Ginger Snaps

by John Wigger on December 4, 2009

From Wikipedia: In modern-day UK, the words “ginger” or “ginga” are sometimes derogatorily used to describe red-headed people.

I gave Jack red hair when I created him because I thought it’d be a nice change of pace for werewolves as it’s not something you see all the time. It also lets me differentiate him by color which is something that I take the time/effort to do while creating characters…. Each character has a predominant color that I try not to replicate amongst other characters.

So, we’ve found out the wolfman is named Jack and the Frankenstein’s monster is named Francis N. Stein. More name/personality revelations to come in the next week.

-John

A side note:

I changed the file format of the uploaded strip for this update to a png 24 instead of the 256 color gif I had been using. It greatly increases the file size, but it looks tons better with the gradients in the image. If there’s a massive outcry against the larger file size I can swap back. Lemme know.

Special Editions

by John Wigger on May 11, 2012

I’ve been working on a project for a little while… I have been quietly editing the earliest strips in the archive to get the fonts/word balloons up to a look closer to the current quality/standard. Each update day for the last week I’ve not only been putting out a new comic… I’ve also put up an edited version of one of the earliest strips in the Zombie Roomie archive.

I have wanted to go back and update the font for a long while… as you see, I have changed fonts and moved to an all UPPER CASED font for the comic’s dialogue. Back when I started I used the Mixed case of a different font. I also had word balloons that left a lot to be desired.

While I’m doing this editing, in very rare cases I’m changing a little (and I do mean little) of the art. The biggest thing I’ve changed can be seen in the above image where I changed the door’s location in panel one. When I had started Zombie Roomie, I had thought about giving the guys a door that was on the outside of their apartment… like they had a duplex or something. But I quickly changed my mind to have them live in a multiple story apartment building.

More frequently than that style of art change is when I change some small color issue. For the first few weeks of comics I had John wearing almost turquoise jeans… I changed to a more denim blue and now all of his jeans will be the same color. I’m also fixing Zoey’s eyes, almost all of Jamal’s colors in his early strips, etc. I want to make sure the early comics reflect the colors that I’ve settled on as I’ve gotten into a groove with Zombie Roomie.

There’s also a bit of recompositing going on. I originally had really tall and skinny panels, but just before the one year anniversary I changed to the current panel ratio. I want to have the comics all fit in the same size so I’m taking the art from the comics and repositioning it into the new size.

That also allows me to make the comics all the new size of 1000 pixels wide. The very first comics were around 935 pixels and after the first year I moved to 970. In the last few weeks I’ve moved up to 1000 pixels and all the edited comics will end up being that as well… when I get to them.

Other than a strange George Lucas like desire to go back and edit my old work… there is an actual reason for this. I’m getting the files ready for the first book of Zombie Roomie. I want the reading experience to be consistent. The less than stellar word balloons, the changing fonts and cases, and the colors changing during the course of the book would be far more noticeable than they were if you were reading the comic as the strips were going up each update. The art changes are to keep things consistent.

I’m not doing the totally insane thing of redrawing the old strips… I’m just tweaking them.

I just wanted to let you guys know what was going on in case you were interested and/or you were going through the archives and noticed the drastic change when you got to the old strips after the updated ones.