Stardrop. . . Mini Mysterious Theater. . . back next Jen Jacobs, aka, "Regular Jen" is in her student apartment.   She has just returned from a successful shopping excursion to the local thrift store. She found cute skirt and a flashy pink top for which she paid altogether only $8.59. —An unbelievable steal when compared to the average sticker price common in any modern fashion boutique. —And neither article of clothing bore any defect or trace of having been worn by previous owners. Jen wonders how this is possible and suspects the local thrift store might be involved in some kind of racket.   Now, a skirt and top like these are by no means the sort of saucy ensemble Jen would normally feel comfortable wearing around town, (though Ashelle had been so excited that she had managed to convince her to wear them home from the thrift store. A daring and somewhat anxiety-hued bus journey was the result). So no, not regular day clothes to be certain, but they will compliment nicely her on-stage persona.   Jen Jacobs is the lead guitarist in the super-cool, all-girl 80's punk rock band, "The June Rocks!".   The fact that both the 80's and the mass popularity of punk rock have long since faded into fond and slightly embarrassing memories in the collective human awareness before Jen was even out of junior high is of little consequence. The guitar case is sturdy and not yet terribly travel worn. It bears only two stickers from two un-paid but memorable gigs, performed in establishments which were both within walking distance of Jen's house.   In truth, Jen is new to the whole performance scene. In this decade, anyway. Okay. Not really much to look at actually.   One was from a bar and the other from a coffee house, both free to the public events where anybody could get up and play. And the coffee house sticker wasn't even an actual sticker, but rather a cut-out from a flyer Ashelle had found and helped paste to her guitar case the morning following Jen's first public performance. So, no, not exactly badges of severe road trip cred, but they had been nice events and she had played well, right out in front of everybody. That had been a very big deal for her back then.   So pardon her for loving her dorky stickers.   Oh, how she loved them! Nowadays, Jen was a real pro. Dozens of gigs and a growing fan following. Recording contracts being looked at. The June Rocks! were making serious waves. No kidding around!   Of course, nobody knew about any of this but a very select few, tucked away here as she was in the safety of her little university town. It was her big secret. She hadn't even told her parents!   —It wasn't that she felt embarrassed about the whole punk rock thing. Jen was pretty sure her Mom and Dad would be supportive of the direction her musical investments had taken, (veering a hard left from the conservatory), even if it did involve jumping around in sweaty night clubs and very occasionally having to plant a kick on the chin of those over-enthusiastic fans who made ill-advised gambits for the stage. Her parents were not the most with-it people in the world, but their affections were relatively iron clad. —So long as she didn't do anything particularly stupid. Jen was almost certain of this. Her Mom and Dad were the best!   No. . , parental support wasn't the problem. Rather, it was those awful, horrifying stories Jenny Mysterious had told her by way of warning. The one about electroshock therapy had especially wigged her out. And Jenny Mysterious' mom had loved her too. . .   So Jen was keeping her big-shot music career to herself for the time being. Just to be on the safe side. Ah! The new acoustic.   Not particularly punky, but this is a really nice instrument. A gift from her parents last year as a going away present before she headed off to university. Or given to her never, if Jen was in the habit of keeping track of conflicting time lines. However, as funky thoughts of that variety tended to fog up her brain, she preferred not to ponder such mysteries as deeply as she might.   A day might come when it would be necessary to work out all that tangled stuff, but now wasn't it. No sir! Not with such a beauty of an instrument resting ever so lightly in the same room with her. No, not terribly punk rock at all, but still. You get the idea.   The last time Jen saw her stalwart ladybug electric guitar, it was under a couch somewhere in 1985.   There was the cruddy loaner she'd been playing when Ashelle's weird alien cohorts had stormed the El Mocambo's dusky tavern and pulled her back home. But that thing was a hopeless piece of junk, and it had Marie's lipstick stains and other gross stuff on it. She'd stuffed it under a couch here in the present day. So, no decent electric.   No matter. She was classically trained anyway, and acoustic is her special place. Oooh.   The angelic voice of the instrument carries through the room with a ring both crisply defined. . , yet somehow smooth and warm. What a great guitar! —And still in tune from all of four hours previous when Jen last visited her beloved.   Jen Jacobs has music in her DNA and the calluses to prove it.   It's very weird to recall an entire lifetime, from her earliest memories to only recently this past Summer, where she couldn't have even held a guitar correctly, let alone know the thrilling sensation of taut steel string humming beneath her finger tips.   