So the name has switched to ComicGenesis. To be honest, I don't really know why the powers that be felt it necessary to change the name, but knowing doesn't really change anything. According to KeenSpot, the reason for the change was to avoid brand confusion between KeenSpace and KeenSpot, which are owned by the same company. Now, being the naive optimist at heart, I don't believe people are stupid enough to confuse the words Space and Spot. But apparently, people did, so now we all have to change our names because being associated with a free comic hosting service is such a grevious misconception that slapdash policy changes are necessary. No, I'm not bitter.

Overall, changing the site over wasn't that complicated, but there were a few bumps in the road. The big problem now is that all the places that have linked me need to change their links eventually because the redirects will only last for a certain amount of time. Then there was the fun process of trying to find every listing of my comic and change the address. Thanks to the glut of sites where everyone in the internet flocks in to whore their comics, this process took quite a while.

Anyway, back to the blog.

You might have noticed a slight quality change in the art of the comic between Monday's comic and today's comic. The lines are much smoother now thanks to a process I've developed. The trick is to export the line art to Flash and use the trace feature to make it into vector art, this eliminates the miniscule imperfections in the lines. If you look really close at ink on paper, there's slight blurring and inconsistencies that can muck up the look. It can also fix some of the slight errors I make when inking my artwork. So after I have the lines auto-traced, I import them back into Photoshop as an Illustrator document where I color and assemble them into the comic.

Sure, it takes longer, but it's worth it for the fans... fan... okay, nobody. Even I don't read my comic. Great, you just made me sad. I hope you're happy.

I never thought it would be necessary to explain a gag before, but oh well. You see, diaphragm is not only an organ used by singers to help their projection, but also an older contraceptive method. They are spelled the same and thus are "puns". There, joke ruined successfully.

ComicCon was interesting, and from it I learned a very valuable lesson; for as much as I dislike anime and manga fans for their obnoxiousness, it has become readily apparent that Adult Swim fans are the most irritating group of people on the face of the earth. I went to both the Pitching Panel as well as the official Adult Swim panel. Both were laden with idiots. First at the pitching panel, you get dumb questions that aren't about pitching, instead they're from angry fans demanding that certain shows be brought back. Then there are people who wanted to pitch them a show over the microphone, despite the fact that they had gone over the fact (multiple times) that they couldn't accept pitches until they had a contract signed to protect their work. Otherwise, that panel was fine, and I learned a lot about what they look for and how to pitch them a show in the future.

When the official Adult Swim panel came on, however, the idiocy tripled. You see, these fans seem to have a few misconceptions about reality. They think that their encyclopedic knowledge of Williams Street Shows is a sign of superiority. They believe that their slavish devotion to these TV programs is some form of virtue. And they mistake their clever references and shouted lines like "Mooninites forever" as sharp wit. In reality however, they are just losers with more time than brains. Seriously, going up to the microphone isn't an invitation to sit there and rant at the producers of a show for 10 minutes because you didn't like the music they used in the background of a segment between shows. Nor is it nice to sit there and make a long-winded insult against a show in front of an audience of hundreds of people, possibly in front of the creators of said program. The worst part is the smug sense of superiority they have in their voices.

Let's get this straight: YOU ARE NOT BETTER PEOPLE FOR LIKING A PROGRAMMING BLOCK. You may think that being a fan of Adult Swim makes you unique, but in fact, you are just like thousands of other people who have TV sets. So stop trying to score geek points over each other and just enjoy the shows. It's not that hard.

Just came back home from Preview Night of ComicCon International 2005. Normally, I spend preview night going absolutely everywhere, in order to get a good scope of everything. However, I instead spent more time hanging out in what I called the "Webcomics Pavillion". This is where KeenSpot, Graphic Smash, Dumbrella, and the PA guys have their booths. However, Scott McCloud, who was scheduled to have a booth next to PA, apparently decided to not have a booth. (He will be at his scheduled panel, though.) I spent most of the evening having a great conversation with T. Campbell and Bob Stevenson.

It was really nice to have an involving and intelligent discussion on webcomics, something difficult to find not only in real life, but online as well. I hope to be able to have other discussions with them later on in the future. I just hope I didn't talk their ears off, as is my tendency as the opinionated jackass that I am.

