Just wanted to give you a quick heads up with what I’m doing with Blow The Cartridge. First of all thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to check the site out and even say nice words about it. It really means a lot to me that you’ve given it your support at its early stages. I really really enjoy making these comics and I love hearing your suggestions about what classic video game to feature next.

Blow The Cartridge started off as a bunch of old videogame jokes I did here on Funny Webcomic and for the longest time I was running each comic on both sites. But now it’s time for Blow The Cartridge to spread its wings and leave the nest, foraging for comic…worms. OK the analogy is bad but the bottom line is that from now on those comics will be running exclusively on www.blowthecartridge.com every WedNESday. If you haven’t been in a while, go check it out and see some comics you wouldn’t have seen here before. In the last three weeks I’ve done Hudson Hawk, Arkanoid and now Radar Ratrace.

That URL again is www.blowthecartridge.com call now operators are standing by.

I was going to draw Presidog tonight (man, don’t I have exciting Saturday nights) but I started doodling in my sketch book for the first time in forever.

It was, as the kids say, heaps fun.

And it’s made me realise something – I draw better with analog tools. I take a lot of short cuts and don’t experiment much with digital. I also have a really hard time keeping the scale of things correct when I’m having to zoom in so much on the small screen so I end up with huge heads and tiny hands and so forth. So I think I’ll need to try and do more of this, maybe make it a weekly thing.

Anyway! Here’s some pages out of my sketch book.

This is from one of the life drawing classes they held at my last job. Not a lot of life drawing classes now that I’m on the publishing side of the business. Maybe I should suggest it!

Another life drawing sketch. To be honest the only thing I really wanted to draw was the model’s hands. Hands are a nightmare at the best of times so I loved the idea of drawing nothing but hands for two hours. I got kind ticked off at the instructor who kept telling me to study the whole body. JUST LET ME GET MY HEAD AROUND THUMBS FIRST GEEZ.

Some quick sketches of Amanda from White Teenagers With Problems I did tonight. The one on the top left is the best I think. I still have a hard time drawing her right. In my mind she’s like a redhead version of one of the girls from Neighbours that I can’t recall the name of because I don’t really watch the show anyway.

Some random character sketches I busted out tonight to warm up the pencil.

Finally tonight I drew these two. I liked the way the dress turned out for the woman on the left but hate her legs. I liked the way the face and expression turned out for the woman on the right but hate that I stupidly drew a Pac-Man. You can’t win ‘em all.

Anyway, time to draw Presidog!

So hey, yesterday was my last day as a games designer.

After almost ten years of working out of the old Krome building I left for the final time, at least as an employee. I’ve made so many friends and memories in that place it’s hard to think that I will never darken its door again. But all good things must come to an end and all that, and I still find it incredible that I lasted there as long as I did. By all rights I should have never have even made it in there in the first place.

So for those who don’t know after Krome’s meltdown at the tail end of last year I found myself still working in the same building, with some of the same people, for a different company that was assembled to finish off a game we were making at Krome. The game is the Wii / PS3 / 360 version of Happy Feet 2 and it’ll be on sale in November. I helped make the bonus levels for it. It was a good way to spend a few months still doing the game design thing while being surrounded by people far more talented than myself.

But like all good things it had to end some time and so it was with my time there.

It was kinda sad leaving, but also incredibly exciting for a number of reasons. In fact, I’m really looking forward to the cool new things around the corner.

Such as?

I’m starting a new career. On Monday I’ll start my new job in a completely new part of the gaming industry and it’s a step I’ve been wanting to take for a couple of years now. I’ll be working in the publishing side of the business as a brand manager. It’s still a bit early to talk about it in detail but it basically means I’ll be working with overseas publishers, local retailers and media to help sell some really cool games that are coming out in the future. What’s even more exciting is that it’s in a different city with a completely different set of people so I’m looking forward to getting to know a whole new crowds and locale. AND NO MORE COMMUTING TO WORK IN THAT HORRIBLE BRISBANE TRAFFIC! YES YES YES.Instead I’ll be cruising down the lovely and comparatively quiet Gold Coast traffic  There is a bit of a down side though, in that it’s looking like I won’t be able to be at the coming Supanova Brisbane’s Artist Alley since my work will also be having a booth there and I expect I’ll be working that. I’ll keep you updated though, hopefully at the very least I’ll have the new Funny Book Comic on sale there somehow!

