It’s been a busy time of late, which explains the brief break since the last of my missives.
Don’t you ever ask yourself why it is that creative geniuses (genii?) seem mostly to spend ages doing nothing very much. Well, I can now reveal that we geniuses spend a deal of time with, metaphorically speaking, our pencils clenched in our teeth as we stare out the window, apparently inactive, unproductive and dilatory..
In truth, of course, this seeming inactivity, which others may mistake for idleness, is anything but.
It is, in fact, the kind of energetic inactivity that volcanoes express, in their gigantic and portentous way. A volcano isn’t just sitting there mutely staring at nothing, like a cat facing a wall, with no plan for what comes next. No, a volcano is, in fact, brooding; preparing for the moment when it can best explode and eject matter across the known world and beyond, changing the landscape forever in one, well, volcanic moment.
So it is with we creative types, too.
Well, once you’ve read the latest strips below, I’ll tell you about my own explosion. It’s exciting, I promise. Well, for me, anyway!
“The world has changed while I wasn’t looking..”
Webtoons and a greatly updated web site.
Take a moment to visit the two links above while you sip your coffee or peppermint tea or whatever else you have in that cup.
The world has changed while I wasn’t looking and it turns out that if you want to publish your cartoon strips in the traditional format, running from left to right as you have seen in each of my posts, the only place you can do that is here on Substack. Everywhere else, it seems, from Webtoons to one’s own web site, demand that you produce everything in the Japanese Manga fashion, reading from top to bottom.
That means that I have had to start re-drawing ALL my strips to fit that format. No terrible thing, I’m sure and it does make sense in that most people seem to consume their media on their phones.
Consequently, I have been rehashing all the strips to fit this “new” requirement.
If you go to the Webtoons page you’ll soon get the idea.
The new web site also requires that format or, more pertinently, simply has no mechanism for uploading traditional strip cartoons without crushing them into hilarious shapes to fit on phones.
The web site comes with a few other options for creativity, though. I have now added a section that shows films about the medieval period, so that those of you who have never really investigated that era can now get an idea of what everyday life was like for the good folk of the “real” Merrie England. I’ve put one of my own instructional films on there as well and I’ll be developing that and all things Merrie England as we march forwards, ever forwards.
So now I must continue with the redrawing of all the strips so that they can all go onto the Webtoons site and, due to the new dimensions, anywhere else that is looked at on phones.
It’s no good railing against change, after all.
We all have to keep up, for fear of being left bewildered in this fascinating and ever-changing world!