I read a comic recently that was a bit hard for me to get through. I think there's an interesting story there, and the artist is really talented. But the problem I had was that he wrote the book as well, and his command of grammar proved to be overly distracting to me.

If you're an artist, I get that your forte is going to be the illustrations, rather than the text. I'm okay with that. I'm willing to forgive the occasional typo or some dialogue that sounds a bit cumbersome. Heck, I love Jack Kirby's 1970s work at DC despite his absurdly tin ear. But what Kirby did, despite having some goofy word combinations that probably would be hard to speak in context, his grammar and punctuation were right.

You've heard folks complain for years about the proper use of "their", "there" and "they're". And "your" versus "you're." And "its" versus "it's." And the zillion other homophone issues that are out there.

You've probably also heard, somewhere back in school, all the reasons why and where you should use commas, semicolons, colons, etc. "Let's eat, Grandma" versus "Let's eat grandma." Nothing new here.

Odds are that if you don't know those rules, you KNOW you don't know those rules. Every time you come to a point where you need to write there, their or they're, you're at a loss. You know there are some rules around them, but you can't remember them.

That's okay! That's why not everyone is a writer. That's why, despite almost everyone being able to publish any story they want, a lot of it is still dismissed as crap. Because not everyone can write.

Here's where I'm going with this, though. If you know you're not a good writer -- if you know you don't know those rules of grammar and spelling and punctuation -- then doesn't it make sense to AT LEAST get someone who does know something about them to look over your script?

I don't want to call this artist out; I respect his talent and have bought more than a couple independent pieces of his work. But I was really turned off on this latest because the script needed a lot of help. Just from a technical perspective. I bought the book, and I was hoping to review it here, but I won't because I didn't like it. Still great art, decent sounding story, but the actual script was problematic enough to keep me from liking it.

You don't want to or can't afford to hire an actual writer to polish your script? I totally understand. But please get someone to at least look it over. A really bad script over good art is almost as damaging as bad art over a really good story.

Last night, the S.O. and I watched the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of The Phantom Planet.

What a deplorably paced train wreck of a movie! Not even a grade B flick; we're talking grade D-minus at best!

Anyway, the movie's protagonist was played by one Dean Fredericks. He was kind of strange looking. (Tom Servo asked, "Is he a turnip that grew a face?") His hair was clearly bleached blonde but his facial features suggested a Native American or island heritage. The S.O. looked him up online. Although she didn't find anything about his heritage (that his given name was Frederick Foote and he frequently played an "Indian" in 1950s Westerns continue to suggest Native American, but there was nothing definitive) she was surprised to see this line in his Wikipedia entry... "an American actor best known for his portrayal of the comic strip character Steve Canyon in a 34-episode television series of the same name..."

And a few seconds later, we learn they're in the process RIGHT NOW of releasing all the old Steve Canyon shows on DVD with new interviews and documentaries plus cleaned up footage. The first two sets, as well as the as-yet-unreleased third set, can be ordered here. Here's a promo clip for the DVD restoration projeft...

I was chatting with an old friend of mine a couple weeks ago. She's been out of the design business for about a decade now, and asked a few questions about how things have changed. She noted that the last time she was doing agency work, they all lived and died by FedEx deadlines. Things had to be on the client's desk the next morning, so you had to have comped up in time for the last FedEx delivery guy the night before.

I noted that considerably less of an issue these days. Obviously, we're able to shoot files around electronically a lot more easily these days, so the deadlines are almost exclusively the clients' and not those of any middlemen. What that means, though, is that instead of staying late at the office to finish something where the FedEx guy will be able to pick it up, you wind up working from home at all sorts of odd hours. I know I've worked on more than a few projects at 2 and 3 in the morning.

But those are largely electronic presentations. I'm working on web pages and emails, so the end products are all supposed to be electronic anyway.

Not long ago, I was working on the Fantasy Fest poster I mentioned yesterday. I had asked about submitting it electronically, but they noted that the judging would be done in a print format. I could submit my piece electronically, but they'd just print it on letter paper off their standard ink jet printer and tack it up on the wall against full-size final art pieces. So I resolved to have mine professionally printed to size and send down the physical object.

I finished working on the piece at around 11:00 one night, well after everywhere was closed. But I could still submit it electronically to FedEx/Kinkos and pick up the finished piece on my way home from work the next day. But that was only because I wanted to do a final check myself before sending it on. I could have, just as easily, had the file delivered to the submissions office from a FedEx/Kinkos that was already down there. It could have been there the very next day, having been sent well after the normal pick-up/drop-off hours.

