rejected comics

Hello, after some weeks of hiatus , I decided to come with a little update , apart from the usual work and social life excuse, I've spent time drawing Currents of space, believing I was getting toward the end…  My goal was to be finished by the start of summer, but now I'm not so sure anymore, I also had a slight scare yersterday as an update in WordPress cramped my ability to upload pictures into the blogs!!! Thanksfully after working on that a while I managed to resolved the problem (surprisingly the sitehost was rather efficient once I pointed out what was to be done…) .

Anyway I plan to restart the publishing of Tzar very soon, as I have given up hope for the moment of a quick ending to this episode of CoS. See you soon for new material on Rejected Comics!

The surprisingly good weather is taking its toll , as it gets difficult to stay inside , drawing and writing when the sun is shining outside, oh well rain will be back soon enough, here is a little preview on a summer themed tzar strip I plan to publish very soon …

Haven’t coloured it yet as you can see…

Big news at the official facebook fan page of The Tzar, this week end fans will have the possibility to vote on the issue of a panel in this comic strip , I recently got a critic from a friend about this panel and decided to do something about it, however rather than making the change, I asked the question on Facebook, shall we let the panel in the strip as it is or change it?

I was too lazy to colour the newly made panel, but if it gets the most votes, I will colour it and replace the other panel. I had to make two post on the facebook page of Tzar as I didn’t find out how to put questions and the picture in the same post…

Next time I’ll just do it from the blog , stupid facebook…. People have the weekend to decide… We’ll see if I have to change the panel…

***Update***

The people have made their choice and The Tzar of course listen to the councel of the people, the panel in the english strip has been changed, I left the norwegian one as it was for comparison!

This week-end I was at the Farnborough airshow with a some collegues, there were some really impressive display of planes. Not surprisingly this kind of show attract all kind of commercial actors to show their wares, related to air-technology. Some of the more amusing publicity stunts were from the military , I’m not sure if this message board was ironic or they actually meant it

Let’s just say that the Tzar was impressed by their message:

The world is complex. Your desisions don’t have to be

With a drone just in front of it! Awesome, it is so inspirational , life is complicated but our advanced weapons will blow those problems away military style… no problems, BAM! Problems are gone, thank you Thales!

The message is so awesome that The Tzar feels obliged to trust those good people and award them with the “Shut up and take my GNP!” award! Thales has earned itself a new client and the Tzar will without doubt slash the healthcare and educational budget of his kingdom for some of their great technology!

Congratulation again Thales for your “Shut up and take my GNP” award!

After a rather long time of inactivity , I’m allocating more time (and efforts) on the site. I’ve currently working on new tzar strips (I just posted a new strip) and I plan to work a bit more on Currents of Space as well, but my main efforts will be on Tzar.

When I started publish my comics on the blog I printed small “visit cards” with the adress of the blog. It’s useful when you meet people at the pub and they wonder at your site, as they usually forget about it the day after. Those cards are a nice reminder and quite practical.

Don’t they look cool? and as a bonus I insterted my very own QR-code so people can scan it with their smartphone to access the site (which isn’t really smartphone friendly… but who is counting…)

Can’t wait to distribute those lovely items!

I have been relatively lazy with publishing new comics on the site lately, and i even received my new intuos 4 from Pixmania which is incredibly nice. I had to fill some forms informing them of the theft and a couple of weeks later i received a new board and mp3 player. I hand it to pixmania for a great customer service, and the fact that they took responsibility for me not receiving the goods in the first place. Unlike posten which on top on giving away my parcel to the nice junkie no question asked, sent me a revolting letter informing they decided after a short inspection that they had no responsibility in the incident and they really sorry and i could **** myself… Well they didn’t write the last part but they might as well have, it would have been more honest.

Anyway back to my first question,  why haven’t been drawing like a maniac and published a lot of stuff??? I blame the damn sun which destroyed my plans to use the Easter vacation, the weather was so nice that i couldn’t with good conscience stay at home and do some creative work. I went out , enjoyed the sun, had icecreams, icecoffes and beers outside and went home usually completly drained but happy.

