Just recently, I managed to finish working my way through a folder full of MISFIT’S JOURNEY related email that I had trouble answering right away.

There were a few respondents who wrote and told me about their online efforts. Since I liked what they’re doing, I’ve decided to go ahead and link to it:

1. Nate Bear is currently in a “post grad state of limbo” and works at a supermarket making “miserable wages”. You can check out his comic strips at his Cramped Comics site. He said in his email that he relates to the experiences described in the first MISFIT’S JOURNEY.

2. Skip Williamson is an underground comix legend and the creator of CLASS WAR COMIX. He’s known Robert Crumb, Jay Lynch, and many other notable creators. His website is here. He didn’t say anything about my comics in his email, but I’m flattered that he thought it was worth the effort to email me about his site.

3. Blake (no last name in his email) is a graduate of Macalester College (which is here in Minneapolis). He says he “throughly enjoyed” the first MJ. I’ve run into other Macalester grads who really liked the first episode too. I suspect this is because Macalester and Saint Olaf College — where I went to school — are colleges that are somewhat similar. He has a political blog called TheNextLeft.com that I’ve enjoyed reading. (Right now, it’s down, so I can’t look up his last name.)

4. Bruce-Erik Osborn didn’t send me any cool links, but I like what he said about artists who, like me, have backgrounds in physics: “There are many great artists, even filmmakers, who have a background in physics. The director of the Fred Astaire movie “Top Hat” (I forget his name), and Frank Capra (a graduate of Cal-Tech), come immediately to mind. The enquiring nature of such individuals can lead to original insights which they often find ways of affixing into a particular medium with new clarity. I would say in your case that its greatest asset IS its individuality, in several dimensions.” (Cartoonist Ted Rall, animator and filmmaker Mike Judge, and Robocop director Paul Verhoeven are three other artists I can think of who have physics backgrounds.)

Here’s a photo of a war protest I went to at Macalester College when the war in Iraq first broke out:

I knew then that Dubya’s war was a very, very bad idea. Time has proven me right, hasn’t it?

I took a couple dozen pictures of the protest actually. I’m planning on using some these photos as reference material for crowd scenes for future episodes of MISFIT’S JOURNEY. I noted in my last post some of the improvements I want to make to my 3d art. These photos are going to help me in doing just that.

That’s all for now. I’ll try to be back soon.

Criminy! I haven’t posted here in over a month! Here’s an update on what’s happening in this neck of the woods.

Things are going pretty well with me. I’ve been lurking around at various webcomic-related and comics-related sites quite a bit. I want to start participating a little more than I have been, so there may be more posts from me on sites like Fleen, The Webcomics Examiner, Comixpedia, and the Comics Journal Message Board in the days to come.

In addition to having a job and a life away from the web, I’ve been heavily preoccupied with the launch of MISFIT’S JOURNEY and I’m the process of working on the second episode. I’ve gotten over 4,000 visitors to the Episode One page on my WCN site so far, and a fair number of comments, donations, and emails too. I ended up getting a little overwhelmed by all the email too, but I finally managed to answer everything.

I used blog ads and Google AdWords ads to drive a lot of traffic over to the story. The most effective ad was the one I placed on Tom Tomorrow’s thismodernworld.com site. It resulted in some of the best emails and comments I received on the story.

I had been considering doing the second MJ story arc as a daily or weekly webcomic, but I’ve decided against that. Instead, I’m just going to post chapters running approximately 25 pages whenever I get them done. My experiences with the first episode lead me to conclude that I will still have a substantial readership if I release the chapters in this way. Maybe going daily or weekly would take the numbers up even higher, but I think the quality of the work would suffer if I tried to do that. I’m open to doing this in the future, of course, but I just don’t think it’s the right call at this time. (I’ll see how things go with the second big story and take things from there.)

I’m still finalizing some of the details, but it looks like the next story will be 4-6 25 page chapters. I’ll release each chapter as I get it done, but I’m going to try to avoid extra long delays. The story I’m planning focusses on my year in graduate school and the various forces that derailed me. It has some long flashbacks to my youth in southern Minnesota and my Saint Olaf College education. It also has a “flashforward” to a period in Seattle when I’m fairly happy and have what I think I want.

While I’m proud of what I accomplished with the first story, I’m not completely happy with the 3d art and want to impliment some improvements for the second story. I want my Poser characters to have a wider variety of body types. I want more variation in how clothes fit the characters and I want to do a better job with clothing folds and wrinkles.

I’ll be posting links to more of my Poser art here in the days and weeks to come.

Comments and questions are always welcome!

There’s a new poll in the sidebar. Please take some time to answer it. If you haven’t read the first MISFIT’S JOURNEY yet, please take the time to do that as well.

I’ve settled on a plot for the second installment, but I’m ALWAYS curious about what aspects of MISFIT’S JOURNEY interest people the most.

