Monday, 30. October 2006, 14:28:42
comics, Chronicles of the Witch Queen, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, webcomics
The remastered edition of
Guðrún ends over on the
Chronicles of the Witch Queen site today.
As far as I know, it's still very rare for any webcomic to be remastered, though reruns with commentary have occurred in a few places.
Guðrún was the story with which I finally got serious about publishing
Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan online six years ago. But that doesn't mean I immediately got it all right;the digital cleaning, lettering and resizing were done very clumsily and no high-res masters were kept from which I could re-do the work. So I eventually bit the bullet and re-scanned the whole thing from the original art. The new version looks a lot better, even though, in many ways, it's "rawer" - there is less tinkering with the analog art than there was the first time around, simply because it's no longer needed to make tiny scans presentable or preserve bandwidth.
I'll still need to replace the image files on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan site. To do that, I'll go back to the master files, cut the pages in half and upload those half-pages at a width of 800 pixels instead of the 600(-ish; getting a consistent width was one thing I did wrong at the time) pixels wide images the site has now, so that the originally-intended presentation is left intact and any pages containing comments can be preserved. That's a bit of a chore, but I'll get around to it eventually.
Potentially the best thing about the project: I now have lettered master files that are suitable for print, if anyone's interested...
Thursday, 26. October 2006, 08:40:33
comics, webcomics, Norway, Chronicles of the Witch Queen
Today, some ten years after Geir, Daniel and I first discussed the concept of having their characters and mine crossing over,
Alcydia ends. If you haven't read it yet, why not go to the
beginning of the story, sit back, relax and enjoy the devilish laughter rending the night over Iceland? Countess Alcydia orders you to!
Tuesday, 6. June 2006, 09:08:16
comics, webcomics, Chronicles of the Witch Queen, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan
...
Alcydia by Daniel Østvold and Geir Strøm has started on the
Chronicles of the Witch Queen website. It will run in full-page installments on Tuesdays and Thursdays, until finished.
Alcydia is intended as a companion piece to
Guðrún, which relaunched yesterday. Or vice versa. In both stories, Duchess Guðrún of Dungill Fens is kidnapped during a stay in Iceland, and it's up to Tamlin's gang and the Baron von Fieffelfalsfaffel to find and rescue her. The events as told are not
exactly the same though: think of it as a crossover told from the points of view of both casts involved, with both stories being incorrect recollections of what actually happened.
Many thanks to Adam Cuerden for his editorial input, especially in the second half of the story.
Monday, 5. June 2006, 13:19:23
Chronicles of the Witch Queen, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, comics, webcomics
The first, introductory, page of the
Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan storyline
Guðrún is now up over on the
Chronicles of the Witch Queen website. The whole 64-page story will run there in three full-page installments a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Guðrún is the story of Duchess Guðrún's kidnapping in Iceland. Tamlin's gang join up with the infamous Baron von Fieffelfalsfaffel to find out what exactly has happened and rescue the Duchess. Guðrún was previously published on the
Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan website and is one of the most popular storylines in that series. The quality of the scans, however, left a lot to be desired, so to take care of that, here's a new, revised and enlarged edition.
Monday, 29. May 2006, 19:18:41
Chronicles of the Witch Queen, comics, fantasy, Kel
...
As of today,
Courtly Manners and
Courtly Manners 2: The Unicorn Race are free for everyone to read. These were the last of the comics I'd originally created for
Modern Tales that were still behind a subscription wall, so this represents my farewell to subscriptions as a business model.
The comics themselves are light romps; Geir Strøm, who wrote the second story, sees them as the comics equivalent of summer popcorn movies, which works for me. See Kel and Krakatoa cause maximal embarrassment to themselves and others in the genteel setting of the Witch Queen's castle, and see the Queen not be amused!
Friday, 23. December 2005, 23:28:24
Chronicles of the Witch Queen, webcomics, Christmas
I've added some more old, but re-scanned and re-processed comics to my website:
I've been rescanning other comics for my website. So far I've done:
Nightmares featuring the characters from
Santa's Revenge;
When We Had Tails, a wordless, biblically-inspired comic with a script from Geir Strøm;
Tree Test a story of two individualists in conflict. Or something like that; and
The Grim Barrowman, a tale of Death stalking his prey with glassy eyes and a wheelbarrow.
I've just noticed that the final comic has some grey stains on it that I didn't see while scanning. Apologies - I'm still breaking in a new monitor at the studio. Will fix in the morning.
There is a
Full Listing of all the comics I have online, which I update regularly. New material is also announced on my (non-Opera)
weblog, which has a
Livejournal feed if you don't like adding another bookmark. There's an RSS feed that you could add to your links in my.opera if you're so inclined.
Christmas at Blocksberg finishes tomorrow, and that will be that for Christmassy things from me and the COTWQ team until - well, until next summer, I suppose. Those things don't actually get written and drawn during Christmas, you know? I have plans for Christmas 2006...
Monday, 5. December 2005, 09:19:46
Norway, webcomics, Chronicles of the Witch Queen
Christmas time is upon us, so over at
Chronicles of the Witch Queen, we're running a seasonal story. In the dark days of December, witches ride out on a Wild Hunt! But then they like to follow that up with a cozy evening around the Christmas tree unwrapping presents. One year, though, Santa goes missing. Will Queen Elspeth find a replacement in time? And just what is Countess Alcydia up to? Read all about it in
Christmas at Blocksberg! Art by Daniel Østvold; writing by Geir Strøm.
If you have a website you want to liven up with a seasonal comic, you can use our Tooncast: cut and paste <script language="javascript" src="http://www.webcomicsnation.com/tooncast.php?series=blocksberg"></script>into your website.
Sunday, 6. November 2005, 10:39:39
comics, Chronicles of the Witch Queen
The Eye of the Underworld wrapped up on Friday on Webcomicsnation. For a series I drew eight years ago, it's pretty good, actually. Go
read it from the beginning if you didn't follow it during its one-month run.
Eye was just beginning to reach the lower rungs of the
Webcomicsnation All-Time Top 100 in the past week. Again, quite good for something that has been available online for years although with something like 2 billion people online it will be a while before everyone has seen it. Compared to
The Double's performance (peaked at #30 when there was less competition, now at #56), it's even more of an achievement, because
The Double was new to more of my and Geir's regular readership and was twice as long, meaning twice as many pages to count towards its ranking in the top hundred. Nevertheless, it's worth noting that as with all online ranking systems, there's a power distribution going on: Position #96 has less than half the pageviews of Position #56, and the Number One comic (currently the political satire comic
Neil Lisst) has something like 20 times the pageviews as Number 56 (However, if
Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan were a Webcomicsnation comic, it would trounce the Number One day after day).
The next long story will have even more competition, and will be even shorter, but we will nevertheless try and get
Christmas at Blocksberg into that Top 100 as well. However, that won't begin to run until December. Next week, we'll have two quick two-pagers,
Thousandstab and
Staff Cutbacks. Then we'll move to posting odds and ends, sketches and previews on an irregular basis until December.
And in January, we'll have some brand spanking new material from Daniel.
WIDGETIZE