Foggy-headed thinking threatens for a moment to creep back into her mind with its aggravating questions, about paradoxes and quantum something or others. Jen makes the proactive decision to banish all that stuff away by letting loose with some sweet kickin' guitar love! There isn't really time for this. School work. Hmmm. Yes, that.   Two papers and a lab report due over the next two weeks.   Jen hasn't been finding it easy to stay focused; hardly surprising given the various upsets marching through her life lately. It was forgivable even, but enough was enough! Jen had always been one of the smart kids in school.   Not a genius, mind you, but definitely smart. And diligent. Good grades. Proud parents, fruit scented smelly stickers and happy check marks all in a row. And as she got older, Jen learned how to do the grindstone thing with the best of them when it came down to a calender crunch. In fact, when all the gears of the world were clicking around in orderly fashion, (and there were no errant space princesses crashing to Earth to knock everything out of place), Jen could be reliably counted upon to keep her calender from ever becoming crunchy in the first place.   There would be plenty of time, she calculated, to turn in some solid, grade 'A' work if she hit the books today and stuck with it without any unreasonable interruptions over the next two weeks.   Also. . , Ashelle was getting better at respecting the study boundaries Jen had put in place.   It had been a necessary maneuver.   —Being disorganized and flung crazily about on big adventures with no plan and open arms and open minds. . , that was fun for a while, even healthy, but Jen's natural resting state was one of relative peace and inner order; Being away from it for too long tended to make her grouchy and miserable. And so. . , boundaries. Ashelle, in her barely restrained manner, made an effort to observe these rules. —though, to be honest, Ashelle's recently increased level of respect for Jen's academic career likely had a fair deal more to do with agriculture than anything else.   Ashelle now lived and worked out on a farm quite some distance beyond the town limits.   Come to think of it, the fact that Jen saw her best friend at all was somewhat remarkable. Farm work was hard, and yet, almost every day without fail Ashelle managed to stop by for a couple of hours. Jen savored these engagements and looked forward to them. Ashelle was always full of stories and affection, questions and ideas for things they could do together. By contrast. . , Jen had only visited the farm twice.   Ashelle's brand of friendship dedication was something to be admired, and Jen wondered how she was able to do it.   *sigh*   Even including all her daily farm chores, personality kinetics and adventuring around, Ashelle still seemed somehow to have a better grasp on time management than she did. How was that fair? Intelligent time management was supposed to be Jen's thing. As per usual, Jen felt a wistful combination of awe, adoration and self-reproach when her thoughts settled upon the Blond Wonder for any length of time. Right! Time to get down to business.   First of all, it'd be good to get out of these punk rock clothes and into something more suitable for a long afternoon of paper and computer work. The lack of closet space in these student residences is appalling, but then, as Jen's mom often advised, "she was at school to study, not to be studied."   Eye-roll-worthy advice to be certain, but Jen found herself keeping it in mind nonetheless. Substance over style. That was her. Even on stage in punk rock mode, she held a satisfying, secret awareness that she wasn't just prancing around and making noise. She was actually really quite good. Some solid, hard-earned talent sat at her core. She was anything but just style. Though, as it happened, it turned out she was pretty good at that too. Hence, the value of a good wardrobe.   The muted scent of moth balls and dust waft up. Who even uses moth balls anymore? Their moth-offending odor has seeped deep into the old wood grain.   Jen's modest array of fashion sense displays itself before her, all hung and folded neatly from hooks somebody's grandmother probably hung her clothes on long ago. Moth balls or not, the wardrobe is actually a bit of a life saver.   As fate (and Ashelle) had arranged things, this rented room received her arrival fully furnished with this lovely old closet box. Beautiful, deep and olden wood. Very C.S. Lewis. In fact, Jen felt slightly at odds with the idea of storing her modern day sweaty punk threads in its august timber. She felt the old miser might not approve. Jeans and a Tee.   A classic since 1950. Um. . . Deep in the back of Jen's neck and skull, she experiences the onset of a really weird tingling sensation. She has felt this before. . .   