Anyway i published a comicstrip of Tzar today, after a coworker asked me why there had been no update yet on my site… which i’m affraid will be quite a couple of weeks more as i’m going to vacation to visit relative on the continent… But i’ll be back!

I haven’t updated the comics for some times now, one “minor” setback is that my old drawing board has grown more unresponsive and innacurate, i ordered a new one a couple of weeks ago, and i should be the owner of a new splendid Wacom Intuos 4 s right now

However some very bold and desperate thieves have gone through my postbox which is at street level and hit the jackpot. Jupp i live in one of the richest country in the world and there are ruffians desperate enough to go through people’s postboxes to see if they can find valuables there…

You would think the postoffice would ask for some kind of ID when people come to reclaim a package there… but nope, they only ask you to sign the piece of paper once you received in the mail… The astute thief had no problem copying my name right from the card and received my package with a smile and “have a nice day” from the lady at the post office. For normal parcels the post office doesn’t require the recipient to show an ID to make it easier for your mum or your partner  or even your local junky who managed to snatch the parcel card from your postbox to get it for you, handy huh? I can’t understand why the post office haven’t changed their services a long time ago… asking an id when delevering packages that can be worth 100′s of euros should be a minimum. The system would work fine if you live at the Larkin’s little village where everybody knows your name but i live in a relatively large city where criminality is part of the deal it’s just dumb…

I’ve made a reclamation to the webshop i ordered from (which should take it up with the postoffice) but it could take some time before it get through… in the mean time , no drawing board for me…So for the time being i work on my scetches and ideas but i hope to resolve the problem soon… I still have a few Tzar stripes to publish however….

I went back to work at the start of the month… lot of stuff to get used to again, not the least getting up at ungodly hours in the middle of the  night (7-8 pm) to get to my helpdesk technician work… i have been somewhat lax(er) with the production of my comics but i hope to get back to new heights of production once i’m up to date with the latest way to ask people to restart their computer when it isn’t working.

On the plus side one newspaper showed interest in Tzar , i had a nice correspondence with the redactor of DagenMagazinet who seemed to like my comics.  Magazinet is one of the main christian conservative daily publication in the country (yup apparently Norway’s got a bible belt too…) , so it’s nice to get their intention.

Alas and despite the redactor genuine good taste in the 9th art,the paper chose Peanuts (aka Snoopy) for their future publications… oh well my comic got beaten by one of most famous, prestigious and recognized comics in history, i can live with that and will proudly continue to draw stripes of our favorite tyrant.

you won this time Snoopy but just you wait, the Tzar is going to upgrade his air force very soon!

Not in a good way, the entire blog network started to behave strangely yesterday evening, i used a lot of time trying to find out why i couldn’t upload new stuff into the blog… then i discovered i couldn’t update or change any files in my domain, after a short chat with one.com i was informed they had some technical problems with the database. The problem got resolved not long after on but i wish they could informed me, i used a lot of time trying to figure out why nothing worked all of the sudden.

on a more positive note i also connected my website with flattr a micropaying system who let fans with a flattr account send me small amounts of cash by pushing the button on my blogs… Some of the magazines and newspapers i sent some of my material have responded, one thanked me for the offer but added they already had comics and didn’t need mine (fair enough…). BA one of the most successful paper in the city had the gal to respond they couldn’t afford my comics… or as they put it they didn’t have the budget for it, they must have heard of my outrageous fees (a button click worth a few cents in flattr)… i had to smile, i guess it was nice of them to write back.

I had a great weekend at the Bergen Game Jam helping with the design of a homemade computer game… i was actually impressed by the result given we had no experience with the making of computer games , the other groups made cool games too. gameplay-wise our game reminds a bit of lemmings but from a flip-screen overhead perspective which actually exponentially increase the possibilities for traps, events and situations a lot in each level. I asked the programmer in the group to send me a few screenshots, i will post them as soon as i got them!