The delay in getting today’s strip (Issue 255) up was not due to illness or the like. It was actually because Jim and I decided to do a different comic at the last minute. We are going back to Cosmic Dungeon, but we felt we wanted to lay some groundwork for other things to come, and this was a good way to do it. I had quite a time doing the art on this one, and if you want to read about that you can visit my pixel blog.

March is right around the corner and that means that Bitmap World is approaching another birthday. We’re going to be 2 years old! Wow. A lot has happened in that 2 years, in our real life and in the comic. We haven’t done a Booyah in a while, and that’s because aside from being busy, we figured we’d save the good stuff for our anniversary. We are planning to do another contest, so be sure to check back. We want to do some different prizes this time, so if you entered before, you won’t risk getting a duplicate.

See you on Tuesday!

You know, talking about the birds and the bees with your kids is probably one of the things that strikes the most terror into the hearts of parents. I am pretty comfortable about that kind of thing, and still I find myself stammering through any discussion with my kids. That’s why I love this comic (Issue 253) , because I think it really conveys that feeling well.

I do have to admit, this actually wasn’t my idea or joke. This actually happened to a friend of mine. Her child asked her, and true to her cool cucumber nature, she just did the “we’ll talk about it later” thing–to then learn where the word had been picked up. I thought this was so funny, I had to use the joke, embellishing it a bit with Harry’s reaction. Of course, thinking about this, I have to go back to the old Art Linkletter show, “Kids Say The Darndest Things.” Anyhow, a big thanks to “El” for sharing that story with me and being the inspiration for this strip.

On another note, the comic is up on time today! How did that happen? Maybe it’s because I don’t feel quite on death’s door being sick and all. Let’s just hope the “wellness” streak continues in our house. The particular bug that’s hit us has already gone around twice to everyone in our home! That’s more than enough for me.

Oh, and for any kids reading this who don’t know what that means, in the context of this comic, the word simply means “pure”–not having anything added to it.

I hate being sick. Ugh. And I should know not to push it when I’m sick, because I make mistakes. Case in point, I tried to update the comics last night and ended up messing something up and the database crashed. Granted, it was probably a program error, but I didn’t really check everything when I did it and just went to bed.

Of course, the sickies worked against me as I ended up deleting the scripts for these strips, and then re-did them only to leave them at my work. Migraines are inconducive to the creative process.

That said, we are pretty busy with a couple of other projects we’re working. One being the re-launch of Family Webcomics, which is going to be worlds better and easier-to-use than its predecessor. We have also been busy being interviewed for different media outlets, including the New York Times. One of our other sites is one for large families, and with the octuplet news, big families are in the spotlight again. This isn’t the first time we’ve been featured in a paper. I’ve been interviewed by the Chicago Sun-Times and our family was featured on CNN.com last year. And, as glamourous as that sounds, it really isn’t. 15 minutes…or more like 8 minutes. Plus, you don’t get anything out of it other than some appreciation. Oh well. Not to mention, they never mention Bitmap World, which would be way cool, but…oh well.

That said, the kids are on the mend, though I’m in the middle of that “feel better one day, feel worse the next” stage. Hoping this bug is beat soon. Still hoping to get the comic up on Friday, but you all know how that may go.

Oh, I am updating this entry to note that in Issue 248 that Char calls the Gigs DINKS. That is an acronym for “Double Income No Kids.” It’s basically used for couples who are both working and making good money and don’t have any kids. Thus, they are usually well off financially.

We ended up having a meeting for a new pay project…which our fans will know is a big thing for us since I have been out of work over a year. So we had to hold off on the Booyah. Michelle just planned to put one strip up late on Tuesday, but then she ended up with a migraine, so she asked me to put up a filler strip. Using the BYOC, I decided to run with the theme from the previous strip. Thing is, Michelle loved it and said it worked so well, she wanted me to re-work the art and have it be the permanent strip. Kinda funny how it worked out, but I do admit it works well in the continuity.

An interesting tidbit is I didn’t have to write this strip at all. I had already done a filler strip built around this song, and every time I saw this template, that song would run through my head for days afterwards. So, literally it took me about 2 seconds to decide to do it, and another 10 seconds to write Harry’s line in the last panel. Oh, and add another 10 minutes to remaster the strip with Harry’s car. I did consider changing the BYOC font on this strip to our regular font, but decided that would have been a little bit too much work.

On another note, the project we met about it really cool. We can’t talk about it right now, but when we are into it, we’ll let our fans know. Plan now is Booyah on Friday!

Well, *that* was an experience.

This is the third comic done entirely by me (Jim) from beginning to end. Wait, that’s a lie. Michelle re-did the last panel. I think my muse expired, or something.

Anyway, it took me about five hours. Eek! Yeah, this is why Michelle usually does most nearly all of the artwork.

The first comic I did myself consisted entirely of Harry watching TV. No challenging artwork there! The current comic, I had to design a store, a samples cart, and a pinata.

Anyway, it’s up now. And I’m tired. Oh, and bonus points for anyone who can figure out what the other two “all-Jim” comics were.

