blue regular colored pencil (that way it is easier to see) and then photoshop it out as well.

Most of how I edit things digitally I learned reading the process by the guy who does this comic called Copper. Link to his process pages

Granted, your joke was preceded by my own tasteless joke. And my joke was preceded by Crackawindow's tasteless, and admittedly, much funnier joke. So I'll take partial blame for where the tone went.

But my unfunny joke came from a place of experience. That is--a joke about being awkward around my parents came from experiencing their inability to understand my sexuality. Your joke did not come from a place of experience because you weren't joking about you. Your joke involved both me and incest, and since you are not me there are places where that joke can go horribly awry. For instance, if I were a victim of incest. I'm not, but you have no way of knowing that, so it's best not to make the joke. Even beyond extreme cases like that, there may be things going on in my life that you're unaware of but would still make me vastly uncomfortable to hear things like that said about me.

I'm not trying to say anything about your attitude towards gay people, and I'm sure you're a great, accepting dude. I just feel like it's a good thing to think about what you say in a forum full of people you don't know. That said, I have nothing against dirty jokes and I don't mean to get all Serious McLecture on you.

STAY ON TOPIC, SNARK, WEBCOMICS



Homosexual people tend to be people-like in nature. Characterizing them involves 1) being a person and 2) knowing what it's like to be terrified all the time and not look like it.

In my opinion (as someone who does not speak for All People), it's one part normal person and one part skewed perspective. For personality, it's just the same as any character you might make, but how that character reacts to the world is another thing entirely. I would suggest imagining that you're gay and following the logical conclusions of how people in your every day life would treat you. Then think about the environment fostered by the world and people in your comic, and how someone who's gay might react to the treatment they receive in that world.

Ah, see, but there's the thing: If you have to think of every single joke you write with "is there absolutely any perspective that could find this offensive" in mind, than comedy would simply cease to be. It's true, there could have been some underlying information I don't know that would have caused the joke to go completely awry from your (or others, could be anyone) perspective, and had you said that it was over the line or sent me a PM telling me off, I would have apologized that it upset you because I'm a (relatively) decent person, or at least I try to be. However, the apology would be that I made the joke to you, based on your own experience, and not that I made a tasteless joke in general, if you catch my drift (I honestly don't know how well I'm getting my meaning across, I'm not quite as elegant as George Carlin in explaining this concept).

Basically, I've lost friends who were offended by jokes I've written or said (and gotten many a hatemail for the same), because they had problems with it due to their own experiences. Others found it funny, I certainly got a chuckle out of it (otherwise I wouldn't have wrote/said it), and therefor it served it's purpose. While it sucks that people I care about were upset and I regret losing their friendship, I won't lie to them and say I regret the joke itself (or, in one case, promising I would never write another joke on that topic again).

I guess what I'm saying is, in one's comic or in any other comedic media, you can't write your material worrying that SOME people may find it offensive. It's a creative rule-of-thumb I follow with everything I do. Some folks will like it, some will hate it, some will be offended, but as Bill Hicks once said: "So? Be offended. It won't kill you."

Though, given this situation, I do apologize if it went a little far (since it was fed by your post and not something from general reference). I'm admittedly pretty well known for not only never knowing where "the line" is, but frequently erasing said line and redrawing it (in bad, overly-thick lines) on the edge of the Cliffs of Bad Taste. Just let me know with a message or, y'know, a good swat on the nose with a magazine and I'm quick to catch the hint.

(Yay, I managed to both address the issue AND keep it comics-related! I AM THE MASTER OF MULTITASKING...er... posting?)

The main character in my comic is gay, but I don't know that anyone would know that reading the comic as 99% of the things that are important about him do not involve who he would want to have sex with. And romance/sex is not a key component of the story. Also, he lives in a different world and homosexuality in the world is not an issue that has come up in the story yet.

