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So where the hell have I been?
5 min read
Well, this is nostalgic!
If it's not obvious, I've rather neglected my DA account these past few years. It's not an exclusive neglect; my Twitter and my personal blog have also been pretty much abandoned too these past few years.
To cut to the point, I had a little bit of a minor mental crisis a few years back due to having too many hobby projects on the go at the same time. On top of that, I'd got annoyed at myself for not completing things.
It occurred to me that three of the projects, all comics*, could technically be three birds killed with one stone. The only problem was that the stone in question needed to be the size of a boulder in the form of a custom webcomic CMS (Content Management System).
*Detulux Incorporated, The Two Doctors and Dr. Ralph Smiffington's Dosser Rodeo
Why did I need to build a webcomic CMS? Why not just use Wordpress with one of the existing webcomic plugins? Or use one of the many other webcomic CMS solutions available on the web? Because they're all pretty bloody awful, that's why. I remember trying twice with Wordpress to build the webcomic site I wanted and failing because the custom tags were too limited, and the webcomic CMS's out on the 'net all generate bloody awful search engine unfriendly URLs (web addresses for the ho's at home) and aren't particularly mobile-friendly.
I set out to build a custom webcomic CMS, and that was roughly two years ago. It took that long mostly due to procrastination and distraction and I admit it's been difficult sometimes to really engage with the project due to coding for a living; after a day of staring at PHP code the last thing you want to do in the evenings and on weekends is to stare at PHP code some more.
The CMS I have built, which I call "Webcomical", isn't quite ready for the proper release yet but the code is available online on my GitHub account if anyone is interested. I haven't thoroughly bug-tested the thing yet and I need to create some sort of webpage to advertise it and provide installation instructions.
Off the back of the CMS project nearing completion, I am now proud to announce that Detulux Incorporated now has a new dedicated living space at gunjunker.payneful.co.uk - head on over and take a gander. There's a few spoilers about something we were planning to reveal later (HINT HINT the comic's title will be changing along with a few character names HINT HINT) but I'd rather just announce it now and get it off my chest! The entire website is built using my Webcomical CMS and there's only a handful of things left to do on the site in terms of tweaks. Sam and myself have been busy writing episode transcripts and getting character profiles finished for the last six months or so. If you follow Detulux here on DeviantArt** then don't worry; weekly updates will continue on this site and the webcomic site will host only the "complete" episodes then apparently you will either need to follow the website (you can sub via RSS) or if you'd like the weekly updates then they are available for Patreon supporters (apologies, I thought we were going to keep reuploading to DA but my artist reliably informs me that the website is slowly being buried under fetish pornography so we are jumping ship, I guess?).
**If you're not following it, why the hell not? I write the damn thing and everyone's favourite nefarious mad scientists have just appeared in it!
The next project I'd like to turn my attention to will be a new website for all the Two Doctors' stuff. It's currently available at the-two-doctors.payneful.co.uk… but is all over the bloody place at the moment. I've started migrating pages over from the minisites that already exist so over the next month or two I'll hopefully get everything up to date and then I genuinely intend to resume the Two Docs' world tour! When I do resume I'll be posting pages to the dedicated site and DA.
As for Dosser Rodeo, which I started putting pages up for and then dropped while I worked on the CMS, will be going back on hiatus indefinitely. I want to get the Two Docs' World Tour done before embarking on another comic project and there's also the small matter of not being happy (again) with how the comic started. To that note, the long-inactive The-Right-Bros DA account has been deactivated; I may very well re-upload all the pages that Sam did for it as bonus materials should Dosser Rodeo ever resurface in the future.
That's about everything I have to say at the moment. I may attempt to go through the 823 DA notifications I've accumulated at some point! If anyone's still following me and is active, please do say hello in the comments below. It's been a while and is always nice to reconnect.
Oh, I suppose I should casually mention that I married Psi Baka Onna last year and we're currently living in our own house being adults and shit. Life's pretty good. Hope you're all doing alright out there in Deviantland too.
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Happy New Year All
1 min read
It's 11:30-ish here and it's the end of what I'd call a pretty rubbish year.
