The actual dates are 8/28/2003 for the release of the DVD and 11/18/2003 for the special edition DVD with rumored 48 extra minutes of footage (more info here). I still haven’t seen the extra footage of Fellowship but I hope to catch up soon.

This comic was somewhat late, but still on a decent schedule I think. Hope next one goes down on Sunday.

— sergio at 02:21 AM  

I think I hate myself. I must be inflicting punishment upon my own person for something awful I did that I don’t remember. There’s no other rational explanation to my having gone to see both Dreamcatcher and Tears of the Sun this weekend.

To be perfectly honest, I went into Dreamcatcher for the sole purpose of watching The last flight of the Osiris (an Animatrix short that was showing before the movie), which was everything I hoped. Made by the guys at Square Pictures (the same guys who made Final Fantasy: The spirits within — which, despite what the critics said, kicked serious ass), it shows a story aboard the Osiris, a human ship similar to the Nebuchadnezzar, Morpheus’ ship. I don’t want to give away the story, but you should seriously consider watching it. The story is good (written by the Wachowski brothers), the pacing is great and the animation is top notch. It even has a kinky, sexy part that will make you laugh.

Ok. About the actual movies: Dreamcatcher is one long winded piece of dog crap that is full of people who take themselves too seriously and deliver their lines in a ridiculously dramatic fashion (I actually burst out laughing two times in some of the more “dramatic” parts of the movie — that can’t be a good thing). Four telepathically linked friends (and their other retarded but all powerful friend) confront an alien invasion by what must be the most incompetent alien race in the history of movies (they make it seem so easy to invade and yet, they’ve been trying for 25 years without so much as a goddamned occupied city to show for it). You never get into trying to make sense of the plot, because every explanation is provided by the characters themselves (and usually involves some unbelievable fact from their lives), but don’t worry: in the end, the plot doesn’t make any sense, however you look at it.

The namesake of the movie, the dreamcatcher thing, doesn’t actually play a part in the movie, which is odd, since it is plastered all over the posters, trailers and whatnot. The dialog sucks, the story has an incredible amount of stuff happening at the same time. There are many, many really dumb, on-the-spot explanations. In case I haven’t made myself clear: this movie blows goats

Tears of the Sun is not really that bad, so much as it is nothing more than a carefully presented collection of all war movie cliches to date. I don’t think they missed any one of those, other that there was no soldier planning to move to Montana and start a farming business when “this damn thing is over” and then died. I have a strong suspicion that they didn’t miss it, but that the dialog got cut somewhere between the director and the theater, though.

Bruce Willis was good but his part lacked depth, and everyone else was halfway decent, except the woman doctor (Monica Belluci) who kept acting like a raindeer in the headlights and making stupid, life-threatening decisions (couldn’t she have sent Arthur in the chopper in the first place and saved herself a world of hurt??) and somehow bossing Willis around. The only cool thing about this movie was watching the equipment the soldiers carried (do they really use those neck-tied radios? those were nifty). Other than that, bleh.

— sergio at 04:22 PM  

This is a late rant update, but anyway, I hope you enjoy this strip. I know I had said this was going to be a three-part story arc, but after looking long and hard at the second part, I decided it was kind of pointless (although I liked the dialog) and ultimately decided to cut it short. I’m posting the script for what would have been the middle part of this stuff. This is how I write all my scripts. I like to have a clear idea about what I want to do with the characters before I touch a pencil.

FRAME 1

Dixon: We’ll have get out of here and face the little bastard sooner or later, you know?

Joe: you think so?

Dixon: flip a coin for it?

Joe: What? winner drops dead?

Dixon: Ok, ok. I get your point.

FRAME 2

Joe: We need some kind of… plan thing!… or something!

Dixon: Have you fought here before?

Joe: Couple times… I can think of at least 6 places he could be hiding over there. And with the range of that thing, we get out, we’re toast.

FRAME 3

Dixon: Damn. The only way will be to do this together. We run out shooting. The one that’s left standing blows his blonde head off, ok?