Even though it is just one of the main traits for my character, I think it does impact how I write my character. He feels a degree of insecurity about it and this vaguely comes across in other things he says or does. Being gay in his world would mean not having offspring and from a place where power is inherited this is a problem. But it is a minor concern at best. You could say that his desire to go rescue his friend is slightly influenced by the fact that he is interested in him romantically, but I doubt he would abandon his friend even if he were not.

Though I am not gay I try to think about how being gay in his situation might impact his life and use that to help decide how he might react to things, but I also think about the people I know that are gay. While some of them may have traits that some people look at as stereotypically gay (other than the desire to sleep with other men) the majority of the things that make them who they are do not depend on their sexuality at all.

I used to be worried about writing characters that were different from me, but then I got over it. I figure you write them as a character first, those traits that separate you from your character as just things you use to help figure out how they might act in different situations.

BlueGecko, you are my favourite.

I liked everything you just said.

I too have gay characters, and their sexuality has no significance to the plot so it's not really mentioned. Wade is (The Voice in Algae's head) and it's vaguely hinted at it when he tried to give advice on women ("Not that I'd have much experience in that area"). Mummy (the mummy) is also, but since he is what he is (an 11 year old, not gone through puberty, and also dead and mummified), it's not really brought up. Mummy never used to be, I actually made up a girlfriend for him, but it just felt... wrong somehow, and ever since I decided he was gay it just made sense.

But then again, the rest of my characters sexualities have no real purpose to the main plot either.

Algae is asexual, for both the reasons of his lack of genitals and because that's just his personality. Mostly a personality thing though.

The women (all 3 of them) in Nothing Fits are all straight.

Fraizer is married to the job.

Solemn is... I don't think he really knows.

But. No one gets any action in Nothing Fits. If they do it'll be off screen and not really mentioned. No sexy times allowed. There are no real social issues surrounding what your sexuality is in the world of Nothing Fits.

Since it's not really relevant to the plot, I haven't been worried about writing these characters that are different to me, since only one character is similar to myself, you just gotta write them. BlueGecko hit it on the nose with her last statement. It does help having friends that you can base things that you have that are different from your characters off (so many of my friends have come out in the past year, so, so many, each of them having vastly different situations, feelings and reactions).

I am kind of regretting bringing this up in the webcomic discussion since it really doesn't belong here, and I probably should've made it a private message to you saying "not cool man" or some such. I suppose I felt the need to bring it up because we were talking about being comfortable in comic forums. In other forums, I've been hit with a virtual (harhar puns) tidal wave of discomfort, and in this forum, there was only one teeny tiny thing and the rest has been dandy. SO ANYWAY apologies to everyone for taking up yet more space to talk about it. This is related to webcomics in that it relates to the webcomics community and the humor used in that community.

I'm not saying you should police your humor. I'm not saying tiptoe around everyone you want to joke with. I'm saying that when it comes to humor, experience is important. The fact that I'm a stranger is what makes the joke unfunny. If you're talking about yourself or someone you know, sure, maybe it's funny. But I'm baffled that you felt the need to make an incest joke about a stranger in the first place. Imagine this: the girl you just met at the office jokes to you "does this neckline make me look like a skank?" You want to joke back: "careful you don't get raped!" Is your joke likely to offend her? More importantly, is it even funny at all? Both of your jokes are offensive, but yours is offensive in a way that doesn't follow the logic of her joke, and intrudes on her person in a way she didn't invite. I don't think asking you to consider that kind of thing is the same as asking you to police your jokes. To me, that seems like pretty basic courtesy. Disclaimer: I am not saying your jokes are as bad as my example, and I wouldn't presume to put that in anyone's mouth. Hyperbole used for the sake of explainy-splain.

On that webcomics topic, I've read many comics that manage to have that comedy thing but don't make randomly offensive jokes about miscarriages or rape or etc. On the flip side, I have a friend who cracks me up with jokes that convince me I am a bad person, and her entire extended family died in the Holocaust. HILARIOUS. Her Holocaust jokes are funny due to context, in a way that Holocaust jokes would not be funny coming from her friends the South Dakota Protestants who never met a Jew before they met her.