Well, as is pretty typical with us, things just happened this week, throwing us into a tailspin. We had a hack on one of our other sites, and then a very sick baby who kept us up all night…and slowed our work on the computer. We actually had the Booyah ready on time, but then at the last minute forgot one of the items! We had done the WiiMiis nearly a month ago. When we were gathering the pieces for the Booyah, we stumbled upon the images and did one of these: And that meant a lot of running around, trying to get it together for the Booyah. The thing that stymied us the most is that Jim really wanted to get screenshots of the actual Check Mii Out Channel. Problem is, while you can download certain content onto a memory card from the Wii, you can’t save WiiMiis. To do so, you need to patch in a DVD Recorder into your television. Well, we have a DVD recorder we had never set up, so Jim decided to use that. Now, if you have ever read about any “easy” project we embark on, you can totally guess what happened next. This comic pretty much sums it up. Getting the images to pipe into the DVD player was not the problem, it was getting the player to write to the disc properly. Quite seriously, it took 3 hours and a half dozen discs, and it STILL didn’t write right correctly. It saved the data, but not a menu, so we couldn’t access the pictures. So, that meant Jim spending several more hours on the internet, trying to find software that could repair and/or read the disc. After that, there was the matter of ripping the screen, creating graphics, putting together the tutorial, and… Well, you get the idea. Anyhow, the neat thing is if you are a fan of the site and have a Wii, you can use Bitmap World characters in your games! How cool is that?I am also super excited about the Comment graphics. There are over 100 different graphics. Literally, this took me a huge amount of time to do. If you are familiar with doing glitter graphics, you know that to make one, you need to create 3 different images, then merge/animate them. So, literally I had to create over 300 images. It was a challenge. But the good thing is that during the process I learned a TON about Paint Shop Pro, as well as getting some techniques that will help me considerably in doing the comic. In fact, some of the shortcuts I used for the current strips, and they went a lot faster than those I did even a week ago!Oh, and speaking of the Comments, we reported earlier that the Booyah was initially delayed a bit because of some programming. That was actually for the comment graphics. I did not want to hardcode pages with the graphics and the links–it would have taken me days. We did consider going with some fancy gallery program to display them, but that turned out to be overkill. Eventually we found a so-so program that we could drop into the directory and it would list the graphics. Jim modified it so it would automatically generate the link codes. It worked up great! Took time, but hey, it will help us loads in the future.

I’ll let everyone get into all the goodies of the Booyah. At the current rate, it looks like we’ll be tying up the current storyline on Tuesday. I’ll post another blog entry there with my comments on the most recent strips.

Well, this one (Issue 178) was done BEFORE midnight, but I wanted to do a blog so it will be up just a wee bit afterwards. Though, Jim argued it is still Tuesday on the West Coast, so he is putting a Tuesday date on the front page!

Of course, this one has new art. The Cosmic Dungeon scenery are mostly from pre-existing video game backgrounds (though they are moderately to heavily modified by me), but the Inn is all new and original. It took me forever to decide what style I wanted to do the building. We always knew we wanted the big sign on the top, but actually putting it up there, with the neon arrow was a bit tricky. Anyhow, I spent a good deal of a day looking at tons of medieval inn and pub pictures, and finally decided that I wanted to use this one. When I finally showed it to Jim, he thought it was a pretty good pixelation! What do you think?

The Inn would not prove my greatest challenge. Instead it would be the wording on the sign. Reason being is that there are TONS of gothic and medieval fonts available on the Web, but very FEW that are pixel/bitmap. The difference between a bitmap and regular font is that bitmap fonts are created to be legible at very small sizes. Most regular fonts degrade badly and are illegible at small point sizes. Considering the fonts in Bitmap World range from 10 to 6 points, I was having a very difficult time finding a gothic font that would look good. Most needed to be 12 to 14 points, and we didn’t have enough room in the panel–which I learned the hard way after spending the time to do 2 different signs in 2 different fonts, to have both be a bust. Ugh! I probably Googled about 50 different combinations of keywords trying to narrow down a “gothic pixel font” or “medieval bitmap font” or…you get the idea. I was actually getting pretty desperate and considered drawing my own font, but I had already taken so much time with this! What I eventually ended up doing is hitting bitmap fonts sites and just manually going through their whole catalog until I found something.

And I did! Hours and hours later. But, I am very happy to say that the font in the last panel is a pixel font called HeinzHeinrich, and it’s awesome. And I think it looks awesome too. I do love the gag on the sign. I meant is to be more of a play on words, but thinking about it, it really does seem to be a sign of our times as we have more businesses sharing space to save money.

I am very hopeful Friday’s comic will be a tad easier, even though I have to do the inside of the pub.

The comic (Issue 172) was late because Jim spent all of yesterday cleaning the house of a dead woman so her family can sell it.  Yes, I know that sounds pretty crazy, but it’s true.  We’re just trying to find a way to work it in the comic.