Joe (staring): YOU CALL THAT A PLAN??? It reminds me of the time I wanted to do a blitzkrieg attack on the sandbox in kindergarten!!!

FRAME 4

Dixon: So?

Joe: So what?

Dixon: Did you win?

Joe: Lost the whole squad. Little Jimmy’s mother hated me after that.

Dixon: Man, that sucks… Any better ideas?

Joe: We pretend we’re dead?

Dixon: Thought so. Well then, we go on three. ONE. TWO.

FRAME 5 (Spread)

Both run out the door shooting and screaming. Wide angle shot (covers two frames)

Dixon: THREE!

— sergio at 07:20 PM  

I’m having the week from hell at work. I guess it’s my punishment for playing Counter Strike the whole weekend instead of working on the comic. Anyway, the new strip is mostly done, and should be up late Tuesday night, so check back on Wednesday for it. Good night.

— sergio at 01:58 AM  

Plug Week Day 6 — A bit of history.

When I started posting in the TWC forum, I noticed that some people asked about a comic named “Weirdism”. They were, for some reason, expecting it. After a while, Liz (Odd1) popped by and announced the launch of the comic. It was good, and everyone cheered.

Intrigued by the hype surrounding it, I emailed Liz to ask her about it. The email she replied was quite interesting. She’s been doing this for a longer time than me, and I found her story to be very engaging. Hope you do too (edited only for emphasis and flow):

—

I started reading web comics in 2000. Mostly Keenspace and Keenspot comics. In late 2001 I decided to take the plunge myself and signed up for my first Keenspace account: “Paperbug”. My Keenspace account was created in February 2002 and I started running comics immediately. Paperbug was poorly written and drawn by a 14-year-old, but that didn’t matter. It was that type of serious manga-styled comics that was all the rage back then; thus it became a success anyway.

I lost interest rather quickly, because I had realized how cliche my concept was and I had started brooding a whole new idea - it would be a weird, full-color comedy… For a while I convinced myself to stick with Paperbug, which had a steady position in the top 10 of various top lists, not to mention more fan art than it did actual episodes. But, I couldn’t even take myself seriously anymore and what had started out as an story full of angst, has wandered far off track and was now incorporating aimless slapstick. In April I put Paperbug out of it’s misery, without warning.

I labeled my new project “Sweet Sanity” at the time. I knew I didn’t want it to be anime-influenced. My art style had to change completely and my skill was poor to start with. As months went by, my new project had become an out-of-hand ongoing joke in the Keen Forum, where I have always been a regular. Now titled Weirdism, but a.k.a. ‘the nonexistent yet incredibly popular web-comic’. The original deadline was January 1st, and when I missed it, Weirdism got hyped up to the point where I was afraid anything I could possibly release would not live up to people’s expectations. Then one day the hype leaked into TWC a little and I knew I had to deliver something.

At long last, February 28th; Weirdism goes public. Many people weren’t satisfied. Loyal Paperbug fans voiced their shock and disappointment. But you can’t please everyone. Weirdism will probably never get the recognition Paperbug did, but at least I can rest assured I’m doing something more original than before

— Liz Groenveld

—

Webcomics are, first and foremost, for their authors. It is easy to lose sight of this fact in the vote count, unique page views statistics and other, ultimately irrelevant things. Doing something that is true to oneself is the only way to achieve any kind of quality and happiness with the work. Kudos to Liz and to all the other webcomic authors out there. Keep up the great work!

In an Overcaffeinated exclusive, I present you with images from Liz’s old project, Paperbug, and an early cast shot of the guys from Weirdism

- Chris
- Demion
- News Box
- Weirdism cast

This marks the end of Plug Week. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and maybe found a new comic to like. Out now.

— sergio at 01:09 PM  

Plug Week Day 5 — Comics Galore!

