blog: things you should check out

Let us say you are idle, this day in September. Let us say that to the cars rushing by outside you are a stationary observer, moving backwards in their memory as they disappear. What use can be made of this time?

The deadline for my comic-coloring contest is this Sunday night; surely you can spend a few hours today in pursuit of this, a task that provides distraction from those things you are not doing anyway.

The television provider DirecTV is offering new customers a promotion; if you were considering their (perfectly adequate, in my experience as a customer for the last seven years) service, you could do worse than saving $100, in the form of ten $10 bill credits. By using my account number — 23334574 — as your referral, not only do you obtain the discount, but I am rewarded somewhat as well. This is no particular urging on my part; simply if you were contemplating the service, on this idle day, regardless.

Finally, if you enjoyed the sight of the ridiculous, entirely un-aerodynamic flying contrivance in Tuesday’s strip, and have twenty-odd minutes to spare on a break from your lack of activity, you may enjoy this remarkable and arresting short film, brought to my attention by kind Marksman Kevin S. It is embedded below; or on YouTube here.

Listen: I will tell you about David Morgan-Mar. Besides being an astrophysicist, he’s a prolific comics author — and he also likes turning his particular intelligence onto overcoming barriers to reading webcomics. His magnum opus, Irregular Webcomic!, sports one of the most comprehensive navigation systems I’ve ever seen (offering separate navigation options for each of different storylines that interweave, for example) and that’s only one of the approximately half-dozen experimental webcomic projects he’s got going at any given time.

His newest contraption is called Archive Binge, and it does a pretty good job of describing itself thusly:

Have you ever found an interesting looking webcomic, looked at the archive, and thought:

I can’t start reading this! There are hundreds of strips to catch up on!

At Archive Binge you can create a custom RSS news feed for a webcomic, which will take you through the archive, at a rate faster than the new comics update. This lets you get up to date on comics with large archives, without spending hours or days trawling the archive in one go.

Rather than spend a whole day or more bingeing on a comic archive, set up an Archive Binge feed. You can start from the beginning, or wherever you’re up to. You can set your custom feed to deliver a strip every day, 4 strips every weekday, or whatever you want, up to 10 strips a day. Anyone can read 10 strips a day! If you get a spare hour and read the next 50 strips, you can update your position in your feed. You can even pause your feed if you go on vacation, and turn it on again when you get back.

And before you know it, you’ll have completed the archive and be up to date.

So, if you’ve put off the idea of going back through the Wondermark archives due to their scale (or the Dr. McNinja archives, or the Girl Genius archives, etc), Archive Binge is the solution. Even better: you’ve read the newest comics already, so you know it gets better. And don’t forget the mouseover texts!

(Also: fellow comic creators: David’s nonprofit service is offered strictly on an opt-in basis — if you’re interested, I encourage you to participate, as it will help me read the backlogs of your long-running comics.) ANYWAY: ARCHIVE BINGE

I found this video, by filmmaker Will Hoffman and presented by the radio program Radiolab, utterly delightful.

Thomas Bewick was an English woodcut artist from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Examples of his work are currently showing at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK until May 25th. The Guardian‘s writeup on the show explains his work thusly:

By the late 18th century, the woodblock was the poor relation to steel or copper engravings. Bewick brought the medium back to life, at the end of each long day’s work printing money for the Bank of Northumberland. He also found time to produce an enormously popular General History of Quadrupeds, as well as a two-volume History of British Birds, in which these Tale-pieces originally appeared (their name is a play on the fact that they are tail-pieces, decorative squibs designed to fill up space at the end of a text).

There is enormous pleasure in these tiny images, sketched on paper then transferred to a bit of Turkish box-wood, which Bewick then engraved, using little tools he mostly made himself. He imagined image after image, right up until the day he died in 1828. It is surprising he kept his sight. Sometimes he even drew on his thumbnail, licking the images off with his tongue when he wanted to draw another. He would have made a wonderful animator.

Bewick’s work was also the subject of the 2007 book Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, and the New York Times review of the book elaborates:

Bewick’s first masterpiece, “A General History of Quadrupeds,” appeared in 1790, when the study of natural history began to be fashionable. There were no field guides of the sort we take for granted; the world of collectors was unconnected and the discipline of classification nascent. In preparation, Bewick spent nine years studying anything he could get his hands on. He collected illustrations made by artists who accompanied explorers into the wild; he visited touring menageries and borrowed items from private collections of taxidermy.

To prepare for his second masterpiece, “A History of British Birds,” Bewick sent out word that he needed specimens, and the northern gentry pitched in with enthusiasm. Crates began to arrive, full of birds either clawing for release or long dead, putrid and crawling with maggots. Bewick carefully examined them, then carved his miniature drawings into blocks of boxwood, sliced from logs sent up from London.

The online Bewick Society also features a wonderful collection of Bewick woodcuts, as well as information about the actual drawing and woodcutting process, which I find fascinating.

Thanks very much to Marksman Ed S. for sending along the info about the gallery show, which led to my discovering all the rest!