Let’s get Squashy!
In case you thought Zippy was kinda normal, King Features will be launching a new strip, My Cage, on May 6th.
My Cage is a twist on "MySpace," except that it has a bit of a manga-style influence. Drawn by Melissa DeJesus and written by Ed Power, My Cage is about Norman, a young 20-something platypus who wanted to be a world famous writer. Like all too many writer wannabees, he is stuck in a crappy middle-management job. However, he does have a girlfriend, a pet amoeba named Squashy, and the usual compliment of oddball co-workers.
Some 30 newspaper have picked up the feature, including the Houston Chronicle, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Chicago Sun-Times, St. Paul Pioneer Press and Madison (WI) Capital Times. No doubt you’ll be able to check it out at the Post-Intelligencer‘s website, one of the best places for the online reading of newspaper comic strips: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/
There is a word missing from page 48. "All thanks to the help from this strange woman who had shared a meal with us and then vanished from our"…LIVES? HOME? PLANE of EXISTENCE?Nice recap and summation of Modi and Skogul's relationship in HotG: Mortal Enemy. I have made the mistakes of assuming that "the girl" knew how I felt and that "the girl" was way out of my league.Oh my! I'm SO confused. I went and purchased HotG: Mortal Enemy through Amazon. Good stuff. Now, I was under the impression that Back from the Dead was being published here at ComicMix for the first time. But in Googling around I came across an e-Bay auction for HotG: Hammer Hits China! That looks like it features some of this stuff. I also saw some ISG issues. A "Color Saga," what's that?What is the history behind HotG? Where has it been published? How many issues? I've read Mortal Enemy and the story from the Sunday Funnies. If I were to get all Fan-Boyish and commit the sin of coveting my neighbors' back issues, what do I need to plan on coveting?Is Back from the Dead an expansion of Hammer Hits China? A reworking? Or is it retitled?
I got a notice at 4am that there was a problem with the pages – had corrected ones ready at 8:30. But there have been problems with the reader. For example – I could only see 4 pages here in the reader – but there should be 6 pages. Sigh. Hopefully this will be fixed soon. Sorry for the confusion. Check back to read ALL the words.BACK FROM THE DEAD is new material mixed with rare material and material that has been – changed – a bit. It is Mike's and my effort to pull all the bits into a single epic. Fortunately we had somewhat of a plan when we were churning out all this stuff – so with the addition of a lot of new stuff we were able to turn it into a tapestry!
The problem with the pages was minor. Pages 51 and 52 weren't showing up in the ComicMix Readers "table of contents window." You could still click through and see them. They just didn't show up as a two page spread when you did. The missing word on page 48 is there. This is one of the fastest digital revisions I've seen on ComicMix! Very cool. It think that would be a major advantage of publishing first to the web. Small typos and glitches in the art can get fixed while the work is still digital and malleable.
I'd prefer the advantage would be to do revisions on story or art – rather than fix mistakes I should have caught before sending in the pages! Part of the problem – now on my radar – is that I am pulling old production files that were built in an old version of Quark Express into the new Quark. I am also making alterations in the fonts used. So type re-flow does happen. In this case I got to working too fast and didn't notice that words were running out of the text boxes.