More television than reality – part 1

More television than reality – part 1

by John Wigger on August 8, 2011

Welcome back to new comics!

I took off a bit of last week to recharge my batteries and figure out what I needed to do to continue the comic.

I’ve been having a bit of writer’s block lately where I have the ideas for the plot and what needs to happen in the story, but the jokes that drive each strip to strip have been fighting me.

The last time I took a hiatus was when I decided to take back the writing on Zombie Roomie as well as doing the art. So, it’s almost poetic that during this hiatus I talked with Bill, my buddy who was writing with me before that hiatus… We’re working together again and he’s bringing you the jokes.

Starting with today’s comic Bill is crafting the dialogue and shaping the joke/gag for the strip while I’m doing the plot outlines, laying out the story beats and of course still doing all of the art.

–

This week is a week of Hunter strips that help set up major plot points for the comic over the next few months of strips. John and George will have their own sort of hiatus as the major characters are taking a backseat to Hunter and his tv show goings on.

Back before John and George were starting their move from the basement to the fifth floor, I had started to have this Hunter storyline start up, but it just didn’t feel right and I kept putting it off. But here’s all of his previous appearances and mentions in the comic to date:

Hunter
Tug of war
Plumb out of luck

So come back Wednesday, because yes there will be a comic!

Comment ¬

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.