Hi to COMIXtalk

Well, if this works this blog will now be viewable on COMIXtalk

This is related to PixelPalaces pressents: Dragon Knights, which is one of the more technically ambicious comics and hopefully also has a good artwork and story (feedback would be nice people).

AFAIK it's the only major action comic mostly in the SVG format. SVG is similar to SWF (Flash) but is a non-propriatory open standard. It's now natively supported by most browsers except Internet Explorer (which still needs a plug-in to display SVG). I'm trying to make full use of SVG's features, using gradients and filters to make the vector graphics look more like bitmaps, and using interactivity and bits of animation. Unfortunately browsers and plug-ins are inconsistent in how well they handle this but things are improving rapidly. I'm also making an effort to produce this comic as much as possible with free software - mostly Inkscape.

Part IX is still in production and will be a 3D animation produced in Blender. Unfortunately this means that updates are rather slow at the moment.

Part X is an XHTML page sumerizing the story to date. I'm doing this to have some updates between the part IX updates.

Part XI will be back to SVG but with stylistic improvements.

The story is unusual in that it's about superheroes but set in the 22nd century (so far). The Earth has been plunged into an ice age and most people have super powers due to nanotechnology. There are also some ominous aliens. I try to tackle controvertial subjects and keep things scientifically accurate.

Life imitating art?

I find it a bit creepy when reality starts bearing a weird resemblance to something I've written or drawn. I wanted a character who'd lost a parent in 9/11 and, as a result, had developed a great hatred of Islam - even converting to Judaism. Muslims tend to accuse their critics of racism although Islam is a religion, not a race (so this is inherently illogical and certainly doesn't counter objections to things like doctrine or the behaviour of Muslims). To dispel such accusations, I made this character of African extraction and appearance. I thought this character would have changed his name to something fitting his rather fanatical ideology. Barach was a good first name, as it means "Thunderbolt" and belonged to an Israelite warrior in Judges. Maybe his family name was originally Brown and he Jewized it to Gold. Then he needed a daughter so I called her Jael after the woman who killed the Biblical Barach's arch enemy. Then I discover there's a company called Barrat Gold. Then Barach Obama became a likely candidate for the next US pressident, the first black man to do so. Now I discover that he has a poor half-brother who's mother was named Jael!

Actually this is a bit odder because Obama's father was a Muslim but Barach and Jael aren't mentioned in the Koran and Barach Obama senior pressumably didn't name his wife!

New part 9x update

Yes there's a new part 9x update, which means that I think I'm about 25% of the way though a rather complicated part 9 update. This is an animation of a new and rather silly mod.

I've also been putting more adverts on my site. Sorry but I have to eat and justify the time I spend on this to my family. If you want to see it advert free, send me lots of money!

Another update

Well I've finally got theoretically half way through the next Part IX update so you get a new Part X update. Hopefully the second half of the next Part IX update won't take anywhere near as long as the first half.

I'm still not comfortable with the main page. It looks kind of messy but at least you should be able to find things easily. Any ideas on how I may improve it?

According to Google Analytics, most the people who visit my site don't come from comic sites. It may be that they don't know that they're supposed to vote for comics and make comments in the forums or on comic sites. Therefore hardly anybody does this and I don't look as popular as I really am. Let me know if you can think of a way to get these people to vote etc.

Terminator gaff

I was watching Terminator: The Sara Connors Chronicles last night and it was said that Sara's blood type was O- and John's AB-. Er, don't science fiction script writers check their basic genetics! Somebody with blood type O can't have an AB child! Well they can if they're a chimera or have two copies of the very rare h-ve gene but this is highly unusual! They could have made John and his uncle both B- (which is still fairly rare) and it would have been possible without invoking anything weird!

What is so difficult about genetics that so many people just seem to have soom weird blind spot about it?

New update and site change

I've finally done an update but it's basically just a filler. I don't normally do fillers because I think you'd rather I got on with the main story.

I've also changed the main page so it's easyer to find the link to the latest update (whatever it is). Now there's a separate link to the warnings about content and the fact the comic's mostly in SVG. Hopefully I'm not going to have people complaining that they weren't warned or just not comming back and not telling my why (feedback is good people!).

Changes to comics listing sites

Well it seems that comic rankers has died and they never got round to listing "Dragon Knights" anyway (that after I drew a special picture for them). I've removed their link from the main page and replaced it with the Web comics list, where you can at least find "Dragon Knights" although it's listed as "pending" or something. I've already got something like 12 hits from there, which I think is more than I've ever got from Webbed Comics!

Working on PDF version

I recently discovered a site called Wowio which lets you post PDF books and you get paid when people download them. I thought it might be interesting if I could convert "Dragon Knights" to PDF and put them on Wowio. The trouble is that I don't have any PDF authoring software. It certainly used to be the case that most the functionality of the Adobe SVG viewer was included in the Adobe reader but I wasn't sure what was happening with this as Adobe's lost interest in SVG after buying Macromedia. Anyway I thought it might be possible to just convert SVG files into PDF with all their interactivity and animation. Another complication is that the "Dragon Knights" comic files use external JS, CSS and image files to try to reduce bandwidth and I'm not sure if any SVG to PDF converter can mange this.

I'm stiff researching this. If it turns out to be simple to convert my comics to PDF I'll do that fairly quickly. If it's a more complicated job it may take longer or I may decide it's too much trouble.