Check out the guitar. Admire stickers. Review fond memories. Sigh. . ! Enough depressing reverie! Get out the guitar. Check to see if the guitar works with the new outfit. Strum out a couple of chords. Let loose with some sweet kickin' guitar love. Nice! Though. . . Okay, enough messing around. You have work to do. Consider work to be done. Again. Enough with the depressing reverie. Put the guitar away. Check out the wardrobe. Open it up and browse the selection. That's silly. Find something to wear. Pick out Jeans and a Tee Shirt. School book time. What's up? Oh boy. That can only mean. . . You. . ! Scene II scene 1 scene 2 Jump to last page you read STARDROP Next Episode, May 30th Previous Next Stardrop Vol 2 "A Place to Hang My Spacesuit" $12.95 A huge THANK-YOU to all those who participated in the Crowd Sourcing campaign. There are dozens of packages now in the mail, and dozens more going out over the next few days to all those who contributed! -If you contributed, you should expect to see yours show up soon! NEW! Stardrop eBook Now Available! (See the Studio News (below) for the scoop on this!) Here's a little extra item; One of my favorite comic shops is moving location, and I decided to do a little 4-pager about it featuring Ashelle and Tom. The idea is that the comic shop will be giving out this little story to help advertise their new location. Enjoy! Tip StarDrop's cartoonist! Visit the Australian StarDrop Mirror. (Thanks to Andrew and Katherine for their wonderful support over the years!)        Jenny Mysterious. . . First Day Back        Thieves & Kings. . . Sample Chapter from, Thieves & Kings, Volume 3, "The Blue Book" Thieves & Kings is not a webcomic. It is an all-ages fantasy/adventure graphic novel series which I've been working on since 1994. It is nearly done; I hope to wrap up the story in the 7th volume, (currently in production). The chapter featured here offers a good example of what it's like to read Thieves & Kings. --It's a peppy sequence, and it contains both regular comic pages, and some text pages. It doesn't show much of the title character, (Rubel) and none of the Shadow Lady, but Heath and Varkias carry the show quite nicely. I hope you enjoy this sample of my work!        The Walking Mage. . . The Walking Mage is a complete story. Originally it was done in black & white, (which you can check out here, if you like). I wanted to experiment with color and so began by using a computer to color the Walking Mage for its print release. After a few panels I decided that it would be a lot more fun to paint it by hand, and so switched to water-color around episode six. The story itself is quite a good little yarn; funny and pointed in many places, as political satire ought to be. I was actually quite surprised to learn this! I found myself laughing out loud in several places. --I don't know why this story in particular was so hard for me to accept, but it was. I avoided reading it for several years after it first went to press. The ending is rather abrupt, but it was a serial strip, after all. So anyway, after having let this web-comic languish in the digital attic, I've decided to pull it out and post it again for all the world in its full-color glory. This is the first time the Walking Mage has been available in full color on the web. I hope you enjoy the adventures of Quinton and Varkias. Cheers!        News From the Studio. . .                   Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5 April 14th, 2012 Comics and the New Media, Part I How to Publish Comics on Tablets and eReaders Without Getting Ripped Off Introducing The New and Sparkling World of eReaders! iPads, Kindles, Clone Tablets, eInk Readers, Smart Phones, and every other thin-screen, pocketbook-sized gadget. Welcome to Star Trek. We're here. It's happening. And naturally, this interests me quite a bit. As it happens, I am right now in the process of breaking down my comics project, Stardrop into single panels which can re-organize themselves depending on the screen size they happen to be read on. (Via basic ePub formatting, which is rather like a stripped down version of HTML.) I deliberately set a creative boundary when I began drawing Stardrop, requiring of myself that all the panels (or 99% of them, anyway) be square and optimized for viewing on e-reader screens. -Squares are wonderful this way; they can stack and re-organize nicely so that you can get full page layouts on a big screen, or with the same file, they can display happily one panel at a time, which is perfect if you happen to be reading on a smaller gadget. The prototypes I've spun up work and read surprisingly well, and I quickly forget the medium itself and just find myself in Ashelle's world. So far, so good. . . But I've held off for a loooong time in releasing digital versions of my books because the distribution and the devices and payment structures, the market as a whole, hadn't crystalized. In fact, it looked like one giant lumbering mess, at least from my publisher's viewpoint. Now, however, that's all rapidly changing. . . At the moment, I'm just wading into the research on the rights side of the issue. And, no, I'm not talking about the murky world of digital rights management (DRM). Rather, the thing I'm curious about is. . , revenue sharing. How does the pie get divided? Who provides which services? Who is deserving of what? (Or thinks they are deserving). And boy! At the moment, the answers to those questions are all over the map! If you want to get your work on Apple's iTunes store, they'll want 30% and an IRS number, (even if you're not an American). Second tier publishing companies such as Ingram and LuLu work in partnership with Apple to offer what they call, 'aggregation', where they provide a block of graphic novels and books and market them to the iPad customer base using the Apple iTunes system. After sales are finalized, Apple takes a cut and