For a very important date!

I’d apologize for the lateness of the comics recently… But really, nobody wants to hear that, do they? Instead, how about I tell you want I’m gonna do about it?

There’s several strips left in this story line, so I’m going to finish them all up this week and, starting next week, publish them twice a week until the story line is done. After that, I’ll probably return to my Wednesday update schedule.

Also, I’ll write a separate post about this later, but they released a patch to Manga Studio that makes it compatible with Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). I finally downloaded it and installed it. I had forgotten why I loved Manga Studio so much. So many built-in tools specific for comic creators (obviously)... Coloring is painful, of course, but I’m hoping version 4 (when it’s finally released here) will fix that.

By way of filler, here’s a sketch I did with my newly patched Manga Studio, ‘Cowbario’:

Starting this week I'm changing my update schedule from Mondays to Wednesdays.

So be sure and check back on this Wednesday, September the 24^th, and every Wednesday for a new ZooDotCom!

And we're back!

Sorry, taking this week off -- New strip next Monday!

Stereoscopic 3D, that is. You know, like those Magic Eye things that were sort of popular in the 90's?

Don't know how to 'see in 3D'? Here are some instructions. The meatloaf image uses 'The Parallel Method'.

And yes, I do have too much time on my hands. What's your point?

... it came with this paint job:

Nice!

Found an interesting Flickr set that has scans of a bunch of old comic sound effects (Onomatopoeia).

Some of them are a little, uh, odd. Like the one shown here.

Still, it’s pretty cool. You should check it out.

This week’s strip is a little early (don’t hear that very often, do you?) because of a power outage at home. I’d like to thank the guys at Prince Bistro for letting me hang out there for a few hours to finish the strip.

Also, being without electricity for 24 hours? Sucktacular.

I’ve been pretty busy on the creative front: ZdC has been on-time for over two months, there’s activity behind the scenes on Lil Monstas, and I have another strip in the pipeline.

The new strip will be black ‘n white… It’ll be a bit darker in tone than ZdC, but still comedic. It’s called Zombie-Mart.

Here’s a sneak preview of one of the character designs.

The pre-production work on it has been a lot of fun. I’m still sorting out some things, like it’s exact format. But I have it plotted out for, well, for a long time. Maybe it’s whole run. I’m thinking it will be a limited series… But limited doesn’t necessarily mean short. ;-)

Also, in the next few days I’ll be creating more specific tutorials on my comicing process. Specifically to do with Illustrator CS 3. So stay tuned for that.

Instead of writing lengthy tutorials on my webcomic creation technique, I thought I’d just record screencasts of the process. So I recorded my inking and coloring session for the latest strip. It doesn’t show the sketching phase because I had already drawn it for this strip. But the next time I do a batch of layouts/sketches I’ll record that too.

In this first video I didn’t add a soundtrack, cause I don’t really know all the copyright issues involved with that.

So, without further ado, here it is at approximately 5x speed:

Making of ZooDotCom #38 on Vimeo.

That was kinda fun. I think I may record a few more.