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Thanks, Paul, David! I used a local printer. I was checking around and a friend of mine knew of a printer that could give me a reasonable price on a short press run. The big printer I used to work at wouldn't even consider doing the job.

Ha! That's great, Paul! Love the face.

Thanks, Homes! I'm working on the pricing now, Myron. I've got to figure out how much they'll cost to mail and balance everything with how much PayPal takes out. They cost more than expected to print. Best guess right now would be $5 including shipping. A bit steep for a coloring book, but they are a very limited edition. :-)

And here they are! I'm very happy with how they came out. Can't wait to see little kids coloring them!

Truer words were never spoken, Myron! I just got back from picking up the coloring books! They look great and a few friends chipped in to increase the order to by 50 books! Bless them, since that lowers my per book cost! I'll post a picture soon. They came out great!

Thanks, Gene! I'm not ready to make a formal announcement yet, but I'll informally say that I just signed a deal to have the "Greyhawk and the Starbucklers of the Caribbean" and "The Wannabe Pirates and the Curse of Greyhawk Island" built as iPhone/iPod apps! I am really excited about the prospect and hope it will be a way for a bunch of kids to discover The Wannabe Pirates! If only I was gainfully employed, I could buy a new iPhone & an iPad and right it off on my taxes. :-)

Thanks, guys! Yeah, it's been too long to remember, but I must've thought they looked right at the time. :-) They should definitely be the other way. I used the same reflection style on all of the spaceship sets, so I would be looking at an impossible amount of re-rendering to change it. I've actually got a deadline now, as I've promised to have all of the pages completed by tomorrow. It's going to be wild having the whole thing finished. A 206 page graphic novel ain't nothin' to sneeze at. :-)

Superhuman just about covers it. :-)

I think I've made mention here that I've been turning "The Wannabe Pirates and the Curse of Greyhawk Island" into a graphic novel, reformatting the pages to comic book proportions. It's been a fun challenge and I must say I prefer the way it looks as a graphic novel to the uniform panels of the comic strip. Today I ran into challenge: Part 158 of the story was this 1-panel gag: To get it to work on the comic page, I had to split it into two panels like this: The only problem is that although you can see they are running in opposite directions, it's not clear that they are about to intersect. So, this time out I was forced to create a new page. It was fun, though and it helped me bridge a problem with the next strip which introduced these big robot suits as a throwaway gag in the last panel. It was very satisfying to be able to show the collision I had always assumed happened. :-)

Thanks, Gerry!

Another great job, Matt!

Thanks, Matt! That would be cool! I've considered taking a couple of pages and submitting them to some of these online coloring book places. There are tons of sites that have coloring book pages you can download and print for your kids ...most of them violating copyrights... but I thought it would be a good way to plant a bit of advertising. I've got a few things going right now and am hoping they will all add up to a bigger audience and awareness for the Wannabe Pirates.

Thanks, Jim! Ken, for all your help with modeling characters for the next story, I will happily mail you a couple for your niece and nephew. Email me with your address! Also, I don't want to jinx it by saying too much, but let's just say in the very near future, you may be able to buy the graphic novels for your mobile devices (iPhone/iPad/Android, etc.)! I'm very excited about this!

Thanks Gene & Ken! I wanted to set it up so that it told part of the story (then the last page is the hard sell to get them to go to the website and read the complete story), so I picked out relevant panels and brought them into Illustrator, gave them 50% opacity and "inked" over them using the pen tool as if the panels were pencils. To give it the look of Coloring Books I remembered from my youth, I made the backgrounds look like they were inked with a pen and the characters like they were inked with a brush. It really makes the characters stand out and it did help simplify the process. Drawing all of those lines on the ship was hard enough without having to try to imitate brush strokes. :-) No toon render or anything like that. Everything you see is vector art.

Here's something different! I talked with Rob Tracy on the phone last week and he had an idea I really glommed onto: doing a Wannabe Pirates coloring book! After a whooole lot of work and a lot of checking around for printing, I sent the files off today! There's a Webcomics Expo coming up next weekend in Dallas and I'm going to attend and have them for sale. Here's a tiny peek at some of the pages! I'm really looking forward to seeing the finished book! It's a pretty cool thought to think that there will be little kids coloring Wannabe Pirates pages! :-) On a tangent... when I was working on the page with Doc Bokor's Voodoo Mask, I suddenly remembered the inspiration for it. I can't imagine it's obvious to anybody but me, but I was thinking of Dr. Venture from The Venture Brothers when I first designed the mask. :-)

Render time for Mac Pro, 2x2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, v15 3:12 Since I can render 7 frames at the same time, it will be the same as 27 seconds per frame.

This is an interesting idea. If I've got this right, the plug-in would create the spline (bones and geometry, pre-weighted) then you would just adjust the shape of the splines to fit the rotoscope. An arm or leg could be defined by the number of joints and generated the same way? I could see where many people would like something like that.

Exactly, Nancy! Although I should say that I do not condone the killing of parrots for any other reason. :-)

Starting today, I'm going to be running a tutorial of sorts for how-to make a 3D webcomic (which is really just how *I* make a 3D webcomic.) It's going to be in comic strip form, so that I can still have a gag a day, but I do plan on covering most of the things I do in actually creating the comic, so that might be of interest to some folks...

Yes, it's like those old wildlife documentaries where the mama bear makes her cubs climb up a tree and then runs off and never comes back. We're all cubs sitting up in a tree asking WTF? :-)

Astounding!

Thanks, Gene! This is the first time that I've created a character with no neck. Ken, I was thinking more in the sense that he was dumb and heavy. :-) He's based on a generic pirate character that I drew for one of the original title cards for the home movie version of The Wannabe Pirates. It's in the very first post of this thread. The one with Flemm being forced to walk the plank. McCrary drew a version of him in the webcomic, too, but he put a shirt on him. I liked the idea of him being bare-chested with the cliché anchor tattoo. The other crewman, Nash, is indeed skinny and was modeled back in January of 2009. You can see him in this post. Once Nash is rigged and textured, he'll have a scar running down his face and his left eye will be permanently shut. I think Nash is the only character I've modeled based on a character that McCrary designed. The parallel would be that Nash is Cutthroat's Mr. Sneeze and Ballast is his Poco Boco. Nash is more weaselly and Ballast is the muscle.

Ouch, Gerry! Modeled a new character today! Here's one of Cutthroat Jacques' crew ...I'm calling him "Ballast."

Not to mention that the bus could stop (presumably to pick someone up and drop someone off). That would not only give enough time to wash the palette, but also (like Will suggested), the ads on the bus could change each time... possibly to be a title and credit for the next segment. I really like the bus stop idea and Mark has created a great looking set.

Stian, that is incredible! My head hurts thinking about how much work that was, but the results are amazing!