Funny Webcomic is changing. Fear not! I’m still doing five comics a week, every week, because I’m crazy like that. This week marks the end of the third year I’ve been doing this comic and I thought I’d use the opportunity to change the format a bit. Instead of doing five comics about one theme that you vote on each week, I’m making each day a set theme and you get to vote on what I should do for Friday’s comic. So for example every Monday could be a new Presidog comic, every Tuesday a new White Teenagers With Problems, etc. What will the themes be, though? YOU TELL ME. I’ve changed the poll to the right of this blog post so you can vote for your favourite themes. The ones with the most votes will be the one that I bring back first. And remember that each Friday will be a random theme based on your votes during the week. So vote early vote often!

I’ve launched a new comic site. YES! Well, sort of. Because Old Video Game Jokes was so insanely popular I’ve decided to make it it’s own thing, a site where you can see over 90+ retro gaming comics all in one place. It’s called Blow The Cartridge and I think you’ll like it. The comics are a lot bigger for one thing. And each wedNESday I’ll be adding more! Stop on by and suggest what game I do next! Guys, if you could take five seconds out of your day today and help spread the word, that would be a HUGE help, I would really appreciate it!

I’m getting some studio space. Just in case you were worried about the new job taking up too much time (and believe me, it will take up a ton of time) we’re getting a dedicated studio space for me to make these silly comic things in built soon. It’s going to be amazing you guys, amazing. It’s really going to help me concentrate on making the comics better, organise more cool stuff to have on the site and at conventions, and even allow me to stream me making the comic more regularly. Wouldn’t that be cool?

OK, I think that’s about it. The fourth year of Funny Webcomic is going to be the best one yet. I’m tremendously excited for what this month is going to bring.

How about you?

I’ve been meaning to do more with video camera for a while so I thought I’d use it to post some thoughts about the iOS version of Z, one of my favourite games of all time from the PC / Amiga days. I really like it!

But GEEZ LOUISE is video a pain in the ass. It only took ten minutes to record but there was so much pafff around encoding and uploading and waiting around. Eh, I’m gonna have to think a bit about streamlining how to make this.

I’ve been doing some thinking about how important early influences are on people, and how simply having a different set of inputs into your developing brain can radically change who you are, what you believe in and what you goals you set as a measure of success for when you are an adult.

Who were your biggest influences when you were growing up? For some people it’s family members, or musicians, or politicians or athletes. Mine were complete strangers a world away working in fields that I thought I would never be allowed to join.

Dave Sim

Dave Sim is a Canadian comic book artist most well known for creating, writing, drawing and self-publishing Cerebus for 300 issues over 26 years.

To say Dave Sim is the biggest influence in my young life would be a severe understatement. The scope and craft in his groundbreaking masterwork was a major achievement in the world of comics and he opened my eyes to the power and potential of the medium. Complex storylines, hidden Easter eggs, a cohesive story only possible when an entire run of a comic is written by one creator, heck even the way he did word balloons really changed the world of how comics are read and created. Further, he was one of the main instigators of the the comic creators bill of rights, which directly lead to creator owned comics becoming the standard and not just an aberration.

It was kind of a big deal. He was a big deal to me.

More than the talent displayed in the comic, he taught me the fundamentals of life and business that I use every day. Things like how important it is to maintain control of your work or how you don’t need a fleet of middle men to handle the ‘business side of things’. Moreover, he instilled in me a deep seated work ethic. He taught me to discard distractions, create something every day and never EVER miss a deadline. I applied that both in my comics work and in my fledging journalism career. I know for a fact that if not for the lessons he taught me I would have never amounted to anything.

Cerebus was a huge constant in my life for the better part of two decades. I don’t mind admitting that most of it went way over my head on the first or second or even third time I pulled an all-night complete read through, but I learned a bit more every time I tried. Cerebus was always there for me through crappy relationships or living dirt poor or being alone and it was the high point of the month.

Sim’s conversion to religion and its head-on collision with the Cerebus comic saw me losing interest in reading it and, subsequently, my interest in him as an artist and unknowing mentor. By then I had grown up, gotten married (which I’m sure he would have disapproved of anyway) and basically sorted myself out. I stopped reading it at issue 275, 25 issues short of the finale that I had been looking forward to reading since I was 15. Yeah, I was kind of surprised I let myself let it go by too.

Julian Rignall

Julian Rignall is a video game journalist that worked initially in the UK before moving to the US. One of his many career highlights is being one of the founding and longest-serving writers of the legendary Zzap! 64 magazine.

