Max Riffner: Bored Online

The Parlor

My weblog work journal. »Archives »Links

Bored Online

With Quick Step successfully launched, interest coming in from the Pinups (and possible Pinup prints), and starting a little mini-webcomic horror line with three other artists (more on this later), I can safely say that I feel good. Just great, actually. A couple of years ago, I was bored with my life and tired of drawing Golden Boy ; it was just a little too much for me to handle in private. I was drawing pages that no one would see and I couldn’t garner any feed back from. No feedback meant no real desire to keep at it, thus Golden Boy took far longer than I wanted it to.

With Quick Step, I like the idea of mini-updates. I release a page, I announce it, and the traffic and email comes in. And it spurs me on. Maybe one day I’ll be confident enough in order to do something all alone again, but not right now.

The other great thing about the Pinups and Quick Step is that I’m becoming a much better artist. After Golden Boy, I seriously considered giving up ever drawing another page again. It was just so painful. A beginner trying to produce an original 128 page graphic novel is ambitious, to say the least. If I gave up art, I thought I could just write comics instead, but everytime I thought about that it made me sad. I love writing comics, but I also still love to draw.

I’m glad I made myself get back up in the saddle. These mini-updates have been incrementally making me a better artist than I could ever have hoped to be two years ago. Constant practice makes perfect. When I saw what I had written for the first page of Quick Step (splash page scene of a neighborhood), I was just dreading it. Environments had never been my strong suit. I think (and so did a lot of you who wrote in) I really did well on it. Not just well, but I owned it. It wasn’t an issue for me to draw it. I drew the buildings like I would a character, and that was the hurdle for me. The background is the character in some cases.

So now I have some major lifestyle/project changes successfully made, I have hit on something else that has really been bothering me: I’m so bored being online right now.

The web was made for writing. I write/blog here in the Parlor. I now have come to the point where I dread writing here. I’m reading back over some past articles, and I think to myself “who fucking cares?”

And it isn’t just my writing, either. Every goddamn site I go to lately seems to just have the same crap. Granted, most blogs that are promoted within the blog circles are written by web designers, it seems. And it is just the same shit over and over again (web standards, CSS, best blog layouts, ad nauseum bleargh). I love it when I find sites that are just unique and don’t talk about the usual safe blog topics:

All of the above are blogs, yet all are different. If there was one thing that I haven’t done with my writing and would like to try is serial fiction blogging (like Monster Planet). I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of the Parlor anytime soon, but I would like to focus my writing on something else. Maybe then the Parlor would get a little bit more invigorated, because right now, it seems to be mostly personal drek, because that is what people comment on. When I write about comics, it is usually over people’s heads or concerns, and I don’t like talking about design unless it is conceptual. So I’m left with a big bagful of crap.

So… this may end up like the Pinups, where I decided to try my hand at drawing pinup girls in different illustrative styles just because, and how it has in turn made me a better comic book artist. I may just one day get a hair up my ass and start writing bizarro serial fiction, just to see what happens to my writing in general.