Guten Tag.50--Special Milestone Post!

There's really nothing special about this post. I just wanted it to be. See, 50 is half of a hundred, which is a significant number in terms of milestones and in general. Because it's easy to add 100s to each other, since it's practically 1 with two 0's. And it's almost as easy to add 50s to each other, since they're half of 100. I think this is why we place more importance on "50th anniversary", or "250 years of service!" or "100 ways to do 'x'" (although, 101 of anything trumps 100, because it's one more. sometimes you will see this in book titles. e.g. "101 dalmations", or "101 ways to help birds". but by this logic, we should also see titles with the numbers 102, 103, 104, etc. because all those numbers are bigger than the others).

But could you imagine the chaos if we switched from counting 50s and 100s to 47s and 94s? People would either have to use math or their cell phones (because they have calculators in them). Pandemonium. 

Alright. Chew on that for a minute.

Take care.

-ryan

Guten Tag.49--Moths

Hey everyone. Not much going on lately. I think that's the first time I did that extreme of an angle in a Guten Tag strip in the panel with the moths. I want to mix things up every now and then without going too far from the look I've stuck with for Guten Tag. I think it fits. That's actually what my porch light looks light.

In related project news, Sean Phelan and I recently finished the final (fingers crossed) page layout thumbnails for the first issue of Mega West. Today I got all my bristol board together and cut it to size, and now I just need to start drawing. I have another blog for that project, so if you want further news, I'll be updating it soon. But feel free to go there anyway: MEGA WEST

Awesome, I'm pumped.

Alright, that's it for now.

Take..luck.

-ryan

Guten Tag.48--Thrice the Guteness.

Oh hey. I suppose it's been a while since I updated. A fair amount of stuff has been going on in the past few weeks. Most importantly, I recently got back from visiting my brother and sister-in-law in California, and I finally got to meet my niece! Madelyn is amazing and such a joy to be around. 

Brandon and Joanna, (my brother and sister-in-law) were in China for the past 4 years, and had Madelyn five months before they left to come back to the states, so it's crazy to think that my little niece has already been in China (dur), as well as Vietnam, Hawaii, and some other asian countries (I think), before she was even six months old.

I can't wait until September when they come and stay with us for a while.

GUTEN TAG! I made some:

On an unrelated note, I recently bought the game Psychonauts off of Xbox 360. I remember playing the demo a few years ago, and liking it. But after someone from the boltcity.com message boards pointed out that Scott Campbell art directed it, I had to check it out. (Scott Campbell, by the way, draws some cool stuff. He's also involved with the Brutal Legend game that's coming out.)

So I just finished the game last night. I tried to get every item and level in the game, but I'm a level short of 100. 

Overall, the story was very unique and solid. The dialogue was excellent and very funny at times, and I thought the character development was given great attention. 

The game is for the most part a platformer, but goes out of its way to bring different challenges to a traditional platforming experience. Not a lot of puzzle solving, except for in the way your different abilities are used. 

The thing I really liked about it was how the overall concept of a 'Psychonaut' played out in different levels. You interact with certain characters throughout the game, and transport into their minds in order to solve what's wrong with them in the game. These are essentially the 'levels', and each is unique in its look and feel as well as its gameplay. For example, one guy you meet is like a conspiracy theorist gone mad, so his mind is a 60s era suburb with all the streets at odd angles and curving above your head. Another level takes place on a Settlers of Catan/Risk type gameboard where you can switch between controlling pieces on the board from afar, as well as shrinking down to the board level to complete objectives. 

Finally, the aesthetics of the game are great. Great environments, great art, great soundtrack, etc. Really cool game worth buying.

Well, that's it until next time. Still working on MegaWest with my friend Sean. We've almost got the page/panel layout of issue 1 completed. We already did, but it felt like the pages were too crowded with panels, so it needed to be reworked. Can't wait to finally start pencilling and then inking. 

Scrabble.

-ryan

Guten Tag.47--A Double Dose of Wasting Your Time

Hoo boy. Busy week coming up. My cousin in the Air Force will be home tomorrow and is getting married this Saturday. I'm standing in the wedding, so all the usual wedding stuff is going on this week, plus it's the last full week of my illustration class. My last project is to design a barf bag. Not a whole lot of ideas yet, except for this sketch:

For those unaware, a rainbow colored yawn (or rainbow yawn, for short) is one of many euphemisms for barf. I thought that it would make sense that a cloud would vomit a rainbow, given the context of this bag possibly being in an airplane. It would be colored of course. So yeah, this illustration class is great.

Too bad about the Wings. 

This is not a sports blog, and I am nowhere near qualified to discuss sports, so I won't.