One of the main differences between syndicated comics and webcomics is the dough. Syndicated comics (those that appear in multiple magazines and newspapers) have it. Online comics, for the most part, don’t. There is another big difference: community. Webcomics create communities. People get to meet the author, talk to him/her (from now on referred to him, for simplicity and ‘cause I’m a chauvinist pig), perhaps even, time and place allowing, buy him a beer/dinner. You may be a fanboy and want to let the author know that he’s the stuff your wet dreams start with, or you may hate and be insulted by the inane drivel said author releases into the world. Any way, you have a voice. There are usually forums that allow you to leave your impressions, you can email and expect prompt reply, or get together with a bunch of other people and discuss the suckiness/brilliance of the latest strip and how past strips were so much better/worse.

Here are more of my linked comics for your entertainment. All of them are quality read. I’m saving Weirdism for tomorrow, since I have something special prepared with it. Enjoy!

It’s All Been Done - By Erik McCurdy and Will Lloyd This is one of the many webcomics out there that are the result of the collaboration between two people. While initially Erik (writer) worked with Jon (artist) on the strip, there came a moment when Jon had to move on and attend to other Real Life obligations, thereby placing IABD on a tight spot. This came as quite a shock to IABD’s readers. Erik posted a thread in the TWC forum and we all started commenting on the situation. Shortly thereafter, Will, from Dunnboyz fame, had offered to take on artist duties for IADB (how he manages to keep two webcomics afloat, and with the quality of art that he delivers is beyond me. Really).

IABD provides some insight into the comic development process. You can click on the little blue ball on top of most of the comics and it’ll show you an animated gif with different stages on that particular strip’s creation. A truly remarkable idea and one I may blatantly steal from them in the future.

Erik posts regularly in the TWC forum as Reflection Jimmy and Will does too, as Dunnboyz.

64 Demons - By Big_Evil

64 Demons is not so much a webcomic per se. It’s more of an online comic book. It’s got Demons, over-the-top violence, a lot of cursing and amazing art. The author goes by the name of Big_Evil at TWC and, contrary to Mack (the main character of 64 Demons), is an insightful, compassionate, thoughful person. A nice guy all around (he’ll be sooo pissed off to be described that way).

Briworld - By Brian Carroll

This comic is quite autobiographical. Starring Brian himself and his friends, it has amazing, clean art and very nice writing. Brian spends an inordinate amount of time at the movies, so quite a few of his comics are about movies recently released, and his take on them. Plus, Brian pulled off the best April fool’s joke of the TWC comics. Worth checking out, really.

Brian posts as classicbri at the TWC forum from time to time. He is quite level headed.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - by Zach This one is something of a rarity: One of the very few one-panel gag webcomics I have seen. Think Gary Larson on stimulants. Most of the jokes he posts make me laugh pretty hard.

Zach is known as Wiztoast over at the TWC forum, where he’s a regular.

— sergio at 01:21 AM  

Plug Week Day 4 — Enter the comics.

Underappreciated comics are scattered all over the Information Superhighway (just who the hell comes up with these idiotic metaphors?). These are the comics you take a look at and see that they are clearly a labor of love. You can’t help but wonder why they are not published in paper and getting the big bucks for their work. Usually, when you see the author’s comments, you find out he works in something entirely unrelated to the comic (I’ve found that working retail is a common trait between a lot of authors. which may go a long ways into explaining the amounts of - funny - frustration found in their comics).

Following, in no particular order, is a brief comment on each of the comics I’m linking to the left. The stuff I put there, I read myself. So I can tell you that it is all good. If the comment on a comic gets you interested, well, you should click on its name and go there, shouldn’t you?

Elf Only Inn - By Josh Sortelli

A few weeks ago I got together with some friends to drink beer and do nothing. We ended up browsing through most of Sortelli’s archives. We laughed our asses off. Tear jerking stuff. Best of all: after I sobered up I came back to the site and the jokes were still funny! He hardly needs any plugging, since he’s usually in the TWC top ten lately, but I just like it so much I had to put a link to it.