I'm hoping to move into a brick-and-mortar house *WHICH I OWN* in the new year, and I probably didn't mention that I got engaged to
earlier this year because I'm terrible (also yes half the house is hers I hope that was obvious).
I'm also hoping (lots of hope right now) that once we're all moved in and settled to a place where I actually want to live I can get back into a creative groove of sorts. I've already decided to shelve one thing so I can get back on track with many others (that thing ISN'T the World Tour, believe it or not - more of that in the new year!).
To the 3 or so people who will see this, take care and have a good start to the new year. Hope to talk to you soon!
I'm hoping to move into a brick-and-mortar house *WHICH I OWN* in the new year, and I probably didn't mention that I got engaged to
earlier this year because I'm terrible (also yes half the house is hers I hope that was obvious).I'm also hoping (lots of hope right now) that once we're all moved in and settled to a place where I actually want to live I can get back into a creative groove of sorts. I've already decided to shelve one thing so I can get back on track with many others (that thing ISN'T the World Tour, believe it or not - more of that in the new year!).
To the 3 or so people who will see this, take care and have a good start to the new year. Hope to talk to you soon!
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It's been a while, hasn't it?
I've had a bit of an art hiatus for a few months, instead opting for copious amounts of blogging to pass the time (feel free to bookmark that site if you like my rants or you can just follow me on Twitter @RussianGestapo and I'll tweet every sodding thing I create at you). However, as much as I enjoy blogging the longer I stay away from producing comics the guiltier I feel and eventually the guilt gets heavy enough to force my hand.
For the few left who follow my DA page (which must like be watching a vast desert expanse, tentatively expecting the odd tumbleweed to blow past) you probably know that my run on Detulux Inc as writer and artist "ended" after a few years of sporadic updates. I love Detulux to bits and there's so many things I want to do with it, but I always found drawing it to be a bit of a chore, mostly because I'm a lazy artist and I prefer dialogue-led scenes over action scenes ("tell, don't show", if you will).
Sam, conversely, was working on The Right Brothers - a comic heavy in dialogue and character interaction that she was finding boring to work on. The final nail in the coffin was a quick doodle where she conveyed annoyance at having to draw mostly word balloons while, over at Detulux, Pain and the crew were finding their hands full with the final boss ofResident Evil Occupant Sin 4. It was an epiphany for me, certainly.
Consequently, Sam is now drawing Detulux Inc and doing a bloody fantastic job of it, drawing a close to a storyline that's been in limbo for the best part of five years now. She's even got a bunch of non-Resident Evil comics ready and I'm actually writing the next storyline which *GASP* isn't a parody of anything! It won't take another ten years to finish, either (fingers crossed!).
This has freed me up to pursue other arty endeavours, which includes rebooting the Right Brothers (again) - I've just uploaded the first page now! I've taken note from Sam that the version of the first episode she was producing was trying to introduce too much at once. As such I'm winging it with the first episode - I genuinely don't know where it is going to end up. I will probably delete the Right Bros. DA account at some point and write Sam's pages off as a "lost episode", one of those curious pilots that never quite matches the final product.
I'm really glad to be working on Duke and Luke's adventures again. There were a few artistic decisions I never fully liked that Sam added (sorry dear) that I'm going to redact, and I apologise if certain jokes or ideas get recycled as there are a few that are too good to waste. I'm seriously hoping to produce one comic at least every two weeks, if not every week.
Oh, and to break up the schedule a certain pair of no-good scientists are coming back (for realsies this time!).
Boring real life stuff follows this, feel free to skip!
After a rough start to the year (and our definition of "rough" is what some people in squalor dream of), things have gotten better.
Me and Sam are currently living in a flat up on what I describe as "nob's hill" - it's perceived to be the posh end of town. We've always planned to buy a place but, following a near-constant stream of noise from upstairs neighbours (HATE HATE HATE), we've decided to step up the schedule and start looking from next month after a week long holiday in Devon and Cornwall (which is mostly a nostalgia-led trip for me to revisit places from my childhood and stand around going "hmm, it's not quite as good as it used to be"). Incidentally the only silver lining of moving to this flat has been that one of my best mates lives next door and he's been very accommodating, putting up with noises from the pet bird and the like.
