Tris Legomenon

Look! An Adventures of Tintin pastiche! It’s so exciting. Villains in sweaters and sports coats. Aging heroes with massive chins and squinty eyes. Simplistic morality. Gunfights where no one gets hurt. I’m way too young and live on the wrong continent to be an official Tintin fan but I’m close enough to get a kick out of Jonny Crossbones. You don’t have to know the original, a love of the adventure genre will suffice. Definitely worth checking out.

Billy the Dunce is one of the comics that I’m most excited about right now. The premise is fairly basic: Billy is the only normal kid at a boarding school for child geniuses. He gets dragged, sometimes willingly and sometimes not, through the wacky adventures of his more gifted classmates. The art is polished in a kid’s cartoon style but what sells it to me is the characters. There are a lot of good dynamics. Budding magician vs. budding scientist. Billy’s alternating befuddlement and disdain over the trouble his friends get into. And, my favorite, the thickly accented eight year old succubus who is extravagantly gleeful over everything that irritates or disgusts the other children.

I’ve been drawing three or four pages a week but only posting two and I’m frustrated with how slow that feels. I think I can maintain the three a week pace so I’m going to move to Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates starting now. See how that feels. Hurray for things moving more quickly.

I just finished reading the (many hundreds of) pages of Ursula Vernon’s Digger. Not to make it sound like it’s finished, because it’s not. There’s a lot of really excellent stuff in there and some excitement on the horizon. It’s a fantasy epic about gods and wombats and a whole slew of other unusual things. A nice mixture of humor and seriousness. Hell, it’s worth it for the geological wombat curses alone.

“Dip me in chalk and call me a limestone conglomerate!”

So, this is the point in the story where I thought I would start trying to get a few people to pay attention to it. There’s a little content on the site and about a month’s worth of pages queued up, so I’m confident of the schedule. Now what? I’ve started with the easy stuff and stuck the site in a couple of web comics lists. I even got one of those little Top Webcomics voting badges, but I think it looks silly so I stuck it in the footer where no one will ever see it. I’ll need to be more aggressive at some point but this is ok for the time being. I can already see people trickling in. Hello people!