Personal Milestones

So, on Sunday 26th January, The W Word turned 1 year old. I put a celebratory picture up, but unless you are in a habit of checking the page daily or follow the comic on tumblr then you may not have seen it, so here it is:

Whilst the archive isn't huge - going from twice-a-week to once-a-week updates due to moving house and losing my buffer, along with changing the way I made the comics to a process that gave better results but took longer, means that it's quite easy to click through the entire comic in a matter of minutes.

But I've never stuck with something this long under my own steam, so I'm allowing myself to feel a bit proud of myself, and giving myself this post to be congratulatory.

Statistics
73 Comics drawn specifically for W Word, 1 older filler comic and 1 first birthday card.
30 followers on comicfury, 32 on Tumblr.
8140 unique visitors on comicfury, with 67,448 pages viewed, and average strip rating of 4.85/5.
Highest number of comicfury hits per day - 62, 3rd January 2014
Highest number of notes on tumblr - 80, on this strip.
1199 pageviews on the blog (yay!)

I know the numbers aren't massive in terms of just about anything else on the internet, but hell, I know that the majority of those are from people I don't know. Like, these aren't just family or friends who are reading out of politeness and a sense of obligation. These are people from elsewhere in the world who feel that I have something to say that is of interest to them. Who are willing to put up with my all-thumbs approach to practising my art and scripting, and (hopefully!) enjoy what they see.

These numbers are a great boost to my self-confidence, and have really helped with my self-discipline to stick with this project. I've committed to it, and now I feel like there are people who are at least somewhat invested in it, I've got to keep going and see it through, unlike previous attempts where I did like four comics and got bored.

I've also been making a point of going back and reading through the archives of popular comics on the internet and seeing how their art styles changed and matured with practice and experience, and I've been getting good at learning how that's fine. It was one of those things that I accepted easily in other people, but not in my own art. Maintaining this for a year has helped me to see the change in my art, and feel my skills change, and give me the confidence to start challenging myself slowly and developing.


So, in honour of my first birthday, I'd like to share with you some of the comics that have always inspired me to want to join the ranks of webcomic artists, and whose work I love and admire greatly.



Bad Machinery
I've been reading John Allison's work since I was in high school, at least a decade ago now, and I've seen his art and storytelling style change through three different, but wonderfully interlinked webcomics. Personally I'd recommend going right back to the start and reading everything from Bobbins onwards, but I'm biased. I own so much of his stuff too, like 6 t-shirts, a book and two or three mini-comics. His designs are amazing and his fictional teen girl characters dress better than I do.

Girls with Slingshots
Danielle Corsetto has a wonderful sense of humour and a delightful appreciation for the wonders of alcohol. Her ability to portray detail with comparatively simple lines is a thing of beauty, and her facial expressions are amazing. Recently I've also been really enjoying how she's been mixing up camera angles and panel composition, which has inspired me somewhat, although I'm not skilled enough yet to achieve it quite as well!

Stop Paying Attention
Lucy Knisley has a wonderful way of observing the world around her, and it was her work that made me realise that journal-comics could be a thing, although I've never had the skill or the patience to create the sort of thoughtful and insightful comics she draws. She also does some wonderful travelogues and yummy recipes.

Nimona
I actually only discovered Nimona fairly recently, but I fell totally in love with Noelle Stephenson's art style, and the doodles on her tumblr are just the best.



So go, read and enjoy these wonderful comics!  And thank you all for your support over this last year, I hope you'll stick around for the future!

Gestational Timekeeping

If you have read back through any of my previous posts, you may have come across the one where I reveal that I have been keeping track of my engagement length in terms of what animals could be born in that timespan. I can't explain why I do that, it's just something which amuses me, and doing so led me to the surprising discovery that Whales and Elephants have much shorter pregnancies than I thought, but Sharks and Giraffes have much longer ones.

also elephants are my favourites and baby elephants are the cutest.

Well, this month we will hit the gestational timespan of a human. That's right - only 9 months to go.

I'm struggling to get my head around this in a way I haven't with looking at other timescales, and the difference is that whilst on paper I have experienced the gestation periods of these other animals in the course of my life, I've never actually lived alongside one of these pregnancies. Whereas I've known pregnant women, so I've got experience of how unexpectedly quickly 9 months can go (as a casual observer of a pregnancy anyway, it might feel longer for the poor woman humping a person around inside her for the better part of a year).



But the thing is, with 9 months to go, now we have to start doing the Important and Tricky things, the difficult bits that we have been putting off because we don't want to have to think about them too deeply because it will be awkward and also kinda boring. So we have to start looking up how to register the marriage, planning the guest list, seating plans (ugh don't even), wording the invitations, working out name changes...

I mean yes, okay, these things should be fun because they're for the ~wedding~ but actually they're really complicated and not shiny and fun.


Fortunately we still have some fun bits left to do - and all the food-related stuff is still to come, which I am very much looking forward to. My priorities are very clear in this.

Nothing Suits Him like a Suit

Sorry for the radio silence over Christmas guys, but I'm back and getting crack-a-lacking on all my stuff!

The wedding is now just over 9 months away (holy crap that's not a long time at all), and Jon went off at the weekend to try and find himself a suit for this shindig. He had been planning and pondering this for months, and umming and ahhing over which suit direction he would head in from the very start. He was very thorough, because he likes to research, to the point that he even looked up the historical backgrounds of the different types of suits.

Whilst in the US I think it is fairly common for a man to wear a dinner jacket to get married, as I get the impression that the more formal weddings take place of an evening, in the UK the traditional dress for a wedding is a morning suit.

Now, as I understand it, morning suits are basically THE MOST FORMAL SUIT a man can wear. This is what men wear when they are going to be knighted, or collect other honours from the Queen. These are the school uniform for schools like Eton. These are a BIG DEAL.

Traditionally, morning suits were worn in the day time for super-formal events, and then in the evening people would change over to white tie and tails, which is the evening equivalent of the morning suit. But nowadays, at weddings, most people don't bother with that because usually people hire their morning suits, and hiring two suits seems a bit much, and who would own white tie if they don't own a morning suit? (my high school maths teacher apparently, but moving on...) White tie is most often seen on the likes of Fred Astaire, as modelled ably below.

Jon for a brief while was taken with the idea of a morning suit, because he liked the traditional element of it, and also because they're usually worn with a top hat. It was really the top hat that did it for him. Unfortunately, he became less keen when he discovered that he wouldn't be able to get a silk top hat because they're not made any more. Apparently the last machine for making the silk for them was broken by the man who owned it in an argument with his brother. So. He'd either have to buy a very expensive vintage one, or put up with a felt one. He was keen on neither of those ideas.

You see, aside from the hats, morning suits have very little else going in their favour. The combination of a low-waisted, long-tailed jacket, and high-waisted, loose-fitting trousers means that, unless you are about 6' 5" and proportioned like Adonis, you will probably end up looking pretty short and dumpy.

So Jon wrote off the morning suit idea and decided it would make better economical sense to spend perhaps slightly more than the cost of hiring a suit to instead buy himself a really nice suit that he could keep. To splurge a little, using the wedding to justify the expense, and get himself a suit that he wouldn't be able to justify otherwise.


I am all kinds of down with this idea.

I really really like a man in a suit. Particularly in a well-cut, well-fitting suit. And since Jon is also a fan of suits, I knew that I could trust him to go out and pick something fabulous and that he would look fantastic in. And he did not fail me.


Guys. It is THE BEST suit. THE BEST.