Back in 2003 I hired a colorist, Jean Fioca (used to be Elmore). Having someone else handle the coloring was wonderful, and Jean was great at it. A lot of the coloring tricks I use now I learned looking at her work on my characters.

I’m considering hiring a colorist again. I’m busy enough to justify it, and would love to see somebody willing and able to express themselves through the colors, rather than just going through the motions the way I do. But don’t send in your resumés just yet… the colorist I want to hire is already getting on the job training. She did the flood filling and shading on the last two rows of today’s strip, and almost all the floods for next week. She’s still learning the swatches, and doesn’t know which backgrounds to drop in without coaching from me, but I can tell already that she’ll work out fine if I can keep her interested.

I am going to have to raise her allowance.

My 12-year-old daughter, whom you may know from sandratayler‘s Live Journal as “Kiki,” is my apprentice colorist. She has had some classical art training using pastels and watercolors, but has next to no Photoshop experience. That didn’t stop her from pencilling, scanning, coloring, and shading a picture of Link last week, using Adobe Photoshop Elements. She was coloring using a technique she copied from me — lassoing areas to be shaded and darkening them with the flood tool and swatches that looked right. And the shading DID look right. The girl has a good eye.

Sandra was concerned. “She’s been working on that piece for DAYS now, Howard.”
I checked to see what she was actually working on. “It’s not a problem. She’s trying to darken her pencil lines, and they’re in the same layer as the colors. She’s going pixel by pixel.”
I told Kiki what she was doing wrong, and suggested that since correcting line art in this way was no fun at all, maybe she’d have more fun coloring some clean line art for me. For pay. She was sitting next to me at my computer within 15 minutes.

Naturally, I have some concerns:
1) I don’t want her art style to be mere mimicry of my own. I have to encourage her to experiment — at least once she has the basics down.
2) We are going to have to strike a balance between “Kiki’s Style” and “Staying On Model.”
3) Criticism of Schlock Mercenary may extend to the work she does, and she is not nearly thick-skinned enough to be reading some anonymity-emboldened, blogtarded wannabe tear her work apart.
4) Saddling a 12-year-old with this level of responsibility is a life-changing thing. She may end up with a job skill, or even a full-blown career. Then again, digital art may end up forever poisoned for her.
5) She is not old enough to be famous. Or so says me, anyway. I don’t mind fanboys stalking me down at the comics shop, but the first fanboy who stalks my baby girl is going to to discover that he can breathe through the gurgling hole where his nipple-piercing used to be.

I’m not asking for advice. I already have approaches for numbers 1-3 above, and Kiki and I will be talking about #4. Number five… well, let’s just say that if I have to go to jail because I killed my colorist’s stalker, the comic strip will end. No stalking, okay?

I went to a friend’s wedding reception last night, and his whole family was there, right out of my childhood. We grew up together in Sarasota, Florida, and while he’s getting married in his 30’s, both of his sisters got married just before or right around age 20.

His oldest sister dropped a real bomb on me. She and I were classmates, we hung out together, and she’s only about a year older than I am.

She’s a grandmother now.

I’m 39, and one of my best friends from high-school is a GRANDMOTHER.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go turn up the music too loud, and not wear any sunscreen.

I’m celebrating seven years of Schlock the way I did last year — I’ll be down at Dragon’s Keep working on the comic. In this case I’ll be pencilling and inking the bonus story for the next book.

Odds are good that no well-wishers will stop in (at least none who wouldn’t have come by anyway), but that’s okay. I’m all about getting work done.

Wow.

Today, June 12th of 2007, marks the seventh anniversary of the first appearance of Schlock Mercenary on the web.

The first three or four weeks of the strip went up in June of 2000 in a long-extinct subdirectory of the tayler.com domain. Then I discovered Keenspace (now ComicGenesis), and their automation made my life much easier.

For the first three months the strip never had more than about 150 readers. When I joined Keenspot in September of 2000 that number immediately grew by more than an order of magnitude. It continued to grow, and four short years later, in September of 2004, I left my day job with Novell. Not long after that I flirted briefly with anti-collectivistic independence, and then wisely joined eight fellow pros here at Blank Label Comics. Server logs lately indicate that somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 people enjoy the strip each day.

And it really has been “each day.” Schlock Mercenary has run daily, without fail, for seven years now. There have been some “late” updates, but for me “late” means the server needed to be reminded that there was a comic to be displayed. And as of this writing the next forty-seven days of the strip have been inked.

Lots of aspiring webtoonists ask me for advice. I have none to offer. I spent four years neglecting my family and working seventy- to ninety-hour weeks between my day job and the comic strip. My strategy was “deliver the goods every day, without fail, forever.” I’m pretty sure that qualifies as “doing it the hard way.” Nobody who asks for advice is looking for the hard way.

I celebrated the day before the anniversary writing a bonus story for the next book. This bonus story will have as its last strip a re-imagining (with the same dialog) of the very first strip on the web, where Schlock enlists with the Toughs. This particular bit of writing drove home just how far I’ve come in the last seven years. I’ve grown almost immeasurably as an artist, significantly as a writer, and quite tangibly as a businessman.

Through it all, however, I have been humbled you, fair reader. You have graciously allowed me to capture small slices of your imaginations, and thousands of you have contributed in recent months and years to allow me to pursue this work full-time. Sandra and I (and our four kids, two of whom are younger than Schlock) stand gratefully in your debt. We remain committed to delivering this strip every day, for free, forever (or until I die.)

Every so often someone will email me and say “I feel guilty for spending a mere 20 seconds reading an update that must have taken you hours to create.” My response: Please don’t feel guilty. First, it didn’t take hours. Art for art’s sake can take its time, but art for money has to go fast. Second, you should know that there is a psychic energy generated by tens of thousands of people laughing at the same time, and I’m working on getting it to power my giant robot.