'Mr Punch and Prof Ratbaggy [Emeritus] is now a 4 months old webcomic, which is surprizing given that I had no idea what I was doing...at all. En route there have been a couple of series -- one on refugees, the other on Fibromyalgia -- and an intensification of the relationship between Mr Punch and the Prof.
All up, over seventy comic 'pages'.
I've skilled up as I pursued an eclectic production niche:photomontage comic making. No use of Photoshop (I've banned it, besides I can't do it nor do I own a copy)-- just a mix of apps/programs. Primary images shot onscreen with an inbuilt camera.
The knack is to work quickly -- unlike the comic making norm where inking and sketching is so laborious. But 'quick' still takes hours to complete.
Magical hours.
At the moment I'm exploring crayon on paper as a skill exercise to supplement the photomontage effects I rely on. I need a graphic tool to fill the space where the digital imagery runs out. I like crayons and pastels because I can work them into 'shape' with my fingers without having to fret over the lines I draw. For me it's like working with clay. Dry clay.
Without going into details, I need to skill up to be able to tackle a couple of pending projects that I'm keen to pursue:
- A study on the Northern Territory Intervention in comic format.
- A memoir -- no doubt in many segmented instalments - that turns my own life into a comic excuse.
- An exposition of socialism in similar mode to Rius works like Marx for Beginners and Cuba for Beginners.
I also want to master stop motion animation...and have a few ideas in mind about that.
Stop motion is easy to do(the way I'd do it -- in fact I have done it) but time consuming and fiddly. A lot of work goes into a few seconds of video time so you have to concentrate on the important narrative bits.
Busy. Busy.
I nonetheless need to skill up so that I can tackle the demands of 'editorial' cartooning. Day to day, ad hoc, graphic political satire demands language skills I'm still working on. So far I haven't felt comfortable with my satiric approaches. The tools I'm using and panel layout I rely on don't seem to suit. The complication is that editorial cartooning is usually projected in one panel and I want to engineer sequence. That also takes up more space on the page...and journal editors who are always word obsessed, of course, are notorious space misers: all the words that fit -- graphics are deployed primarily as decoration.
The other bang to my webcomic buck is that I'll be converting my series projects into ebooks, presentations and other shareable file formats. For now, with all their black background, they don't suit hard copy.
But hey! If a publisher is out there and wants to talk turkey...
As for site traffic, it's rising...but then I use a combination of three locations online:
- The home website itself: punchratbag.org
- Comic Fury and Comic Rocket
So it's hard to estimate day to day patronage. But a few thousand patrons a month after 4 months of existence isn't bad.
