Some of you might have noticed that Christian has started drawing some of the Betty Blonde comics. He is equal in responsibility with Kelly for the invention of the characters and for many of the ideas for individual strips that have appeared on the web site. While Kelly has drawn the daily strip, Christian has been working on a graphic novel featuring the same characters. The characters in the graphic novel are stylistically different from those in the daily strip in a way that makes them more compatible with the story and Christian’s style. Christian is going to continue work on his graphic novel, but he is also going to start contributing drawings to the daily strip more frequently.

We made an editorial decision last night to keep the character style of the daily strip consistent with the way Kelly has drawn them. Kelly and Christian designed the characters together, so both of them are capable of drawing them the same way. Christian will contribute one or two daily strips per week while Kelly contributes three or four. That will give Christian time to continue work on his graphic novel and still contribute his unique touch to the daily trip. As for his graphic novel, he has filled one full sketch book so far. I think I heard him say he was about a quarter of the way complete.

My contribution has been to manage the mailing list, post the daily comic, and maintain the online archive. My Python program is now able to take the individual panels, accumulate them into a single image with drop shadows, title, byline, and copyright, create a thumbnail, and upload the thumbnail and comic images to the appropriate directories on our web site. My next step will be to add a GUI interface to the program so I do not have to run it from the command line or from the IDE. After that I want to write another program to perform the daily strip posting, email the strip to the mailing list, and update the archive web page.

If you have been keeping track of the weight loss death match you will notice that Lyle is starting to make great progress again while I have made great gains (in weight, not weight loss). Well, I am going to redouble my efforts starting today. The last couple of nights have been fairly pathetic in terms of my gluttonous behavior.

October 25, 2004 – All the crab you can eat
October 26, 2004 – Waiting for test results