Xaviar Xerexes

Wandering webcomic ronin. Created Comixpedia (2002-2005) and ComixTalk (2006-2012; 2016-?). Made a lot of unfinished comics and novels.

16 Comments

  1. And William, you always seem so angry in your posts. Yeeesh.

    Trust me, if I were angry, there’s be no uncertainty.

  2. And many people do both (write and draw) or at least form a team. And the only thing I said was lazy, was having to get guest strips. I just feel a cut and paste comic… err… well whatever you would call a comic whose artwork never changes, should be held to a higher update standard then most comics (this is only a personal standard by the way, if people disagree with me, that’s fine). I also said I felt the comic was poorly written. A comic that’s poorly written with no artwork, SHOULD be able to update without needing to resort to guest strips (again, this is only a personal opinion. It was just a beef I had about it, and I didn’t say anything until I saw a script that was (IMO, fans probably feel it is well written) able to do just as good a job as the creator (in my opinion again, which I feel I made pretty clear in my previous posts ;))).

    As for the comments that the comic’s text does work with the art, I’ll just agree to disagree there. Really, I know plenty of people like it. I don’t see the attraction myself, but I don’t normally say anything. But I couldn’t stop myself with this particular script. And William, you always seem so angry in your posts. Yeeesh.

  3. Unless you mean a human translator, I’d -really- not want to see comics getting translated by software. Although I guess it’s better then having no comic at all in the language, it’d just result in babelfished comics (which I think most agree isn’t something you’d want to spend overly long reading).

    Although I imagine having a fan-created translation-storing system (fans do translate Userfriendly and post it in the comments), it could easily work with this system. Rather then having 10 images stored for each language for each comic (which would take up quite a bit of space), you could instead just have one (or two) images stored with the text provided depending on the language. Although I imagine it’s a lot easier to do with Dinosaur Comics because the images never change, so positioning the text in the correct spot would be easier, then having to determine where to put the text (which is different for each day) all the time.

  4. Well Sam, history has shown us that any asshole can crap out a webcomic and have it read. So I can see why some would think having the same art all of the time is lazy… I mean, no one actually WRITES webcomics.

    I mean, I’m drawing a comic for Alexander Danner and he didnt give me a script. No, no. He gave he the following on a napkin from TGI Fridays :

    “Bandit gud dog”

    And I had to build the art from that because no one WRITES webcomics! That’d be against the laws of laziness.

  5. And now, allow me to point out a possible practical future use of this:

    Assuming the artist can find a translator, they could possibly have their comic in whatever language they’d like without having to make a large number of copies of the comic.

  6. I don’t think you could call it laziness. After all, even a person who can’t draw could always change or rearrange the clipart without much extra effort. No, using the same template is a very conciously chosen creative restriction… and one that seems to have spurred some wildly diverse and (in my opinion) freaking hillarious writing. Indeed, the real joy of Dino Comics is seeing how many ways Ryan can “work” those same few panels!

  7. And yeah, writing to the same art every day…seriously not easy.

    From what I’ve seen, the art pretty much exists independant to the comic. The art has absolutely no relation whatsoever to the text, and I think this news script pretty much proves it. These news things make as much sense with the art, as the comic itself.

  8. It certainly looks the same, but it reads very differently. I read a couple of the news things, and thought it was neat that someone figured out how to do that, but it’s not something I would actually read. It’s a funny concept, but the text is just…well…the news. You could get the same effect with any comic, if you know how to program it and can replicate the superficial quirks of the creator’s writing. But that’s all that’s replicated–the superficial stuff. This captures none of the witty insights and clever philosophical satire that characterize North’s actual writing.

  9. Now let’s see THIS news story run through NewsRex!

    News Presented in Dinosaur Comics-O-Rama…

    …Vision!!!

  10. Looks as funny as all the normal Dinosaur comics….

    I don’t like the comic. I don’t like the jokes, and find the whole “never changing strips” pretty bad. What I especially find pathetic is having guest strips. He should be able to do strips every single day, there’s so little work (and if I’m misrepresenting it, from what I saw it looked like there was very little effort, with the jokes not really being that funny ;)). I could easily see him just replacing the normal strip with this news script and no-one noticing.

    Yeah, I don’t like the comic. I’m very biased against the comic.

  11. Wow I couldn’t disagree more — there’s no comic out there that makes me laugh out loud more often than Dinosaur Comics. I’ve yet to see anything funnier. And yeah, writing to the same art every day…seriously not easy.

  12. To be fair, his update schedule is five days a week, and he keeps to it pretty reliably. So that actually is a more rigorous schedule than most comics. I don’t know that the guest strips are to make up for not making comics. He’s got a lot of fans who like to make guest strips, and he gives those fans a public presentation. It’s more an event than a stopgap.

  13. John– What you apparently don’t realize is that Ryan hosted guest strips for his series because they’re FUN, and because a number of notable artists wanted to try their hand at his unique and wonderful concept.

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