PVP - Player Vs Player

I have more than one thing to talk about today.

Color me thrilled:
I’ve been doing a good job of keeping PvP on time since the new site went up, but I still don’t have a significant buffer of strips. This is something I would like to achieve, so I’ve decided to work smarter and not harder. I have enlisted the help of Mary Cagle, my one time intern, to take over coloring chores. I’ve done this in the hopes that the extra time I spent coloring I can use to get even further ahead on writing, drawing and inking.

I’m not sure if it’s going to work, but I do know that her colors are amazing, make my characters really pop and that the strip has never looked better. I have a feeling I’m going to be hiring her on as PvP’s full time colorist.

You should all follow Mary on twitter. She goes by @cubewatermelon. Tell her how amazing her colors are and check out her webcomic Kiwi Blitz.

PAX is coming
PAX prime is right around the corner, and I couldn’t be more pumped up about anything right now. PAX Prime is my favorite show of the year and I can’t wait to see you all there. So much is happening at and around this show:

As you know, Kris and I are bookmarking PAX with two live shows at the Triple Door. This is going to be insane. Special guests include Paul and Storm, MC Frontalot, Stepto, my brother and Kris’ beard. Mama Mia, pizzaria, it’s gonna be a good time.

I’m also doing a couple panels at PAX:
An Afternoon with Scott and Kris
- Kris and I are going to hold court for 50 minutes and tell you about all the things we love and are working on and NO WE ARE NOT GETTING DRUNK ON THIS PANEL (but you can bring us booze to drink later).

Acquisitions Incorporated: The Lost Episode - It’s live D&D at PAX again and I hope that in this installment, Binwin can finally get Aeofel to forgive him for splitting the party and getting him killed (probably not).

An evening with Scott Kurtz - Hey, let’s bring it down a notch. This is the panel where we shut the doors and I open my heart and tell you stories I shouldn’t tell you and then we all keep it to ourselves and it’s a very special night that nobody else but us got to have. I’ve done this twice before and I’m very much looking forward to doing it again. I promise that at some point during this panel we’re all going to have a good cry.

I’ve apparently confused a lot of you

A lot of people thought Max had already come out. That’s true. He did come out to Jade last after she bumped into Max and his boyfriend at the market. And of course, when Max’s sister, Sonya came to visit, we discovered that she knew as well. And of course, it only took one awkward kiss for Lucille to figure out things out. But a lot of people were under the impression that Cole and Brent had already known for a while now.

Kind of.

There was a storyline I did during Thanksgiving 2008. Max confronted Cole and Brent about them always being so mean to him. The whole thing lead to a debate on whether Max stole Cole’s girlfriend back in college and if he was, in fact, gay. It ended with this strip. Max never admits he’s gay here. He just points out it shouldn’t matter either way. So it’s not surprising that he got the reaction he got today. Look, I’m not a very good writer.

Oh! Also…a couple people on twitter have asked if I’m going to address the way Francis has, in the past, been portrayed as a typical homophobic teen gamer. In years past, Francis loved to use the word “Gaaaayyy.” Yes. Absolutely I am going to be addressing that.

Stay tuned.

I consider Mary Cagle to be my protegee.

She has interned for me, and worked on projects for me in a professional capacity. She frequently refers to me as her “comics dad.” I think that mentoring and apprenticing is a lost but important practice. I’ve had a lot of people mentor me as my career developed and I want to do the same for Mary.

I’ve always had a mental block when it came to color theory. My mind just shuts down. I lock up. I’m much more comfortable in the world of black and white with spot blacks that can anchor a page and make figures pop. For Mary this comes easily. She loves coloring. It is the dessert she dutifly swallows her vegitables to get. And I think that she has a pretty no brainer career ahead of her as a professional colorist if she wants it. Starting today she could fill up her working hours with professional coloring work. No doubt in my mind.

I hired her very recently to color a week of PvP. And she did to much fanfare. In fact the day I went back to my boring flat colors, my twitter feed was filled with comments like “Whelp! Scott’s back to coloring. boo.” And so I decided to try to mimic Mary’s colors. I’ve tried to put more time into shading figures and I’ve picked Mary’s brain and asked her to instruct me on her process.

And for the last week and a half people have been complimenting Mary for my colors. Whoops.

When I was a kid, my mother wanted me to take piano lessons so I did. But I wasn’t really interested and I hated reading sheet music. Much like color theory,I couldn’t wrap my head around it and my brain would just lock up. But I still had to perform these songs so I would ask the teacher to play them first and then mimic them. It’s called “playing by ear.”

Trust me when I tell you that I’m very much doing the same thing with my colors. I only know how to use about 2% of photoshop and Mary is educating me there. She’s teaching me some of her techniques of shading. She’s complimenting me when I do well, and sternly lecturing me when I do poorly (a good example was thurday’s strip where apparently I “went a little too far with the highlights”).

Mary, I know that people are complimenting you for colors that you think you did not work on, but believe me when I tell you that they are absolutely complimenting the right person . When it comes to color,  I am the student and you are the teacher.

But just when it comes to color.

The first time I played Dig Dug, I was 11 years old.

More than likely, I played it at Skate West in West Des Moines, Iowa. We went to the roller-rink a lot back then. Jesus, that was so long ago. Those 8 bit games left a lot to the imagination. But we had the cabinet art, and that was always really cool looking. Good cabinet art could sell a game. The same thing can be said for the first games that made it into my home. My first personal computer was an Atari 400, and all of our games had amazing box art that I studied and traced and re-drew. My first real love affair with a video game was Origin System’s Exodus: Ultima 3. And that manual had about 8 illustrations that informed how I pictured what was happening to my characters in the game.

I’m glad that video games now are filled with high-resolution artwork and amazing design. This isn’t a longing for simpler times. Things are better now for sure. But how lucky was I to be born at the right time, to be the right age, to experience the dawn of video games? I think that feeling, that love, is what’s informing all the great comics over at Shiftylook.com. We get to dive in there and tell all the stories we imagined while we were playing. Hell, we had to imagine it, because it certainly wasn’t on the screen. Like Dig Dug says (in a comic strip I just drew for Shifty), it was the 80’s and they only had 8 bit systems to tell their stories. They counted on kids to fill in the rest with their imaginations. And we did. Happily.

I’m going to be working on more stuff for Shiftylook this fall and early next year. More Dig Dug stuff, A Mappy comic strip and of course the Blamimation style series that Kris and I are cooking up. I’m looking forward to sharing some of the joy we got growing up playing these games. In the meantime, check out the strip I did to join in the celebration of Dig Dug’s 30th anniversary. And stay tuned.