It's been a while since I posted anything here....I've got a draft of a review of Roine Stolt's "Wall Street Voodoo" that's not done yet, so I'll be posting that soon.

 

In the meantime, I thought I'd share something I'm working on. 

 

I do a comic strip called Stranger Things for Full Tilt Features which is included in gogags and the Not Quite Sunday Funnies blog put together by Full Tilt hero, Annie Taylor Lebel.  Stranger Things is a fun project for me that I've been working on since 1991, but not very seriously until 2003.

 

Last fall when word hit the net about the video iPods and the podcasting community began to generate a buzz about VIDEO podcasting, I got excited.  The rusty gears in my noggin started to sputter and squeek and turn and I began to think - comic strip + Flash + QuickTime + iTunes = my comic strip on iTunes...  I could do a video podcast of my comic strip which would basically just be displaying each frame for a few seconds in sort of a slide show.  But people could subscribe in iTunes and not have to try to remember to go to a website and look for the newest comic, they would get it automatically.  Sweet!  So tax return time comes around and I manage to spring for a video iPod, put together some test runs of strips in QuickTime movie format and wala!  Everything came together nicely.  The strips look great on the iPod, you can read them easily, it's a win-win.

 

So now I have to get some material together and start putting these out on libsyn or some kind of podcasting service so that someday soon people can subscribe to my comic on iTunes.

 

So what comic is it going to be?  Is it going to be Stranger Things or is it going to be something else?  Well, I've got 2 new strips I've been working on in addition to Stranger Things over the past several months, working toward this video podcasting thing.  One of them I'm going to drop and maybe someday when I have free time coming out of my ears, I'll pick it up and run with it.  But for now it's my shelved pet project that I'll return to "someday".  The other one I'm calling "Corporate Hangover". 

 

My buddies at work have been bugging me for years to do a comic strip based on our confusing life in the tech industry.  My dissenting argument has always been Dilbert.  Scott Adams is already doing that and he's covering it nicely.  However recently, I've become aware that I can cover this tech industry world in my own style and it doesn't resemble Dilbert at all because my sense of humor is so different from Scott Adams'.  And so is my drawing style.  So just like an artists shouldn't refuse to do a comic strip because Peanuts has already been there/done that, I don't think this is a valid argument even for a comic theme as long as I can put my own unique spin on it.  So I've been exploring this and will continue to do so.  I've already gravitated toward it several times in Stranger Things anyway whenever I would do a strip about Alan at work.  And really Corporate Hangover is just Alan at work minus the alien Nergon stuff.  So it has Alan and a cast of at least 3 new characters.  In fact, a couple of weeks ago I did a Stranger Things strip with Alan at work and I used 2 of these new characters in it.

 

So without further ranting and raving, here is my first official Corporate Hangover strip.  I won't have any free time for about 2 weeks from now, so at that point I'll start figuring out what kind of schedule I can churn these out on and get them on iTunes in video podcast format.  I'll try linking in the flash part of the video podcast form and click the thumbnail below to read the strip.

 

Link to Fash video podcast version (gets to the iPod by publishing in Quicktime in Flash, then converting the .mov in iTunes to be iPod compatible.)

 

By the way everything in this strip actually happened.  Except I didn't wear a tie and I'm fatter than that.