There’s more background information on the BenAdamsArts.com profile page as well as on my Webcomics Nation profile page. I’ve also summarized where I see the series going here. Once you’ve read these pages, you may have questions about me and thoughts on where YOU’D like to see MISFIT’S JOURNEY go. Let me know what you’re thinking.

The new poll will close July 6th. Going forward, I’m going to leave each poll up for a three month period.

The results can be seen here.

All the answers that were not added by other people are things that have frustrated me to some degree in my life. My own answer to the poll was romance, and you can see my reasons for this by clicking here.

Many of you who are frustrated with romance may wish to consider online dating. Seriously. It can work very well. I’ve blogged about it in the past.

I’m not sure what to recommend for people with money problems. Hotjobs.com? Ebay? A payday loan site? A new Congress and President that will increase the minimum wage and improve the economy?

If anyone needs advice, let me know. I don’t have the answers for everything, but I’d be happy to help.

Life can certainly be tough on all of us. I try to do my part to help people in need.

I love reading about how people have overcome obstacles in their lifes, and I enjoy writing about how I’ve overcome some of the obstacles in mine.

Next up: Thoughts on the NEW poll

Click the thumbnails to see the full pictures:

The poll currently on the sidebar will end on the 5th rather than the 3rd. I’ll have a new poll about MISFIT’S JOURNEY up at that date. I decided to change the closing date because I’ve been preoccupied with other things.

Once again, click the thumbnail to see the full size image.

I’ve just completed four new 3d art pieces I’m ready to show the world. I’ve spent the last couple days experimenting with character design in Poser 6, and I’m very happy with what I’ve come up with.

These pieces have all been posted in my DeviantArt gallery and will be posted in my Renderosity gallery in the days to come. (Renderosity currently has a limit of one gallery post per day.)

Click on the thumbnail below to see the full size image on DeviantArt:

I fully intent to be back with more news shortly.

A review of Episode 1 of MISFIT’S JOURNEY has shown up on a Dutch website called Comicbase. It’s also being discussed on a Dutch message board at a site called Clickburg.

I don’t know Dutch very well, so I had to use Babelfish to translate the page. From what I can see, this is the best, most even-handed review of the first episode yet. It says some very nice things about the story but also does a good job of pointing out some areas that could be improved upon.

I just wish I could get a better translation than what I get from Babelfish.

I’ll be back with more soon, and, yes, I AM behind on my e-mail.

I’ve made a number of changes to this site to improve performance. As is the case of many blogs with good Google rankings, I’ve been getting a fair amount of comment spam. Comment spammers are coming to this blog and posting their gibberish in some of the earliest posts. Apparently, some people who want good Google rankings make it a practice to go to popular blogs and put their links in comments so that their Google rankings rise. I’ve installed two popular spam-filtering WordPress plugins, Spam Karma 2.2 and Bad Behavior. They’re doing a great job of filtering out the garbage comments. (I apologize to anyone annoyed by them in the past.)

Pages of this blog have frequently been loading slowly this week. This problem has been fixed. I rent server space for this site, and someone else on the server was abusing their SQL database privileges, which in turn was slowing down this blog. My hosting provider seems to have resolved the problem. I apologize for this. (I hope this hasn’t kept someone from commenting.)

Feel free to send email to ben (at) benadamsarts (dot) com if this should start happening again.

I’ve just completed a new round of changes to this site:

1. I’ve created a page with info on my 3d art galleries.
2. I’ve changed the MISFIT’S JOURNEY Comments Page so that you can page through the comments. (This way you don’t have to look at all of them at once — they’re definitely starting to build up.)
3. I’ve created a new page to link to all the comments (and reviews) on MJ that don’t appear on the main comments page.
4. I wasn’t happy with the graphics on the main FAQ page, so I changed them.

I owe a few people some email. It should be on the way shortly. I’m very happy with the way things are going with MJ, but I’m running a little behind schedule.

This blog is seeing an noticable increase in comments and page hits, and I’ve decided it’s a good idea to write a revised version of an older post on rules for posting comments.

Right now, I want to do whatever I can to encourage as many comments as possible. Currently you only need to type your name, your email address, and your message to post. There is no long registration process, and you don’t need to wait for posts to be approved.

However, I do reserve the right to delete posts that I find inappropriate. Spam that has nothing to do with my entries will be deleted. (My blog software will, in many cases, filter out spam.) I may also delete anything that I consider mean-spirited or inflammatory. Over the last few years, I’ve gained a lot of experience with online discussion and have encountered more than a few trolls — people who disrupt online discussions to draw attention to themselves and upset others in a selfish manner. Trolls are not welcome here. Disagreement, on the other hand, is welcome and encouraged. Feel free to disagree with anything that is posted here, but please try to be polite. Constructive criticism is always welcome too.

If you prefer, you can e-mail responses to blog entries to me. (Please indicate whether or not I can mention the response in one of my entries.)