Niche media and The Golden Age of Mediocrity

     Sometimes a tradition fades away for reasons that aren't immediately obvious.  The most immediately relatable for people of my age is the Saturday Morning Cartoon.  They were rooted in old conventions of broadcast television, where the major networks were few and real competition was non-existent.  A known demographic (kids pumped to be not in school) meant advertisers were able to focus marketing, making the whole thing financially viable.  Hell, after Ronnie "I'm glad he's dead" Reagan loosened advertising regulations, they went whole hog on making the cartoons themselves into commercials. 

     Being a huge manchild, I kept watching these well into my late teens.  I'm not about to go all "rarr they don't make em like they used to" because there were still some weird and good ones being made at that point.  The ratio of good to bad, though, was getting a little worse.  Shortly after this, the big networks backed off on Saturday cartoons, for 2 reasons:
 
   1- Cartoon Am Expensive; Even a shitty cartoon costs a fair amount to make.  You're looking to make up for this with ad revenue and toy sales, but kids aren't any dumber than anyone else.  A kid knows a shitty cartoon is shitty, even if they can't fully articulate why.  You look me in the eye and tell me you actually liked "Stop the Smoggies" and I'll call you a filthy fucking liar.

   2-Dedicated cartoon channels; With Cartoon Network in the US, YTV and Teletoon in Canada and others elsewhere, direct targeting of specific niche markets removed the novelty of cartoons on one day of the week. 


     After a little while of this, somebody noticed that barebones talk show media produced on a shoestring budget pulled a similar amount of viewership as the cartoons.  Considering the difference in production costs vs viewers, it was a no brainer to pull the plug.  Consider this strike one.
   
     Jump forward a little and see the rapid ascendance of Reality Television.  The heart and soul of this genre was producing the lowest-end content for as little money as possible.  The immense popularity of this kind of show demonstrated the kind of payoff you can get from throwing whatever nonsense at the wall, as cheaply as possible.  This is strike two.
  
    A few more years later came the Writer's Guild of America strike.  This led not only to a further explosion of reality tv (don't need writers), but it gave us an unfortunately notable moment in modern television; LOST.  An idea that obviously wasn't thought through to conclusion, and likely wasn't even expected to make it past season 1. It's the culmination of "throw everything at the wall", who cares if it makes sense or matters.  And you know what, fuck me, because people loved that shit.

    So here we are now.  Cheaply made niche media is the current doctrine.  The Walking Dead famously had it's creative head leave after the budget was set too drastically low.  The drop in quality was precipitous and immediate.  This made no difference, however, as it was the only "big" tv show about zombies, a niche that had experienced highs and lows, but never this level of mainstream popularity.  Netflix is awash in garbage original content, going to far as the hire Adam Sandler to make things for them.  Oh shit, ok, how did I get this far without Sandler coming up.  It's not brave or original for me to point out that he makes cheap garbage, it's a meme at this point.  Still, THEY KEEP MAKING MONEY.  So keep it up, I guess, since event he biggest idiot in the world still needs to laugh and clap sometimes.

     Anyway speaking of focused niche media for fat drooling idiots, here's what I've been up to with my Mad Max/Fallout/Fist of the North Star raiders comic.

     So this first page turned out way shittier than I originally planned because I had no concept of how to use the tools in this paint program to do shading.  Also I really have no concept of how light and shadow work in general so the learning process involved crashing into it over and over.  Luckily the muddy shittiness of the colour in this one is on a separate layer, so I can go back and re-do it the way I did the ones after.

     The weird empty space spots where it looks like I just stopped trying are areas where word bubbles are going in.  Pretty torn on these colours, but I might just plow through this first part of the story and focus on making it look better down the line.

     I think I fucked up the perspectives a bit.  I'm still not great at seeing it at first, but adding the colour makes problems stand out a little bit more for me.  Everything is still a little too close up and claustrophobic, I have to get better at pulling farther back.

     So far I do think this is better than any other coloured thing I've done.  Not a high bar to clear, but I cleared it anyway.  I just have to finish five more pages for this part of the story, and it's on to the next. I'm sure the second part of the story is going to look far better than the first.

and furthermore,

     The other day, I had a minor computer glitch where I wasn't getting any audio.  I got around to fixing it tonight, and went to youtube to make sure it was coming through clearly.  My usual game of follow-the-algorithm led me back into the old classic rock hole for a bit, since it's probably been years since I listened to, say, the Led Zeppelin catalogue.