How many folks do this for conventions? Obviously, creators try to prepare as much as they can for them, but it's not uncommon for something to get pushed to the last minute. And so a creator can submit files electronically at midnight, get on a flight to San Diego first thing in the morning, and have the printed documents (comics, posters, banners, whatever) waiting for them at the show.

It used to be that time was our enemy. We needed to have things complete in order that the objects themselves could be physically transported. We had to get our jobs done by 5:00 (or whenever) because that's what our mostly arbitrarily imposed limits were. Now, we're able to work more on our time and our own schedule. Though some people complain about this notion of bringing more work home, I dare say we're able to make up for it by reading comic strips at work or check Facebook and Twitter.

Stewe Boyd recently brought up an interesting point and one that seems to be gaining acceptance in the modern workplace. That is, that we're all working more like freelancers. We're working more on our own schedules, just getting the job done. If that means being online at 3:00 AM, then so be it. My job is to get my projects done. Sometimes that'll be 40 hours a week; sometimes it'll be 50 hours a week; sometimes it'll be 30. It's the results that matter, not the numbers you've punched in on the metaphoric clock.

The only question that really remains is: how long before that really becomes integrated into businesses? That's more or less how comic creators work -- I can't tell you the number of Tweets I see from writers working at 4:00 AM -- but there's no reason publishers can't do that as well. They don't need to be in the office for that meeting. They don't need to get the actual art files to send off to the printer. All that can be done from just about anywhere. So why not work on the schedule that suits your individual needs?

OK, so what is Sean up to these days?

Team Cul de Sac: Favorites
In support of Richard Thompson, I contributed a piece to an old school 'zine Craig Fischer has put together where a bunch of writer types yammer on about their favorite comics. The contributor list includes: Derik Badman, Noah Berlatsky, Johanna Draper Carlson, Shaenon Garrity, Dustin Harbin, Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, Gene Kannenberg, Chris Mautner, Jim Rugg, Chris Schweizer, Tom Spurgeon, Ben Towle and myself among many others. Plus it sports a new cover by Thompson himself. All the proceeds go towards Parkinson's research and will be available for $5 at Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC next weekend. More info can be found here and here.

Graphic Novels
The Salem Press encyclopedia moves apace; I'm working on my fourth and fifth articles for them now. My most recent ones cover My Mommy is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill (brilliant title!) and You Are Here.

Fantasy Fest 2011: Aquatic Afrolic
OK, this isn't really comics, but I had fun with it. I'll be attending a wedding in Key West, FL in October and the timing happens to coincide with an island-wide party called Fantasy Fest. Sounds like a slightly smaller version of New Orleans' Mardi Gras from what I can tell. Anyway, I submitted a poster design for the event, which I think has a fair chance of being selected as the official art for the year.

The Jack Kirby Collector
I'm actually ahead of the game (barely!) on this one and have already turned in my column for issue #57, which won't hit the stands until August. An interesting look at Jack's intertations (yes, plural) of Prester John. And, although not really scheduled into the magazine yet, I've done some research that, I think, will make for another cool article. I'll be looking at the third surviving script that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby used in their collaborations on the Fantastic Four and how that sheds light on the evolution of their working relationship. (Bet you didn't know there were three scripts that have survived, did you?)

MTV Geek
Kleefeld on Webcomics is still going strong and I'm having a blast doing these columns. Yesterday's piece was on comics about and for differently abled folks and the one before that looked the guest strip. I don't know about you, but I'm finding this stuff fascinating.

Endeavor
You know that space shuttle that'll be landing in a few days from a two week trip up to the International Space Station? I'm on it. Well, a picture of me is. It's part of NASA's Face in Space program. I'm not all that special in going, though; there are over 300,000 participants among all these last three shuttle launches. But it's another kind of fun bit so I thought I'd mention here, even though I can't get my official certificate until Wednesday.

Yesterday, I was talking about some artwork I did when I was a kid. While I was writing that piece, I did a quick look to see if I still had that t-shirt (I don't) and stumbled across some archive CDs that have some of the earliest computer artwork I did. I thought I'd share some of them here since many are comic-relate.

Here is, I believe, the first instance in which I really started using the computer as a drawing tool...

The file had a creation date of August 5, 1986 and was done in a program called MacPaint. Color was not an option at all, and grey scales were done in a still-pretty-binary fashion. Obviously, scalable fonts weren't a available. The Batman, Shatter and FF figures were based on some existing clip art, and the US 1 truck is largely lifted from some as well, but the other figures were all drawn pixel by pixel.

It would seem that I was able to improve a bit as I got used to the new format. Here's a Far Side cartoon I re-drew a couple months later...