This forum just got Godwin'd. Please shut me up forever.

I give this comment a big gay thumbs up. Or a little gay thumbs up, because I am five feet tall.

It should affect how you write them, but it's not necessary for it to ever come up. Kind of like how knowing a character is straight may change how that character reacts to men and women, but won't be outright stated if the story is about how that character learns kung fu or something.

Whoah, Copper! I *love* that comic - It's one of my absolute favorite web comics going. Aside from it being gorgeous, I really enjoy his writing style. Thanks very much for the link, I've not seen that before, even though I've looked at his comic pages often.

I actually think we're saying the same thing now, I'm just a little more subtle (AKA bad at getting my concept across) and you're a little more overt (AKA Godwin'd).



The bold part there is what I mean, it's one thing to make a generally tasteless/offensive joke based on something from your own realm of experience, and another thing entirely to make a joke at the expense of someone else's experience.

One is pushing boundaries of offensive humor, one is being kind of a toolbag. I went into toolbag territory, which is why I apologized.

/fistbump for inevitable understanding?

Oh, I meant that they color/grayscaled (I think the grayscale parts are meant to look flash-backy or something? :P) it all in one go.



Ah! Has he used a separate inker since the beginning of Girl Genius, then? And come to think of it, if he does have an inker, he never seems to mention or credit them, which strikes me as kind of unusual for him.

maybe he gets paid, and/or waived his credit. This happens a lot if the comic artist is hiring someone and is not necessarily doing a callab with the person. The legal copyright also belongs to the comic artist and is not shared with the hired hand. (from my understanding, at least.)

..If inker had problems with that, he'd have said something, I guess. So it doesn't look like a big problem.

"Inevitable" might be the wrong word choice here, because I'm pretty sure we're not saying the same thing. And the longer this drags on the more I'm certain we will continue to not be saying the same thing. I accept your apology (I just noticed that I didn't say anything about that before, sorry) but I would rather not fistbump if it's all the same. I would just like to stop arguing on the internet because I'm beginning to be ashamed of myself.

I believe he and the inker split ways after the first issue. If you take a look at the website and go to the first page, at the bottom of the comic there's a little black portion that says "drawing by Phil Foglio" and "inks by Brian Snoddy." Then, if you go to the most recent page it just says "drawing by Phil Foglio." The most recent stuff doesn't seem to have any notable ink job at all, as though left to his own devices he doesn't quite understand line thickness. Like I said, I still love that guy, but I wish he'd get an inker again. I wonder what that Brian Snoddy fellow is doing these days.

I hate laptop screens. I was away from my computer for a while so I took my laptop to work on my comic. But the thing changes the hue of the colors every time I look at it at a different angle. Now I'm back on my computer monitor so it's all good...But it was hell for the last couple hours. D:

Ahh *that's* what I was missing, thanks! And now I noticed that there's text at the bottom of every HTML page saying "Volume One was inked by Brian Snoddy." ;)

Apparently he works or has worked on Magic: The Gathering art; there's some cool stuff in his website gallery.

Next time I corner Phil at a convention I'll definitely have to suggest that he do some more work with the guy. :D

Snnnrrk!


Snoddy.

B. Snoddy.

Huh. You know what? His inks are really good, but some of his art has a case of the strange-natomies. I don't know who to believe in anymore.



We only wish our names were that cool.

I started the first page of my new chapter (well the first other than the chapter cover page, which I tend to do more weird things with and already finished) and I love it. I really love how the art looks so far, I captured my character how I wanted, and I am just super excited about it.

Well, now I remember why I lost my buffer before, I just want to post all the pages at once. I am currently 2 weeks ahead on my comic, and just want to set them all to upload right now. (Which I am not going to do because I have what seems like 500 random comic things to do in June and will probably need the buffer...but I so want to share.)

Seriously - NaNoMango, Comic Roulette, Random Cross Over comics...everything in the same month.