Other highlights included meeting with the guys I used to work with at CMX in the DC Comics booth, although it was really interesting to hear of the changes to the staff. Oh well, I'll have to check in sometime next week at the office.

I also got a picture of Rachel over at Poseur Ink with Seth Green of Family Guy and Robot Chicken fame.

I'll be around the convention, maybe hanging out some more at the Webcomics Pavillion, so if you think you see me, let me know by shouting something obscene in my direction. It's always fun to disturb others.

More to come tomorrow.

Today I mocked the FCC. The FCC, for those of you who don't know, is the government agency responsible for keeping television "decent" under the outdated value system created in the era where people thought that Victorean values were a good idea to bring back. You know, the era where married couples couldn't have their beds shown less than 5 feet away from each other. The era of shitty programming like Leave it to Beaver. But I digress.

If you haven't noticed on the TV, the warning boxes for TV programs have at least doubled in size. The problem is, if parents didn't pay attention to them in the first place, what makes them think that making them larger is going to change anything? Besides, aren't the parents supposed to be watching their kids in the first place? The only reason children are stupid enough to imitate what they see on TV is because nobody is telling them any better. There's no point to putting warnings on anything if nobody is going to follow them be it CDs, games, movies, or television. It's irritating to see Peter Griffin's face cut off by a black box.

When researching the guideline system on the FCC website, I noticed something interesting in their "For Kids Section": THEY PLAGIARIZED DORAEMON. Doraemon is practically a national icon over in Japan. He has over 20 movies, 2000 episodes on TV, and was the mascot for the postal service for a few years. Doraemon has also been running strong for over 4 decades. So it was interesting to see a government agency take one of the Doraemon designs, add a thumb, add a striped sweater, and rename him Broadband. What the name "broadband" has to do with children's television has evaded my sensibilities at the moment, so instead I'll reply with "WHAT THE HELL?!"

See for yourself:

Now normally, I'd show you guys the yellow Doraemon design, but I wanted to give you guys a good idea of his typical shape. Even then, you can see the striking similarities. On the FCC site, I was not only amazed by the ripoff, but of the overall poor quality of the image. Come on, if you're going to plagiarize something, at least make it look good.

I think the FCC deserves to get in trouble for once. So spread the word.

If you thought I made up the "kid named Sephiroth" stuff up, you've got another thing coming. Seriously, I don't think ANYBODY could make this shit up. Some parents actually decided to name their child after the famous Final Fantasy 7 villain, who is usually the star of terrible fanfiction. If you want to see how far America has fallen down the society shitter, just look at the most popular baby names. The doctors should have slapped the parents when he found out about the name. But seriously, there is just something that needs to be asked here: WHY? Why would you name your child after a video game villain, a Final Fantasy character of all things?

This is the kind of bullshit that 6 year olds go through when they think it would be awesome to name their kids after superheroes or video game characters. But then they turn 8 and they realize how stupid they were and go on with their lives. This leads me to believe that the parents were either retarded or worse... a fanboy and a fangirl that somehow procreated out of desperation. However, fanboy/fangirlism is typically at its prime in the early teenage years, so perhaps these loser pregnant teens decided to get it on because they came to the realization that nobody else would ever have sex with them without being either dead or drugged first.

Perhaps they were angry about their childhoods, so out of resentment for the limitless possibilities of their child, they decided to inflict double the bullying they recieved when they were kids by giving him such a shitty name. Seriously, all the bullies have to do is print out bad homosexual Final Fantasy 7 fanfiction from the internet, and read it aloud and you have a shitty childhood in the making right there. Then again, growing up in the household of otakus can't be good for his mental development. I have a prediction of his future screen name: PARENTKILLER8345

Let's just hope he succeeds.

Is it just me or have Cocoa Pebbles commercials stopped making sense altogether? Seriously, why does Barney Rubble have clones? What's even better is that the producers of the commercial really don't feel the need to explain where they come from at all. So we're to assume that somehow in the stone age, Barney Rubble, a frequently-unemployed half-mongoloid retard, has somehow figured out how to magically duplicate himself in order to steal breakfast cereal from his angry, alcoholic neighbor. What the fuck is this shit? At least the older commericals established the process behind the schemes, like Barney building a machine, or learning a magician's card trick or some other inane crap. At least we could, in a cartoonish sense, believe what was happening. Now they've just let it ride into insanity with no explanation whatsoever. Seriously, what the hell?!