The characters are representations of people in a chat room, and Sortelli makes the most out of that situation. Recently he started drawing all panels (it used to be a cut and paste comic). While the old style certainly had a charm to it, the new one has apparently allowed him to explore new situations. The comic updates Monday Wednesday and Friday and Sortelli should lay off that ugly ass avatar he uses at the TWC forum and get himself some woot avatar, because Woot kicks ass (hope that’s not a drawing of himself or something to that effect).

Paste - By Allan Hatt

This one is utterly different from most stuff that is out there. Allan is an old school Illustrator who works with the traditional tools. The site is clean, nice, and the comic hits you in the face like a huge ear-biting steroid-pumping boxer’s uppercut. Featuring whatever is on Allan’s mind at the moment (well, actually, what was there 3 months ago, since that’s how long a buffer he has — isn’t that hardcore? I can’t get a freaking one-week buffer strip yet!). Sometimes it has a ongoing story. My favorite is about a psychic grain of rice (how the hell do people come up with this stuff?).

Allan is known as AlienHate in Rocketbox Comics, where he hangs out from time to time. He sometimes posts stuff here in the shoutbox too. His avatar in Rocketbox is just plain creepy.

It Never Rains - By Reggie Reno

Reggie spent much of his adolescence playing pranks and involving himself in suburban warfare. He had a crew of guys - The Mollusk - that trashed around a lot and used to cover cars/houses with food. He also had love interests. He was your run-of-the-mill weird suburban prankster kid. Now, we can see his story in comic format (he says the story is real and his). With charming art and amazing writing, It never Rains is a comic you won’t fully appreciate unless you read through the whole archive from the beginning, so this one is a whole-afternoon commitment kind of thing, but trust me, it’s worth it.

Reggie apparently spends most of his time in IRC. I don’t, so I have only interacted with him via email. He seems like an ok guy.

Updated every weekday. Reggie likes to say “fuck” and comes up with all sorts of word games, most of which end up in appropriately named sections at his site.

The Repository of Dangerous Things - by Amanda Hardy It’s hard to believe Amanda has never taken art lessons. The art on her webcomic is amazing (she colors it with markers) and the concept is pretty damn unique. RDT is the story of a place and the people related to it. The Repository is a warehouse of sorts that houses all kinds of monsters/ghosts and altogether weird stuff. The extremely hot and ill-tempered Miss Harper handles administrative tasks and doubles as Amanda’s avatar in the TWC forum where she’s known as skoolmunkee. Amanda can also be found posting in Rocketbox from time to time (where she’s known as rdtcomic). She’s one of the brightest people out there (and real hot too, from what I hear =) ).

— sergio at 12:20 AM  

Plug Week Day 3 — About Hosting.

The holy grail of hosting is the free host. The all-generous, user friendly (no pun intended) provider of space, bandwidth and functionality. There is one harsh reality, though: Good hosting comes at a price. Whether that is a hefty or reasonable price depends more on the income of the one paying it than anything else.

Interesting and fun facts:

- A big webcomic will burn through more than a terabyte in a month. That’s like a gazillion Libraries of Congress (who the hell came up with that stupid measure anyway?). Brian from 8 Bit Teather has said that he burns more than 600 Gb/month. His is not the biggest webcomic out there.

- The biggest one: Megatokyo. I mean big. He gets nearly 300 000 visitors a day.

- Hosting a successful webcomic can be very costly. You need a whole server devoted to it, ridiculous amounts of bandwidth and a lot of time dedicated to supporting the site technically (Database administration, Forum housekeeping, Site design improvement, etc.). So next time you see those pesky paypal buttons on your favorite webcomic you may want to give them a try. I know of no authors who are swimming in the bucks they make from their comic (I don’t think even Piro makes that much dough and he’s already publishing in dead tree format).

- The little blue Globe with purple lines going round it that you see on some webcomics’ site (and, as of yesterday, below the button links on this one) is an Extreme Tracker You can click on it and go to a page that displays the statistics for that site. It lists unique visitors, referrers and whatnot. I just found out about this a few days ago and I felt so stupid for not knowing. So don’t let it happen to you.