     I got to thinking about how I used to mostly have band t-shirts, soaked in gravy.  A huge chunk of these have disintegrated and been tossed.  I have new shirts, such as the one that is an angry face saying "Don't Frick With Me", and the one where a man tells his neighbor "Please don't fart around my kids".  I have several others now that would require a paragraph or two each to impart the context of their images, let alone describe the images themselves.

     The classic rock shirts used to have some side effects.  Sometimes it would be taken as an invite for a drunk dumbass to wander up to me and scream "ROCK AND ROLL", or like stick out his tongue and throw up the devil horns or something.  Other times it could be a kind of fucked up but otherwise benign old dude who was happy to see someone liking music he liked. 

     Nobody has had anything to say about "Please don't fart around my kids" yet.

     The real perk of my current shirts, though, is this: sometimes when walking around, I'll see someone in, say, a JonTron shirt.  After coolly and dramatically lowering my sunglasses (I'm wearing sunglasses), I"ll say "Nice internet shirt...but isn't it a little...*smirk* mainstream?"  As I say this, I am wearing a shirt that says, simply, "SEX BICYCLE".

     Anyway here's the latest.

     I guess this is the last draft pass for this little part.  From here it's clean lines and colour.  After that, I think I can do the next part in a fraction of the time this took me.

     Still not extremely good at drawing someone the same way twice.  Everything's a little claustrophobic too.  All these structural flaws and more, next time.

Thinking about Dee Snyder

     I know this is a stupid topic, but I'm a stupid man so it balances out.  It's also something I've talked about before, but I think I have a little more to add this time.

     I don't often listen to the radio anymore, and much like with television, it feels like something from another planet.  Recently, I was treated to some of the old "you've heard it a billion times and are utterly tired of it because it wasn't actually all that good in the first place" hits, "We're not gonna take it" by Twisted Sister.  The song itself is a pretty straight-forward "Big Dumb Rock Anthem", which is something that gets more and more embarrassing every year.  However, the video is an incredible story all by itself.  I don't want to say "Here, watch it!" but in the off chance you've never seen it, or don't really remember it, maybe refresh yourself.

     It starts out with the usual "parents are shitty and just don't get it" bit.  The dinner table has a palpable tension, tinged with menace.  The children and mother appear quietly resigned to a life of misery under what is clearly a tyrant of a father.  

     When we get up to the son's room, we get a full on dose of this paternal anger.  At first reprimanding his son for the state of his surroundings, his anger grows at an exponential rate.  We're supposed to side with the son in this situation, wondering how this man could be so irrationally angry.

     That's just it though, his anger IS completely irrational.  He is soon bellowing in a military style and acting out the trope of the hard-nosed Drill Sargeant, with more and more military jargon seeping into his speech.  We get a brief moment of "parents not getting it" when he examines a Twisted Sister poster, then lapsing even deeper into the military fantasy.  The boy's clothes are referred to as a uniform.  He then questions his son's masculinity, before screaming "I CARRIED AN M-16".  It's at this point the absurdity of his anger should be understood; this man served in Vietnam, and was SHATTERED by it.  A decade later and he is still haunted by whatever happened to him in that ridiculous farce of a war.  He, as well as his family, bears the unfathomable cost of pointless, imperialistic conquest; a psyche shattered, and a man that may have once been happy annihilated.

     It is at this point the song begins, with a guitar chord startling the father so much (no doubt inducing a flashback) that he stumbles back and falls out the second story window.  We're supposed to laugh about this, because dad is a dick.  The boy then spins around and turns into Dee Snyder, singing about how we aren't going to take "it".  This is followed by Twisted Sister invading this man's home, and heaping abuse on him, even sending him through ANOTHER second story window.  As this walking, breathing avatar of Butt Metal causes enormous damage to the house,  the final shot is very telling;  the wife, fully aware of the demons her husband deals with, comforts him in his agony, a look of profound sadness on her face as a logo or some shit appears.  Whatever this logo is, I have to assume it if a formation of F-4 Phantom fighter jets, to rub further salt into this man's psychological wounds.

