Feb. into May 2020
In the beginning.
For the first time in about nine years, I opened a Tim Powers novel. Despite the lapse I'm a fan, I particularly like his stories centered on LA and the southwest. Fascinating to me, is his commingling of other dimensions and planes with our own. He and I have corresponded casually since the date I opened his book: 20200202, a fabulous palindrome, just a bare two digits—zeros and twos—that prompted me to mark the occasion by writing to Tim via his agent. And getting an answer! Shortly after this (with a bit more Jungian synchronicity) I came upon an album of George Herriman's Krazy&Ignatz, syndicated strips from the '40s, which delighted me; I'd never seen his work before. In truth, the album called to me across a floor stacked with albums, a siren in a secondhand bookshop (FYI I'm SHBA: secondhand bookshop addicted).
Back in 2019, I'd taken the domain ark2020.net with a very different vision for a website. Principally supporting XR, Extinction Rebellion: political; very serious logo; many words; some cartoons. From experience, I knew such a site wouldn't get to many peeps, but would do wonders for me, just getting it off my chest.
Still early days into the project.
There are three aspects to this venture: concept (this would be words if there were any); drawing; coding. Something I didn't foresee is that I forget if I'm supposed to be concepting or drawing—it took five days to draw the last three frames (10-11-12, episode 2), inordinately slow, but I got involved. Is that wrong? After all, no deadline, no publisher and, right now, no followers. Hopefully, later, when there's enough ballast to keep things floating smoothly, there'll be swarms.
Coding is something else. Me, a whole bunch of experience, coding. Long in the past, I used to Dreamweave maybe 20-30%. Since then, it's become so good, I merely copy and paste in their editor and make adjustments, and then go to W3 Tutorials to brush up for stuff new to me. Simple is the aim: a comic strip, plain and simple. Dreamweaver for me is like PhotoShop or AfterEffects or InDesign: I know enough to do what's needed, I don't have to learn it like I was at school, f' crying out loud. But since Adobe have got me paying forlikeEVER, there's no option, not if you want a stable platform, they've seen to that. So I use everything as much as possible and only as much as necessary. One's web design needs some serious tweakery for mobiles and pads, but for now it will have to suffice, so there. Get a computer.