Oh, and between the time we last posted a comic, my computer has been hit with a worm, which required a frantic backup and export of the data and speedy reformat of the hard drive.  I am working at half mast not having any of my stuff!  Oh…and I lost all my favorites.  Then, just today, I ended up infected with Antivirus XP 2008!  Thankfully, some good malware software cleaned me up.  *sigh*  Truly, my computer jinx is still around.  Trying to think of ways to write that into the comic too!

Either way, today’s comic was totally Jim’s show.  We just got off of the Rasterman storyline and we decided we need a few stand-alone “filler” strips to kinda space things out before jumping into the next plotline.  Since we left off with Harry at the office, I wanted to do a trouble ticket strip.  Jim came up with this idea, and after a bit of hashing out, we came up with this.  In fact, we came up with 2 jokes, and will be doing the other one in the future. 

Barring any major emergencies–and you never know with us–Friday should be up on time.

Oh, and just to be clever, three points to the first one who comments here in the blog with the correct answer to the question posed in the strip.

Well, I felt so bad about the whole forum blow-up that I did 2 comics today. Forgive me??? Please, someone, a pity comment. ;O)

The forums will be up tomorrow, along with the contest winner. Sorry for *that* delay, but Jim is doing some work on the system which I hope can be done by then. I figured you guys would rather we work on the extra comic.

The last few strips have been grueling! Most the carnival stuff had to be done from scratch. There is some stock pixel art in there, but a good majority is my original art. What pre-existing art had to be heavily modified. Each one took much longer than even the Cosmic Dungeon strips. However, I feel it was well worth it. I am happy with the look, and now I have a lot of props for further issues!

I think the thing that got me the most with this last round was all the supporting characters! You know how you watch Spongebob or any other cartoon, and there are a bunch of recurring secondary characters? Well, now I know why. Getting all those faces in the crowd took an enormouns amount of time, since I needed to create a ton of non-descript characters, as well as putting in key characters and members of their families. I just wish I hadn’t been so pressed for time with the site problems, because doing the art was a lot of fun and I would have liked to have had the time to enjoy it more.

I do have a lot of comments on the individual strips from the last 2 updates, so I’m just gonna rattle them off one by one:

Strip 151 - I would love to say my kids behave in the car all the time. They do mostly, but even on the best of trips there is the kicking and the poking. This was certainly a tribute to that.

Strip 152 - This is one of my all-time favorite strips. I laugh just thinking about it. The mayor has definitely developed into a colorful character, and a bit different than what we first envisioned and planned for him. Makes you wonder what that baby looked like, eh?

Strip 153 - I am WAY proud of how those porta-pottys turned out! The joke in there about the family motto was actually something Jim said to Linus once as a gag when Jim made him use the facilities at a public place. I thought it would be funny if it actually *was* someone’s family motto. Now it is!

Strip 154 - The Dott-Com joke never occurred to me until just a few weeks ago. We’ve been doing this strip for over a year, and such an obvious tech joke was under right my nose. Too funny.

Strip 155 - I am sure we embarrass our kids by making them do things with the little ones. Most of the time they truly don’t mind, but there are moments in public, particularly when their friends are around, where they cringe at the thought. Coincidentally, this was Linus’s favorite strip of the Booyah update–because he could relate to it!

Strip 156 - Have you ever played the Wii game, Carnival? That was the inspiration for the dunk tank with Mr. Domain in there. A tidbit, Korn’s son is the one who dunked him. Also, I had more fun drawing the little drama in the background of that strip than I did the dialogue between Max and Blip. Though I do say, I am really proud of how this strip turned out overall.

Strip 157 - Jim asked me, “are we really going to do a vomit joke?” C’mon, how could I pass that up?! Seriously, I don’t normally like potty-humor, but there are times it’s appropriate and pretty darn funny.

Monday…the parade.

Of course, I sound like such a broken record about an update (you see I even created a category in this blog for it). But swear on a stack of Batman comics, things have been nuts!

First of all, I have to ask a question. If you have a virus, a nasty virus, but your computer is running okay, do you remove it? My first answer would have been yes, that is until after yesterday. As the tech at my work installed the updated anti-virus and did his magic to fix my computer up, inside little gremlins were doing their duty. Needless to say, after 2 hours of “fixing” my computer was far worse off than it had been before. I was there until 9:00 last night and did not want to even look at computers–even for the comics–when I got home.

Now, most people would say, “So what, don’t you have a home computer? You could have worked on it at home sometimes.” Sure do, and I do most of my art on that normally. Problem is, this particularly line of strips I did at work. My office computer is limping along, but it will not allow me to open certain folders and programs, including my graphics package. So, I’m stuck…for now. I did manage to grab certain files and will be bringing them home, but that is going to delay me until this evening.

Now, I should note the reason I’m not up on this is because this strip diversion into Cosmic Dungeon was not planned. We wanted a little padding out of some other storylines, and came up with this little sidetrack. So, I have been doing it on the fly. I probably should have just stuck with the other stuff, since most of that is done. Ugh.

So, thanks for the patience. I do feel better offering you our amusing fillers. The good news is they have earmarked me to get a new machine at work. Just wish it didn’t take something like this to get me there.