Palace Club, Delta Episode: "The Merger"

Paid work has to take preference over personal projects like making comics, as all freelancers know, but during a brief week of downtime with work, I was somehow able to churn out 17 pages of the fourth and final Palace Club episode, "The Merger", and finally complete it! I started writing it back in May 2008, so this comic has been sitting in my 'To Do' files for a very long time.

This is my first comic ever to be entirely pencilled and inked digitally. I no longer have to draw the lineart on A4 paper, scan it, and then colourize/shade it in Photoshop. Now the entire artwork is produced in Photoshop and then the dialogue added using Comic Life. For someone who used to spend hours getting just one page done, this has really sped up production! I could have never produced 17 pages in five days using my old methods.

Anyway, enough about the vagaries of life on the comic circuit. Here are a couple of sample panels from "The Merger". Drawing it with a graphics tablet really makes an improvement to the artwork; you get much cleaner lines. Scanning lineart and then adjusting the contrast creates 'noise' around the lines – speckly coloured pixels that then affect colourization.

You'll notice I said this was the fourth and final episode of the series. I'm not retiring it for good though! It will make a comeback some day I'm sure, because I really like the series and characters (and, let's face it, making fun of the media and the internet). So I guess it's the final episode just for now. There are plenty more projects in my comics pile that are crying out for more attention! Next comic will probably be Rebirth, the opening story of Airbury Academy Volume IV, which will be in black and white from now on and will also be released in instalments for those of you who want to follow it.

The whole Palace Club series has been compiled into a 176-page omnibus edition, containing all four episodes, and it's called Alpha Beta Gamma Delta. It's got a new colour cover page as you can see on the right here. There is more info on the Palace Club page. At the moment it's in PDF format, perfect for reading on a computer screen, which is what we all do all day anyway, isn't it?

Be A Nut

Beernut the Cow was a character from the early, early days of the story/comic that eventually became Palace Club, back when it still had its 'talking animals'. My sister and I created the character's look and personality, sometime in the early '90s.

Back then, she was supposed to be Maxine's 'foster child' (don't ask, for God's sake) and had her own TV show, a Krusty the Clown-like affair that screened episodes of an R-rated kids' cartoon (again, don't ask) called Ruxpin, which would incite kids to commit murder. She also used a pillow instead of a litter box (usually while it was still on someone else's bed) and enjoyed kissing people but ended up suffocating them due to her large 'snout'.

These are the first two drawings of Beernut done since the '90s, as she never appeared in any Palace Club episode. I'd like to write her in somewhere though. I could use a subplot involving a hyperactive purple cow.

World Cup 16 Series – No.14: Mexico

Mexico today...Rosey is a character from Palace Club who always has a broken arm. Normally this would disqualify her from playing, but here at Nonesuch Blog, it doesn't matter.

Storefront Bigscreen

While I was on holiday in Malaysia a few months ago, I noticed something unusual. Every evening, a crowd of twenty or so men would gather around the entrance of an electrical store near the hotel where I was staying and watch TV. There were at least ten TVs at the front of that store, all tuned to different channels. It took a few days of passing by these guys before I realized it was the TV showing American wrestling that they were staring at.

Of course, the TV set in question wasn't all that big, which gave me an idea.

Wouldn't it be great if, to cater to this group of idlers, the store owner wired up several TV sets in grid formation to make one large mega-screen? In case this might be hard to visualize, I took 13 seconds to do a quick Photoshop hashout:

As you can see, the TVs are in a 4x3 grid for a 4:3 ratio, but it could be anything you like. Except 1.33:1, obviously.