Referring again to yesterday's post about intellectual property, I think it's note-worthy that I was very clear that I had copied Gary Larson's work here.

Jump to a few years later. June 1994. I believe I came across a cool-looking Thor image in Marc Spector: Moon Knight. It was drawn by hand (can't recall the original artist offhand) and I remember thinking it was cool image that would be fairly easy to replicate electronically. I redrew the piece in, I think, Altsys Freehand (This was before Macromedia and/or Adobe had it) during some free time I had during my internship at Kenner toys.

Still some artistic problems (only some of which I can blame on the software) but a definite improvement. Plus, this is still at least five years before computer coloring and/or lettering became common.

Just some interesting pseudo-historical pieces that I thought I'd share.

When I was in high school, a freshman I think, they held a t-shirt design contest for the city's spring festival 5K race. There were a few requirements

• The design had to be one color.
• It had to fit on the front of a t-shirt.
• It had to include the name of the race and the dates.
• It had to somehow reference that year's theme, which was something centered around Disney. The 60th birthday of Mickey Mouse, maybe?

So I sat down and sketched out a design. The race name ran in a slight arc across the top with the dates flush along the bottom. The main image was a frontal shot of Mickey running across a finish line with Donald and Goofy behind him racing to catch up. It wasn't a particularly stellar drawing, all things considered, but it was serviceable enough considering I was barely a teenager.

I ultimately won the contest. I never saw any of the other entries, but they couldn't have either been too many or they must have been really horrid. I mean, realistically, how is a 14 year old with no professional art training going beat out a talented 17 or 18 year old with several years of art classes under his/her belt?

I don't recall how much my folks knew about the contest beforehand. I'm sure I must have consulted my dad for at least the lettering portion, but I may have printed the text onto a sheet of paper first and then drawn the figures around it. It's somewhat relevant here because, after I told my dad about my success, he first expressed pride in his son doing a good job on something vaguely professional but then also noted some concern. The design, as I said, featured three major Disney characters fairly prominently. This design was going to be printed up on hundreds of t-shirts and used in helping promote this spring festival. Many of the folks in the race itself would inevitably be wearing it.

All without any consent from Disney.

So my father's concern was that this was a notable violation of Disney's trademarks and, potentially, the company could seek legal action against the artist. Me. Dad gave me a basic lesson in trademark law. That characters were owned by people and it wasn't legal for just anybody to make a cartoon about Mickey Mouse. Just as not anybody could make a comic book about Batman. It was okay if I wanted to sit at the kitchen table and draw them for myself, but trying to make money off somebody else's idea was wrong and illegal. Since these t-shirts were going to be for sale, that really wasn't right.

I had to sign a contract of some sort to complete things. It basically said that I was considered to have done work-for-hire and that the final artwork was theirs. I think I was paid $50 and a free t-shirt once it was printed. Dad ensured that I knew about the legal issues and that I ask specifically about them before I signed anything.

The woman in charge of the design contest, who also happened to be the high school art teacher, assured me that any and all legal responsibility would be on their shoulders. That they weren't all that concerned since the entire town population was something like 7,000 so no one from Disney would be likely to notice. And that my dad was pretty astute to think of that sort of thing.

To no great surprise, the t-shirt design never attracted any legal attention. As was pointed out, it was just too small a burb to get noticed. I don't know if Dad knew that, or if he was pretty sure that I was safe as contractor first, and as a minor second. But I am certain that he was taking advantage of the opportunity to teach me about intellectual property. The basics he gave me then were expanded upon in some of my design classes in college a few years later, but I wonder if more kids were presented with those basics like I was, would we see as much digital piracy as there is?

• I haven't checked in on Brian Altounian for a little while now, but he will evidently be on Trend POV this Friday at noon EST to discuss Wowio and "converging trends." I don't think I'll be able to tune in, but the show will hopefully be archived for later viewing.
• Neil Cohn finds some interesting differences in translating American comics for French publication. Beyond the text itself, some of the art was translated for French audiences.
• The Hooded Utilitarian crew are conducting a poll to nail down the top ten greatest comics of all time. I'm generally not keen on lists like this, but Robert did ask me personally to weigh in. I haven't made all my choices yet, but I will give you this hint about my submission: my list will not include anything by Bil Keane.
• Ben Huh criticizes how news in general is written. (Although his piece seems to be geared towards written articles, some of the same issues are present in video coverage.) While not directly related to comics, it's a good take on the problems inherent in the news industry. It seems that some of these general ideas could be applied to webcomics as well. Not unlike what I was talking about over at MTV a couple weeks ago.
• And finally, Harold Camping versus Zombies. In comic book form.