- Keenspace used to be the main provider of hosting for webcomics out there. They helped a lot of budding authors find a home, but they recently closed their doors and stopped accepting new entries. The service they provide has been on and off for some time now. There are other alternatives in free hosting, like Drunk Duck, which is a very fine service, ran by Ronson, who is a nice person to boot and hangs out at the TWC forum.

My hosting comes from the great guys over at Red Naranja (Orange Network)

I designed their site and do general web admin jobs for them (one of which consists on plugging them here, by the way, so check them out to make me look good ;-) ). In exchange, they give me gobs of bandwidth (of which I don’t use that much currently), and excellent tech support. Go pay them a visit, and consider them next time you’re thinking of getting a hosting provider. They have great prices. Also, if you have any comments on their site design, email me about it.

— sergio at 10:21 AM  

Plug Week Day 2 — About Communities.

When I got started on this webcomic thing, it was mainly due to a casual suggestion from a friend in a conversation (“Hah! that’s funny! you could make a webcomic out of that”). That, along with my desire to start a personal site and my lack of creative direction at the moment, sealed the deal. The end result has been quite rewarding.

Of course, as always happens with this whole Interweb thing, whenever you strike a weird fancy, say… purple lettuce, you find out that there are already thousands of people out there who have started purple lettuce fanclubs, written articles on the optimum leaf width and color (along with its HTML code and RGB equivalent) and have huge greenhouses in their backyards entirely devoted to the further improvement of certain purple lettuce species. Suddently, the bar for your little “Purple Lettuce place of [insert your name here]” has been raised. You’re up against pros. Not just any vegan kid with a strange craving and a personal site, mind you. These are real pros. And suddenly, you’re scared shitless. This happened to me.

When I started Overcaffeinated, all I read webcomic-wise was Penny-Arcade, User Friendly, Dilbert, Sinfest and the Calvin and Hobbes strips at uComics. I (naively) thought to myself “Hey, this whole gamer/geek thing could work! I’m both, after all!”. Little did I know that currently, everyone and their goldfish (as a fellow forumer put it) has a webcomic, and that mine is one of the most clichéd, used-to-death genres out there. I’m sticking with it, though, since I truly like my characters and the situations they get themselves into. Maybe there is still room for this kind of stuff out there.

But I digress. What I found, once I knew where to look, was a thriving, pulsing, gigantic community of creative people bent on making people laugh/cry or just plain think. There are literally hundreds of talented guys and girls out there that have something to tell the world and devote time, effort and money to put it into a comic format and release it into the wild, anxiously refreshing their stats page and checking their Inboxes, waiting to see wether the world gives them a big thumbs up, or gives them the finger (yes, we all do, only the big ones bother to filter their incoming mail and even they read all fan mail).

The first webcomic community I found was Rocketbox. Founded by ten webcomic veterans, and with a solid body of articles, it offered me a wealth of information and most importantly, a peek into the general mindset of the webcomicking community.

The second community I joined was Top Web Comics. You may have seen the list (maybe you found out about this comic there?). But the most interesting stuff goes on at the forums (fora). Whereas the noise-to-signal ratio is higher in the TWC forum than at Rocketbox, the community has established authors that are level headed and usually provide very interesting opinions, moderators that are frequently called into action, controversial topics, attention seeking vote whores, stoners, kids, old farts (I count myself as one of the latter. I’m definitely not the oldest — that would be you, Dinglemunch! — but I certainly belong to the old crowd. Maybe to some of the others too). All of these make for a very entertaining place to hang out at.

There are numerous inside stories within these communities. Rocketbox had a period of very intense activity (I think there was a slashdotting involved) and then settled on a moderate growth pace. The Top Web Comics site had its fair share of infighting and instability recently too, when it changed ownership. All in all, they are incredibly entertaining places to hang out at (remember that many of these people make it a point of getting people to laugh on a regular basis). If you have time, check them out. It will prove to be entertaining, at the very least, and who knows? you may find the webcomic you’ve been looking for all along, or make friends with very interesting guys and gals.

— sergio at 02:32 PM  

Plug Week Day 1 — The Self Referential day.

