New Fey (not a webcomic)

So here's Fey page 5. And I think I've found the secret to non-jaggedy art (or a secret, anyway): don't use the "save for web" function on PhotoShop, even though other webcomics artisits seem to do it. This time I just saved it regularly, and as a .jpg instead of a .gif. The file's bigger, of course, but it looks sooooo much better (if you can ignore the shadowy bit where I joined the two scans--this one's got greys, so I couldn't rely on a b&w scan to get rid of shadows). Time to find a web provider with much cheap webspace, methinks. Anyway, I'll be fixing the previous pages asap.

So there are two new things about this page, besides the nicer look. One is that it's the first time you meet the main character (one of two, actually). I think I broke some kind of sacred rule of fiction by waiting so long to show a main character. Just think of the first four pages as a prologue, if it bothers you (I don't because generally prologues are a poor attempt to fill the reader in with info that should have been worked into the body of the story). New thing number two is grey tones in the art. And they're not cg.

Which leads me to the bracketed part of the title. I just read Scott MCCloud's Reinventing Comics (which I will blather about more when I post about my latest reading), and it got me thinking about what webcomics are, and how Fey really doesn't exploit the electronic format much at all. And I realized that it's because Fey is only a webcomic in the sense that it's a comic published on the web. What it is is a print comic that I can't afford to self publish and haven't got enough of to submit to publishers, so I'm putting it online.

It doesn't bother me at all that my comic's not really a webcomic, but I do want to explore the idea of making webcomics--real webcomics--some more. And I want to learn to draw manga style (partly in the hopes that it'll make my drawing style a little more spare, less hatching-heavy). So I thought, hey, I should try them both at the same time. So what I'm going to do is play around with PhotoShop and make a webcomic that explores whatever I feel like exploring at the time. And I'll put it online whenever I happen to finish a page. It's going to be called Into the Woods. Why? Partly because I really liked Alberto Manguel's book of essays about books called Into to Looking-Glass Wood, and partly because when you say someone is "out of the woods" it means they're out of danger. I figure this'll be new territory, and maybe dangerous in a sense. Plus, I like trees.