Work is going well. I'm fairly well versed in online software development now and have been working on various private projects to flex my PHP skills. One of the projects I've got floating around on my "to-do" list is an open source webcomic platform that I'd like to release for free, probably built in CodeIgniter. ComicPress and Comic Easel, the two main WordPress comic extensions, are alright but both are basically shoe-horning in functionality into a blog platform - I want something designed from the ground up to be for comic management and, most importantly, it should be mobile responsive and have transcripts built-in. If you've got any ideas that could go on the wishlist, let me know and I'll see if I can accommodate when I build the thing.
I have 450 DA messages to go through, so I will get around to THAT.
That's all, folks! I you're still alive and kicking reply back with a comment below, I'd love a chat.
I've had a bit of an art hiatus for a few months, instead opting for copious amounts of blogging to pass the time (feel free to bookmark that site if you like my rants or you can just follow me on Twitter @RussianGestapo and I'll tweet every sodding thing I create at you). However, as much as I enjoy blogging the longer I stay away from producing comics the guiltier I feel and eventually the guilt gets heavy enough to force my hand.
For the few left who follow my DA page (which must like be watching a vast desert expanse, tentatively expecting the odd tumbleweed to blow past) you probably know that my run on Detulux Inc as writer and artist "ended" after a few years of sporadic updates. I love Detulux to bits and there's so many things I want to do with it, but I always found drawing it to be a bit of a chore, mostly because I'm a lazy artist and I prefer dialogue-led scenes over action scenes ("tell, don't show", if you will).
Sam, conversely, was working on The Right Brothers - a comic heavy in dialogue and character interaction that she was finding boring to work on. The final nail in the coffin was a quick doodle where she conveyed annoyance at having to draw mostly word balloons while, over at Detulux, Pain and the crew were finding their hands full with the final boss of
Consequently, Sam is now drawing Detulux Inc and doing a bloody fantastic job of it, drawing a close to a storyline that's been in limbo for the best part of five years now. She's even got a bunch of non-Resident Evil comics ready and I'm actually writing the next storyline which *GASP* isn't a parody of anything! It won't take another ten years to finish, either (fingers crossed!).
This has freed me up to pursue other arty endeavours, which includes rebooting the Right Brothers (again) - I've just uploaded the first page now! I've taken note from Sam that the version of the first episode she was producing was trying to introduce too much at once. As such I'm winging it with the first episode - I genuinely don't know where it is going to end up. I will probably delete the Right Bros. DA account at some point and write Sam's pages off as a "lost episode", one of those curious pilots that never quite matches the final product.
I'm really glad to be working on Duke and Luke's adventures again. There were a few artistic decisions I never fully liked that Sam added (sorry dear) that I'm going to redact, and I apologise if certain jokes or ideas get recycled as there are a few that are too good to waste. I'm seriously hoping to produce one comic at least every two weeks, if not every week.
Oh, and to break up the schedule a certain pair of no-good scientists are coming back (for realsies this time!).
Boring real life stuff follows this, feel free to skip!
After a rough start to the year (and our definition of "rough" is what some people in squalor dream of), things have gotten better.
Me and Sam are currently living in a flat up on what I describe as "nob's hill" - it's perceived to be the posh end of town. We've always planned to buy a place but, following a near-constant stream of noise from upstairs neighbours (HATE HATE HATE), we've decided to step up the schedule and start looking from next month after a week long holiday in Devon and Cornwall (which is mostly a nostalgia-led trip for me to revisit places from my childhood and stand around going "hmm, it's not quite as good as it used to be"). Incidentally the only silver lining of moving to this flat has been that one of my best mates lives next door and he's been very accommodating, putting up with noises from the pet bird and the like.
Work is going well. I'm fairly well versed in online software development now and have been working on various private projects to flex my PHP skills. One of the projects I've got floating around on my "to-do" list is an open source webcomic platform that I'd like to release for free, probably built in CodeIgniter. ComicPress and Comic Easel, the two main WordPress comic extensions, are alright but both are basically shoe-horning in functionality into a blog platform - I want something designed from the ground up to be for comic management and, most importantly, it should be mobile responsive and have transcripts built-in. If you've got any ideas that could go on the wishlist, let me know and I'll see if I can accommodate when I build the thing.