This post marks the beginning of Plug Week. What in flying blazes is Plug Week you ask? Well, it’s where I spread the love and explain how most of the links you see to your left came to be there.

I’ve started to get a relatively significant number of hits (nothing to write home about, but let’s say if all the readers stood on a small cat they’d crush him to death… oh my god! did I just write that???), quite a few of those hits have come from the kindness of the people linked there, so I think it would be nice of me to return the favor and send a little traffic in their general direction.

How it works

This thing will consist of a series of rants explaining the what, who and why of those comics/communities/hosting services linked there. If you’re interested in gaining a little insight on the webcomicking scene you should find it at least mildly amusing, so come by and check the site everyday from now ‘til Sunday for the skinny on all that stuff.

Plug Week rants will be available after the deed on a new section I’m adding titled, interestingly enough, writings. In there, I’ll post some short stories and assorted rants (those that tickle my fancy).

— sergio at 09:56 AM  

If you don’t know what the hell is going on with the strip, you may not be a Counter Strike player. This is the first of a three-part installment, so in two weeks it will be clearer. Let me know if you like this style. It won’t be a new style for the whole comic. Just select strips.

A reminder: Tomorrow is the first day of Plug Week. There will be a new rant every day talking about the webcomic scene and some of the people involved (namely, those linked on the left), hosting and assorted related subjects. Thanks for visiting. See you later.

— sergio at 11:47 PM  

I have received a lot of comments about the update frequency of the strip (moreover, the lack of it). While it seems I’m finally stabilizing on a Sunday update schedule, the whole weekly thing seems to be just waaaay too slow. If it bothers you, let me tell you that it drives me mad. This stuff is supposed to have an actual story. I have several storylines I want to explore planned for the future, but it all seems to advance very slowly. Which is why I’m exploring new directions.

I thought for a while about making non-colored strips for the middle of the week and keeping the current Sunday colored strip. Don’t know how this would rub you. I could put a sample of how the strip would look without color somewhere to give you an idea. Let me know if this is something you would want to see. I’m somewhat obsessive about the art, so it would take a conscious effort from me to release those strips, but it would shave a few hours off the development process.

I have also thought about making a 1-panel gag strip in the middle of the week (the “Insanity” poster started that way but became a normal strip). I kind of like this idea, and I’ll at least follow up on that with a few more spoof posters. Problem with this is: The format for a 1-panel gag thing doesn’t provide much on the way of character development material.

I’d like to know your opinions on these subjects. Also, thanks to everyone who has written so far and to those who haven’t: Hope you do sometime in the future. I like to know who’s reading this thing and hear from you. I will answer every email I get.

Announcements

- Next week will be Plug Week. I’ll make a daily rant about the comic industry, introduce the comics and communities that I’m linking to and let you in on a bit of background history about this stuff. If this pikes your curiosity come by and check out the rants. There will be a new one every day.

- The next strip will go up on time this Sunday. It will be somewhat different to the usual stuff. Hope you like it.

- You may have noticed that we now have a forum courtesy of TWC (thanks Threeboy!). Apparently there is a bug on the registration system so new people can’t register and post, but it’s being worked on. I’ll let you know when it is available.

- The Top Web Comics list finally reset (for real) and we’re doing fine. Thanks everyone. Keep voting. I’ll keep on thinking up stuff so I can update more often.

— sergio at 12:17 PM  

Well, today being April Fool’s, I thought I’d celebrate by… NOT DOING ANYTHING SPECIAL AT ALL!!! Hah! that’ll throw you off balance!

There’s always next year I guess. In the absence of an April Fool’s joke here, I’d like to point you out to Briworld. Brian pulled the best April Fool’s I’ve seen so far.

On other VOTE news, the Top Web VOTE Comics list resets itself today, so you might want to show your VOTE love for this comic by VOTING!!!. Yeah, that’s right! Thanks a lot for all your support so far! you’ve been great. I’ll try to do as many extras as I can this month.

— sergio at 10:27 AM