     So the reason I was thinking about this is pretty stupid and simple.  Dee Snyder hosts, or at least used to host, some kind of radio show that Q104 would run.  It was exactly what you would imagine it to be, endless streams of big hair, forgettable butt metal.  Normally this is something I wouldn't give a second thought to, but in between songs he happened to say something along the lines of "Home of REAL music, not that JUSTIN BIEBER crap".  Far be it from me to defend ol' Beeby Boo, in fact I can say I don't much care for his music, but god damn if a grown man in what I believe was 2015 complaining about Justin Bieber isn't the saddest fucking thing.  

     Also, this is just personal opinion with no research to back it up, so I may be completely wrong; for all this talk about rebelliousness and sticking it to the man, I guarantee you Snyder thinks Reagan was a fantastic president, and probably LOVES Trump too.

     Well now that I've dealt with that, here's how I'm coming along with drawing stuff.

     I'm on like the fourth pass or so, and once I've finished that up I'm going to work on finalizing and actually putting out the first part of this story.  This first page is pretty much ready for the final pass.

     I made so many large mistakes on this first chunk of the story, but correcting them would involve starting over from the top and taking forever.  I think once I get this first bit done, I'll have a better idea of how to make the next part much better.

     Trying to fill in the surrounding area, can't have everyone hanging out in a featureless void.  This isn't Garfield, after all.

     The endlessly messy text is still placeholder, but I'm definitely happier with the second draft so far.  Reading the way I write, I must be hell to try and have a conversation with.  Just meandering all over the place and circling a point without ever hitting it. At least it's nearly impossible to read because of the visual mess right now.  Figuring out balloon placement is going to be a big deal for me.

     I wanted to give Hugh a little detail, because so far he's just been a drawing of a nearly nude man in an empty room, and that's just the story of my first bachelor apartment. This panel probably should have been wider and pulled out more, but that's the kind of thing I'll start getting better in the next part of the story.

So far Hugh has elements of The Humongous, Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, and The Shredder.

     Getting excited about tech

     Getting excited about memes (having lots of trouble with that middle panel looking up)

      Getting excited about booklearning
 

     This page has been almost unchanged since I first drew it, I really like it a lot.  Hard to dial in the dialogue though.

     Yeah that's a joke about eating ass, it's current year

     So these last 3 or 4 pages still need to be finished with regards the the current pass, but I think what I've learned so far is making the general process faster.

     Well whatever who cares, continue not taking it I guess.  Maybe don't take in in the context of the song from the end of The Who's "Tommy", though.

Bye Bye Bye (bye bye bye)

*Nickelback voice* IT'S BEEN A WHILE

      Now that "everything grinds to a halt for the holidays" December is over and done with, it's time to stop neglecting this.  I don't have any rambling insane theories to talk about right now, so instead how about this: have you ever tried going to a climbing gym? It's a primally satisfactory kind of exercise, my inner ape does excited backflips over it.

     Anyway, on to my ever eroding efforts.

     There's still lots of sticks and bones here in this second pass, I'm mostly focusing on trying to make everything look normal structurally.  Going to all the trouble to make a character look perfect when there's still the chance of shit getting tossed out would be a silly waste of time, not like drawing a comic about a chubby raider gang.

      AREA

      Still haven't really solidified a way of drawing anyone either.  Faces vary wildly from panel to panel, but I guess I'm starting to get proportions under control.  No wonder so many people just have an asset bank they reuse over and over.

     The three main characters are different types of horrible nerd.  The guy with the cap and huge goggles is a tech nerd, the mohawk guy is a social media nerd, and the cowboy hat guy is a book nerd.  I'm not talking cool, hip nerd either, I'm talking abrasive, socially difficult nerds.  Here the goggle man is jazzed about obscure computer parts.

     Here the mohawk guy is getting excited about being on the cutting edge of memes via this universe's equivalent of the internet, HAMNET.  Look how bad that head is in the top middle.  Getting a face to look right when they're looking upwards is reeeeeal difficult.

     Finally, cowboy nerd is excited about maps and survey data, and what is the equivalent of a Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual. 

    The things they all found are going to play major parts in the story of course, otherwise I'd just be wasting time here.  Also, you may have noticed what a sausage festival the story is so far.  There will be women, and they will also be certain types of horrible nerds, I just need to nail down their personalities.  I have lots of time for this, since what you're seeing now is only 2 or 3 pages from the end of the first chapter.  Other characters will be sprinkled around in chapter 2, and they'll play larger roles later.

   Well, goodbye.