I have 450 DA messages to go through, so I will get around to THAT.
That's all, folks! I you're still alive and kicking reply back with a comment below, I'd love a chat.
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Two Docs World Tour - the Episode Log
2 min read
What is the Two Doctors' Dimensional Temporal World Tour? Find out here!
This journal post will be updated as new pages get added, and is meant to provide some means of keeping track of all the collaborations!
Prologue (feat. Psi-Baka-Onna)
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15
A Short Trip to Yesteryear (feat. Detulux Inc.)
01 02 03 04 05 06 07
The Russian Connection (feat. DarkeAngel)
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58
No Business Like the Toy Business (feat. Jazon19)
01 02 03 04 05 06 07
More to come...
Bonus Pages
- Dr. Gyrode by Endless-Warr (Random awesome birthday giftart - thanks again!)
- Intermission: The Four Doctors (Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special)
- No Rest for the Wicked by DarkeAngel (a Christmas quickie)
- Inter-Dimensional Derby Epilogue Part 1 by Psi-Baka-Onna
- Intermission: Back After This Short Break
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Two Docs World Tour - Info
2 min read
Hey, guys and gals! Hope you had a good holiday and that the new year is so far treating you right (taking you out to dinner, returning your calls, that sort of thing).
Before the Christmas holidays, I announced that I'd be embarking on a mass collaborative effort to tell a story of two old men with aTARDIS highly scientific inter-dimensional time travel device in a bid to (what else?) take over the world (BWAHAHAHA!).
It might not look like it, but it's still on! I've not quite finished the prologue yet, but already I've got the first two participants lined up, the first of which I'm currently working through some draft scripts with. It's not a secret who these two marvellous people are, but I won't tell if they don't.
Unfortunately, new pages are on hold for the time being while that horrible party pooper "real life" gets involved - work commitments and the fact that I'm currently in the process of moving into a new place with a very special lady (who's waited about eight years for this)means that, at the moment, I'm currently getting home from work and either crashing on the bed or just playing video games because I'm too knackered to do anything else.
That doesn't mean that we can't progress things further in the background in the meantime! If you commented on the announcement post and/or if you're really serious about taking part in the hijinks, what I could really use is reference sheets for what character/s you'd like the Docs to meet so I can start building a bigger picture of the overall story. They wouldn't even need to be fresh ref sheets, links to existing ones or just a pointer towards previous work featuring the character/s is enough; just gimme a link in the comments for this journal. If you're really keen and have an idea you'd like to run with for when the Docs meet your character/s, send me a note here on dA with an outline and I'd be happy to discuss it!
That's all for now, catch up with all you folks in a bit! Take it steady.
Before the Christmas holidays, I announced that I'd be embarking on a mass collaborative effort to tell a story of two old men with a
It might not look like it, but it's still on! I've not quite finished the prologue yet, but already I've got the first two participants lined up, the first of which I'm currently working through some draft scripts with. It's not a secret who these two marvellous people are, but I won't tell if they don't.
Unfortunately, new pages are on hold for the time being while that horrible party pooper "real life" gets involved - work commitments and the fact that I'm currently in the process of moving into a new place with a very special lady (who's waited about eight years for this)means that, at the moment, I'm currently getting home from work and either crashing on the bed or just playing video games because I'm too knackered to do anything else.
That doesn't mean that we can't progress things further in the background in the meantime! If you commented on the announcement post and/or if you're really serious about taking part in the hijinks, what I could really use is reference sheets for what character/s you'd like the Docs to meet so I can start building a bigger picture of the overall story. They wouldn't even need to be fresh ref sheets, links to existing ones or just a pointer towards previous work featuring the character/s is enough; just gimme a link in the comments for this journal. If you're really keen and have an idea you'd like to run with for when the Docs meet your character/s, send me a note here on dA with an outline and I'd be happy to discuss it!
That's all for now, catch up with all you folks in a bit! Take it steady.
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