If you’re one of the people who has been visiting our site for some months, you will have noticed that we have had an empty section called webcomics on the site since March. An earlier Flood Damage entry suggests that these webcomics would begin in June, and quite obviously they did not. We’ve had some setbacks, Adam’s computer began to die in March and refused to run necessary programs like Photoshop and Illustrator. And on top of that he works a day job as the only graphic designer for a local alternative weekly newspaper. In the meantime he has been focusing on pages for a pitch we have for a comic called The Troubleshooter.

"The Troubleshooter" Page 1

"The Troubleshooter" Page 2

Well Adam has since rebuilt his computer and, armed with a machine that is faster than ever,  we are ready to make a big push toward having several weekly webcomics appear here on floodworks. I’m in love with web comics, I greedily devour weekly episodes of Cameron Stewart’s Sin Titulo and Karl Kershl’s The Abominable Charles Christopher over at txcomics, I can’t start my day with Zach Weiner’s SMBC, Hark! A Vagrant, by Kate Beaton, continuously amazes me, and nearly everything that happens to me on a day to day basis at work reminds me of an xkcd strip. I love the possibilities working for the web offers as opposed to traditional 22 page print comics. The pacing, format, and style can all be so radically different. If I could make a living doing webcomics with regular trade paper back printed volumes collecting them, I would do so, and not miss that I wasn’t doing monthly single issues at all. Adam and I both know that the internet and webcomics are an incredible way for us to get our work out their and promote ourselves as artists in these very early stages of our career. So we continue to work on traditional comic pitches and comics for the web.

Sometime in October we will be updating this site to include several new weekly comics. Presented here is an overview of each, and of some possible future projects, as well as some details on some personal struggles I have been having with a project of mine called The Sunpotters.

Comics Launching in October:

Floodworks Presents: Script Ethan. Art: Adam.

Floodworks Presents is a collection of 4 to 8 page short stories in webcomic form. Unlike our other short story project, Breaker Breaker: Love vs the Future, each episode of Floodworks Presents is entirely unrelated to the others. The first episode titled Creation Science, is an 8 page story about a group of scientists  that build another universe inside a machine in their lab. Floodworks Presents will be published on Mondays, but will not absolutely run every month.

Light Years Away: Script Ethan. Art: Adam.

Light Years Away is a project I began writing years ago, about the same time I started doing work on Ghosts of Floodtown. Light Years Away is a space opera, one that starts with a fairly minor scale and hero, and slowly builds up to be a galaxy spanning epic. It is my one foray away from hard science fiction and a welcome one, as much as I love writing hard SF sometimes I just want to let the science get a little rubbery.  Light Years Away is an episodic story that follows Milo Quinterra and his crew aboard the inertia driven space vessel, Analogue Aeon. Each chapter is 60 pages long and explores a full and necessarily separate story. They can be read in or out of order, with only some episodes advancing the story’s main plot. It is very much influenced by European science fiction comics in both format and flavor. We initially flirted with the idea of submitting Light Years Away to the Zuda comics project, but eventually decided that the competition aspect soured the process of creating the story. Light Years Away will be published every Wednesday, and on months without a Floodworks Presents it will be published on Mondays as well.

Friday Funnies: Script: Adam Art Ethan

Friday Funnies is a collection of 3 panel comics written by Adam and drawn by myself, reversing our normal roles.  As the site expands and we add more comics, Adam and I plan on trading off weeks on Friday Funnies, each of us writing a comic for the other to draw every other week.  We find them hilarious.  No one else probably will.  Friday Funnies will obviously be published on Fridays.

Comics Already Running that will Update Regularly in October:

Fat Baby: Script: Chauncey Watercloset. Art: Upperbottom Bottombottom.

A new Fat Baby strip will now be published every Sunday at www.fatbabycomics.com. You will read it if you know what’s good for you.

Ruinship:

My single panel science fiction isolationist tale, Ruinship, will continue to be published everyday, Monday through Friday, over at http://ruinship.wordpress.com until the story ends.

Comics Launching Sometime in the Foreseeable Future:

James Schoville’s Salvage and Demolition: Script Ethan. Art: Unattached

James Schoville’s Salvage and Demolition is a near future story about the crew of a salvage and demolition spacecraft. It currently does not have an artist, as Adam is stretched too thinly as it is and I am not drawing the damn thing (see comments on Sunspotters, below). I am currently talking to a couple of guys about possibly drawing it, but I am always open to hearing from anyone interested in drawing a page of spaceship heavy hard science fiction, thick with father/ son relationship issues every week.

The Sunspotters: Script Ethan. Art Ethan.

The Sunspotters is project I began once Ruinship had been going for a while and I felt more comfortable drawing my own comics. I produced about 8 pages of art for the script I wrote, but I am unhappy with the quality of the work. Whereas Ruinship is more about the act of creating a comic daily and allowing it to evolve naturally, Sunspotters is a scripted, thumbnailed project and I want the art to be something I can be proud of. And at this point I am not. I am going to have to learn to take my time with this one. I am going to start over on the pages, improving the materials I work with (Ruinship is drawn on printer paper with a Uni-Ball Vision Needle Pen) and focusing on not moving forward until each panel is correct. I am not a good artist, at all, but I can do a lot better than these first few pages. That being said The Sunspotters may be slow in being published, we had originally planed for it to be published twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but now I want to dial that pace back a bit to ensure that I am creating the best artwork I am capable of. Once I am doing that I will announce a publishing schedule and begin putting the pages on the site.

Here are the first 3 pages of the version that will not be used:

The Sunspotters Page 1

The Sunspotters Page 2

The Sunspotters Page 3

Anyway, Adam, Dillon, and I are all quite excited to start telling our stories here on floodworks.net. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for updates and/or follow us on Twitter (@ethanede and @arosenlund). See you all in October.