Found an interesting Flickr set that has scans of a bunch of old comic sound effects (Onomatopoeia).

Some of them are a little, uh, odd. Like the one shown here.

Still, it’s pretty cool. You should check it out.

This week’s strip is a little early (don’t hear that very often, do you?) because of a power outage at home. I’d like to thank the guys at Prince Bistro for letting me hang out there for a few hours to finish the strip.

Also, being without electricity for 24 hours? Sucktacular.

I’ve been pretty busy on the creative front: ZdC has been on-time for over two months, there’s activity behind the scenes on Lil Monstas, and I have another strip in the pipeline.

The new strip will be black ‘n white… It’ll be a bit darker in tone than ZdC, but still comedic. It’s called Zombie-Mart.

Here’s a sneak preview of one of the character designs.

The pre-production work on it has been a lot of fun. I’m still sorting out some things, like it’s exact format. But I have it plotted out for, well, for a long time. Maybe it’s whole run. I’m thinking it will be a limited series… But limited doesn’t necessarily mean short. ;-)

Also, in the next few days I’ll be creating more specific tutorials on my comicing process. Specifically to do with Illustrator CS 3. So stay tuned for that.

Instead of writing lengthy tutorials on my webcomic creation technique, I thought I’d just record screencasts of the process. So I recorded my inking and coloring session for the latest strip. It doesn’t show the sketching phase because I had already drawn it for this strip. But the next time I do a batch of layouts/sketches I’ll record that too.

In this first video I didn’t add a soundtrack, cause I don’t really know all the copyright issues involved with that.

So, without further ado, here it is at approximately 5x speed:

Making of ZooDotCom #38 on Vimeo.

That was kinda fun. I think I may record a few more.

For all you twits… Er, twitter-ers? Twitterfolk? Hmm. Anyway, for those interested, ZdC has a twitter account now. Check it out!

It’s kind of experimental at this point. I’m not sure if it’ll be a place for supplemental content, announcing new strips, both, neither? What do you think? Leave a comment!

Which reminds me. Comments are back. I had to remove Haloscan comments because of the sluggishness of their servers. So the new, and quite possibly improved, comments are inline with the post instead of in a popup.

Also, I’ve picked a date for when ZdC will start going to biweekly updates. I want to build up a good buffer before then, so I’ll keep the date to myself for now… But don’t worry, it’s pretty soon.

At some point, I’ll go into detail on my creative process. Until then, here’s an overview.

I plot out story-arcs as bullet points. Each bullet is one strip. Then, I’ll script out each one. Here’s an example from this week’s strip.

Usually, I’ll write the scripts for several weeks at a time.

Then, when I’m ready to start drawing, I’ll open up Scribbles and start sketching. I’ll loosely rough out the strip, like this:

For the finished inks and dialog I use Illustrator. I’ll place the sketch, as a “template”, on the bottom layer and start the inking process.

Finally, I use Illustrator’s LivePaint to color it all in.

And now it’s done. I export it as a PNG and update the website! All in all, it takes a little over 2 hours to complete one strip.

So there you go! That’s a taste of How It’s Made: ZooDotCom.