However, the Red Wings are an amazing team, and I think one of the best faces of Detroit that we can present to the country, so I'm bummed to see them lose the Cup.

But they will definitely be back next year. 

Alright, end of stuff unrelated to Guten Tag.

Drink milk.

-ryan

Guten Tag.46--DoppelTag Saturday! The Learning Channel and Rabbit Season.

Because even though it is summer, and I only have one class, I still find a way to be lazy and not update on time. Apologies.

Yeah, you've probably watched these shows on TLC. I know I have. While eating triangles.

I think the inspiration for this week's strip came from years ago, when one of my brothers either almost ran over a bunny when mowing the lawn, or actually did, and severed its foot. And I'm neither a PETA fanatic, nor a proponent of animal cruelty, but I can't help but see the irony in the latter scenario...

Well, I wish you a fantastic week. Don't get stressed out.

-ryan

Guten Tag.45--Comi-conned

So yeah, I went to my first comicon this past weekend. It was pretty sweet. Saw Guy Davis, who has been drawing the B.P.R.D. series regularly for the past few years. Got to talk about the series a little bit while he did a cool sketch of Abe Sapien.

 

Also got to talk to David Peterson, who draws Mouse Guard, and is also from Michigan. My friend Sean and I were talking to him about how he does his comic, and just comics in general. He had some good advice about plotting the script and laying out panels. He also did a nice sketch of one of his characters, Black Axe for me. 

The cool thing is that this all happened within an hour of the doors opening, so I just walked around for the next 6 hours looking through boxes of comics. I guess that's how comicons go? Maybe it's just Detroit. I'm sure San Diego or New York is much bigger and has more stuff to do, but that's alright. The fact that there were less people than I expected meant it was easier to talk to the guests, so that was cool. 

Some dudes from Battlestar Galactica were there too. Commander Tigh and Chief Tyrol, for any nerds who follow the series...like I did... Anyways, they were cool to talk to. Aaron Douglas (Chief Tyrol) was talking to us about the Red Wings/Anaheim series, so that was cool. Some old dude was creeping out the girl who played Kat from BSG. He wanted her to sign a picture that was taken of him and her, in which he was wearing a shirt with a picture of him and her on it... It's like when you take a picture of yourself holding a mirror. And then he got down on his knees and gave her a box of chocolate or something. The dude sitting at her table, comicon security or whatever, I guess, was up in his face waiting for him to do something, but this guy was just being weird in a non-threatening way. Awkward. 

So overall, got a bunch of sweet deals on trades, got to talk to some artists/writers that I like, got to talk to some guys from a show I watched religiously, saw a few people dressed up like Deadpool and other superheroes, Storm Shadow(?), missed Taimak (Bruce Leeroy from The Last Dragon), etc. It was alright. I'll probably go back next year. 

Alright. Later. 

-ryan

Guten Tag.44--Finals

How is it possible to make it through the day on 3 hours of sleep? I'm just glad this semester is almost over. No more all-nighters for me.

-rh

Guten Tag.43--Unbiased Journalism

Just presenting the facts. You decide. 

-ryan

Guten Tag.42--Car Trouble (Edited 4.19)

So I've been listening to a number of composers lately: Holst, Mussorgsky, Debussy, Stravinsky, Belioz, Sibelius, etc. Thank you, Pandora radio. My oldest brother tells me that most of these guys' music falls under the genre of tone poems, not necessarily formal classical music, even though I wouldn't be able to make that distinction. (at least not yet, since I haven't studied or listened to enough classical music)

Anyway, tone poems stray from the formal structures and traditional scales found in classical music, and try to evoke a certain mood or match the persona or feel of a certain subject. It was a modern movement of the late 19th-early 20th century that was most likely inspired by the aftermath of WWI (acc. to my brother). I'm really digging it, as opposed to older classical stuff, because a lot of it seems more dynamic and chaotic. I like to think of it as classical music's counterpart to post-rock/post-metal music (Explosions in the Sky, Pelican, etc.)

Anyway, I'm glad that the sun's getting out more everyday. I like to be warm, not on the brink of hypothermia.

-ryan

Wow, just realized I didn't upload the strip before this one.

Here it is anyway:

alright. later

-ryan

Guten Tag.41 (I think this is a bad post naming convention. I mean, the number refers to the number of the post, not the number of the strip, so why..

...am I even numbering them at all? Shouldn't I just give them titles? I guess numbers give you a bearing of which post is more recent, but that's what the navigation bar is for. For now I'll keep the numbers, since I'm not clever enough to come up with a catchy title for each post.)

alright. comic strips. 

-ryan