Let me tell you something about my home town. It is a God forsaken backwater that is stuck in the stone age. It’s mostly an industrial / manufacturing area and for a fat lazy kid who just wanted to play computer games and read comic books (like me) it was a scary place to grow up in.

When I was 13, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I became a grown up. If you wanted to make comics you had to live in New York and hang out with other comic artists, so that was obviously out. They didn’t have computers in my school so the idea of being a programmer or something just never occurred to me. So that left me with the jobs available in my local area. These jobs were all basically being a boilermaker or a house painter or a brick layer. These options scared the crap out of me.

Shortly after getting my own Commodore 64 (the first of many) I was reading my first issue of Zzap! 64 and really, really digging everything Julian Rignall was writing about these games. I’d read the occasional copy of the mag beforehand at school – the C64 was the gaming system of choice and the magazine was passed around a lot during lunch breaks. It become obviously pretty quickly to me that Rignall wrote exactly how I felt about the games I had played and I came to rely on his opinion before making that next big purchase at the games store. He really got what made you excited to be into computer games and what’s brill and what’s naff.

Then, like a bolt of lightning, I made a realization while I was reading a review of Apollo 18 of all things.

Reviewing video games is a job. It’s an actual job I can go do.

The concept of doing a job that didn’t require me to be outside doing actual, you know, work blew my entire freakin’ mind. It was the concept of being a knowledge worker. Something that my hometown still do this day finds weird and not really right. But man oh man, the idea of being a video game reviewer just excited me too much to bother worrying about the practicalities of it all. And it was something that I pursued relentlessly until it actually came together a decade later. And from there I had all sorts of amazing adventures and ended up getting into design and PR for even more crazy adventures and achievments.

All the while I was trying to just emulate how Rignall wrote…maybe it shows. I used the word Superlative a lot in my early stuff. At any rate, I owe pretty much my entire video game industry career to that guy. That’s a lot to be thankful for.

Jeff Minter

Jeff Minter is a video game programmer, designer and all round zarjaz dude who isn’t afriad to show the world what his passions are. He’s made a lot of great games including Space Giraffe, Sheep In Space and Attack of the Mutant Camels. Yeah, there’s lots of animals in his games and that’s no accident. He loves animals, lives on a big farm with a heap of them and shares them with the world via his work.

Minter, like Sim, was a huge influence on me growing up because he did his own thing and made a viable business around it. He wrote and published his own games and they were all unique. He introduced to me the concept of finding what makes you different and instead of shying away from it, embracing it and making it your trademark. I think of Minter and I think of shoot ‘em ups, fluffy animals and the integration of psychedelia into gameplay. Hopefully when you think of me you think of Commodore 64, chocolate milk and my love of all things Alyson Hannigan. It’s good to have those things to help identify yourself.

He also introduced me to a lot of great things that I would never have discovered otherwise. Things like how great it was to listen to Pink Floyd while watching computer generated light shows on your TV, the power and glory of Eugene Jarvis and this weird thing from Japan called Super Mario Brothers. All those things had a huge impact on me and changed the way I saw the world afterward.

For a lot of people they don’t get the chance to ever say thank you to people like these. I mean, it’s not like they were up the road or even knew who I was, right?

I met Sim once at a local comic store appearance in the mid ‘90s. I gave him some of the mini comics I had made (which were terrible, looking back, but hey), I said nice things about his work, he thanked me for coming out and signed my books. Afterwards I saw him again outside the store having a smoke and I got the chance to go all fanboy on him again. That was pretty damn cool.

I’ve exchanged a couple of friendly messages with Rignall over Twitter over the last few months, and he’s always been cordial and kind to his fans. I’m sure he’s tired of people pestering him about the good old days, though.

I met Minter at E3 2000. He was demonstrating Tempest 3000 on the Nuon system and I got the chance to talk to him about the good old days and thank him for everything he’s done. I even offered to buy him a drink to start trying to make up for all the games of his I had to pirate back in the day. Then many years later he sent me an email thanking him for a review I wrote of Space Giraffe saying it made his week to see it. That was a huge, huge deal to me.

Thanks again, you three. You were there for me when nobody else was and showed me the world that was out there while I was stuck alone in the suburbs. You saved me from being a boilermaker…whatever the hell that is.

So…who were yours? Did you ever get a chance to let them know what they meant to you?