pays Ingram or LuLu or whoever, then they pay the publisher. (Ingram takes a bit over 50% of the remaining pie, and LuLu between 10 and 20% depending on which page on their website you read.) Amazon has its own little fiefdom, (surrounded by swamps and walls), and its own ways to cut up the pie on digital works. Within fairly short order, the revenue from a comic book sale dwindles into very little for the people doing the actual work of writing and drawing. -Keeping in mind that Apple and everybody else is not in the business of traditional publishing; they aren't printing or shipping books, (notwithstnading print on demand services, which are a whole other ball game), and in many cases, the creator pays for bandwidth. Frankly, the whole thing looks kind of Wild West to me. Then, and perhaps more importantly, there is the issue of exclusivity. Apple, for instance, if you want to distribute through their iTunes/App stores, will only apparently allow you to do so if you agree not to also sell your own work on your own website.*** That sort of thing makes my neck hairs stand on end. Amazon is pulling similar tricks. ***Correction: Turns out the exclusivity aspect of Apple's contract is related only to eBook files created using the Apple layout package. That is, if you use their layout software, their contract terms forbid the files it creates on from being sold anywhere other than through the Apple iBookstore. -Thanks to Steve Crooks for writing in with this clarification. I remember the comic book distributor wars which tanked the whole industry in the 90's, and the battles before that for creator rights. It seems the stew pot is heating up once again and the creators are again being handed the short end of the stick, all while the industry itself wholly depends on their existence and continued labors. "The more things change, the more things stay the same." It's going to be an interesting journey. So for me, this is an experiment. Stardrop will be the litmus test. The first stick in the water, and I'll be learning as much as I can from the process. -Cuz' I've also got a bunch of new Jenny Mysterious material starting to pile up in my outbox, and T&K is in the process of being colored, with new pages also stacking up. . . Yes indeed! Interesting times ahead! Yet while there are devils in the details, and battling monolithic corporations, I can also see some lovely gaps in the brickwork. What fun! This is a very exciting time; a new golden age where many possibilities are floating all about in flux. New ways to reach readers. New ways to share stories. It's all rather exciting! So as I research this, I will post my findings here. If you happen to be in the self-publishing e-book world yourself, and have comments or discoveries you'd like to share, please send them along. If you're just learning the ropes and perhaps have an eBook of your own you're hoping to market, hopefully my explorations into the subject will be of use to you. Come back next week for Comics in the New Media, Part II: Apple, Savior of Publishing, or Jobs' Con Job? Cheers! -Mark Oakley                     Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5   Readers Respond. . . Nice discussion to have. I looked into the Apple contract when new Apple eBook "Author" software was released and I DO think you are able to sell -physical- copies on your own, you're just not supposed to sell digitally on Apple AND Amazon or whomever (and THAT was when you were utilizing the Author software to 'fabricate' your eBook). Apple and Amazon are just really popular distribution streams. In no way should you rely on them, at least initially. I would encourage you to find a friend with Adobe InDesign 5.5 (if you don't have it already) and fabricate your own idealized eBook. InDesign has the best creation tools so far and you can save it in formats that are friendly with all sorts of gadgets. Send it to friends to see how they relate to the interface, try it out yourself. Only then will you know if eBooks are right for your books. And... I've remained pretty opposed to reading comics digitally. There have only been about 3 webcomics that I've enjoyed, but I've cherished them more once they were collected into physical formats. That said, I just got a new tablet and paid for few comics just to get the full experience... and it wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. Anyway, I look forward to seeing the rest of your thoughts. Shawn McLeod   Hiya, Shawn. Wow. You know, the thought that sales of physical copies might pose a contract issue hadn't even crossed my mind. What a thought! Brr. Thanks for the info on Adobe. I've not actually looked very far yet into the how-to of a final product yet. Cheers!     Very curious to see what I Box Publishing decides to do with all this fun stuff. Ultraist Studios endorses the Louis CK and Nine Inch Nails model... it's the self-publishing of the internet. Mike Kitchen     Well the Adobe side of things in the most basic sense is easy. Once you have your InDesign file that you might send off to print created, you can export as epub. But you are right, making a file is fairly easy. NOW what do I DO with it? Really interested to see what you come up with. Makes me wish we in closer proximity and could do some longer sit and talk type thinking. Chris Howard

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