One of the best parts of putting together the first Schlock Mercenary book was deciding which artwork to stick in the margins. Consider: each page has room for four “rows” of Schlock on it — four daily comics, or one Sunday plus one daily.

Unfortunately, Sundays MUST be kept together. And often there are footnotes. But not often enough. The result is that the best page layout for the book is 3 rows per page: Sunday, M/T/W, Th/F/S… three pages for a week. And that leaves three rows worth of blank space. We filled that space with existing footnotes, a few new ones, and piles of artwork, some brand new. There are concept sketches, marker pieces, and a few pieces that point up punchlines in weird ways. Some of the “margin” art takes up half a page or more.

So… picking the margin art was fun.

One of the worst parts of any job is cleaning your office. My office is FULL of stacks of stuff that might make good margin art. Some of it might make good auction pieces. Some of it would be perfect bird-cage liner. And it’s all in three or four unsorted stacks, a couple of boxes and one wall-mounted “in box” thingy. No, I don’t have a “sketchbook.” Every sketch I whip out is loose-leaf. What a disaster.

After tearing through those piles to find good stuff for this book, Sandra and I have decided that we need to tear through them for ALL upcoming books, in one big triage party. It’s pretty easy to tell which pieces would go with which book — especially when I’m designing aliens for a particular story (the first book has half a page of sketches showing the evolving design for the bug-eyed cave-men I called “cruxapes”). It’ll take a little mental energy, but when we’re done they’ll all be sorted by book in nice folders I can then put away in a single box.

This evening I began tidying my office, and ran up against these piles. I have a sneaky plan. I’ll go upstairs now and do the dishes. Then Sandra will be sooo excited about the clean kitchen she’ll rush downstairs and help me file margin art for the next three years’ worth of books.

–Howard

I’ve got a few items taking up space in my house. If you have some interest in taking these off my hands, make an offer.

1) NEC Accusync 90 18″ monitor (trinitron tube, I think). At 1280×1054 the lower third of the monitor is a teency bit blurry. Probably worth about $50, and likely luxuriously large at 1024×768, where the blurriness isn’t noticable.

2) gigging musician’s “carpeted” rack-box . The rack-box has 10 rack-spaces and is 12 inches deep, with panels closing the front and back of the box for safe transport (not rated for air-cargo though). One of the two front-closure snaps needs repair (re-attach female snap to nylon closure), but all pieces are present. Probably worth around $50.

3) Sabine FBX 2020 stereo feedback eliminator (occupies one rack-space in item #2 above). eBay says it’s worth around $500. I paid $900 a decade ago. I guess these things hold their value pretty well. If you run sound, especially in a theater setting with floor mics or “choir” mics it’s a godsend.

Naturally, Sandra and I would both love to get lots of money out of these, but we harbor no illusions about their actual value. We’d also rather not have to go to UPS to ship them (especially not the monitor).

–Howard

I’ve been “distracted” from working on the comic for the last two weeks, what with all the work involved in getting the book ready. I burned through a week of buffer, and woke up this morning with only 5 strips in the can.

After my morning routine (kids to school, me to the gym, come home and eat, then nap) I hauled my gear to Dragon’s Keep to get some work done. At a minimum I needed to get this coming Sunday’s strip pencilled and inked.

I managed to pencil and ink Sunday, and then pencil and ink the rest of the week. It took a solid seven hours (with breaks for eating, shooting the bull, etc), but I pulled it off. They’re good strips, too. (Well… next Friday’s strip is questionable. It’s an experimental sight gag, and while *I* like it, I’m sure there are those who won’t).

How do I feel? Awesome. Tomorrow I’m hoping to be similarly productive, coloring everything I’ve inked. And then Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday can be spent putting yet ANOTHER week in the can. Only then will I feel good about the fact that I’m travelling to a convention a week from Thursday.

–Howard

Every so often I get email from some utter jerk who says “put your beard back, you look horrible.” I ignore these people, because I long ago stopped caring about what others think of my appearance. I dress, groom, and dance in ways that make ME happy, and the rest of the world can go hang.

I needed a good “about the author” photo for the upcoming book, so I talked to my friend Scott, who is consummately professional in everything he does. He directs the Ballroom Dance program at UVSC, and his team’s many national and internation awards reflect his passion for exactness. He also has a very, VERY nice digital camera, and while he considers himself a hobbyist, I know better. I’ve seen professional photographers with less skill, less training, and FAR less gear than he has. He agreed to shoot some head-shots for me.

He took about 90 pictures. This was one of my four favorites. It’s not the one we’re using in the book, but it’s still far, far better than any picture I’ve had taken in recent memory.

I compared it to the picture I USED to have on the site, and realized why the jerks were telling me to put my beard back — the old photo with the beard was a better picture than the quick-and-dirty beardless photo I’d been using. It’s like the old axiom from my record-production days: The customer always knows when there’s a problem, but never knows what exactly the problem is.