Web Comic - I don't think that's what Mom meant ...

Enjoy a Cully Koala comic strip!

 

Web Comic - Grocery shopping with family

Enjoy a Cully Koala comic strip!

 

Web Comic - Who is stronger, me or paper?

Enjoy a Cully Koala comic strip!

 

Web Comic - What if superheroes were real?

Enjoy a Cully Koala comic strip!

 

Web Comic - Courtesy Call

Enjoy a Cully Koala comic strip!

 

Web Comic - An A for effort

Enjoy a Cully Koala comic strip!

 

Web Comic - The cost of physical health

Enjoy a Cully Koala comic strip!

 

New School Year

This seemed an appropriate sentiment given the time of year.

It's So HOT!

I've begun a new series of Cully Koala comics. Keep your eyes open!

A New Direction for a New Year

When I first started a Wandering Koala blog, the purpose was to syndicate new Wandering Koala tales one page at a time both as a blog on this site and as articles on the main Wandering Koala website. It didn't work out like I thought it would.

So I started another blog to syndicate Wandering Koala comics, and again after the first chapter of a new story, it wasn't turning out how I wanted it to.

I think I've finally got it figured out. Inspired by Jeff Smith at Boneville, I think I've finally figured it out. A week or so ago I redesigned the Wandering Koala website to both be modern and html 5 compliant and to handle the new direction I wanted to go. Today the first comic/post went live. Take a look and follow more somewhat daily posts at WanderingKoala.com.

Daily Comics - The Past and a Possible Future

A century ago the newspaper was THE source of information and entertainment for most Americans. During the first half of the 20th Century, papers were featured a large and glorious comics section filled with some of the greatest illustration at the time such at The Phantom by Lee Falk, Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond, Wash Tubss & Captain Easy and Buz Sawyer by Roy Crane, Terry & the Pirates and Steve Canyon by Milt Caniff, The Spirit by Will Eisner, Krazy Kat by George Harriman, Dick Tracy by Chester Gould, and so much more. Each day readers could follow the beautifully rendered adventures in glorious black & white.

Today, sadly, papers are a dying bread and the few comics they carry are pretty rough and amateurish gags by comparison. But they don't have to be. Thanks to the Internet, daily comics have a new home and a chance to find a new audience. And without the limitations of print and size, they have the ability to blaze new trails. But they also have the ability to take what was great about the past and build upon it.

The two daily strips above were inspired by the brilliant Buz Sawyer comic from the master of daily comics, Roy Crane. I've never really worked with any sort of patterned greyscale before. It really adds a different look. Just one more of my many experiments.

Let me know what you think.

A New Website Created by ?

I've been a little busy putting up a NEW website. And not just any website, but one I've been thinking about for a long time.

I have a lot of websites, but most of them have weird names like SkyFitsJeff or Jatce Studios that don't make a lot of sense. I've been wanting one a with a little more normal name, and I've wanted one that showcased my best and more recent work. I've also wanted one that was just freaking cool to look at with an original illustration on the front page.

And I finally got it!

For now there's only a home page with links to pages on my other websites, but I plan to fill this one out and keep it updated. The others I haven't, because they just weren't a good representation of what I wanted to do. This one is.

So where is it?

http://www.CreatedByJeff.com

Visit it and then come back here and let me know what you think.

jQuery

I've been building websites for over a decade now. The web has changed a lot, and yet somethings stay the same.

jQuery is one of those.

I just finished a fairly thorough tutorial along with several practical examples. A lot of the things you can do with jQuery are the same kind of things people have been doing on the web for years. jQuery makes some of them quicker, and it makes some of them less compatible than the old way.

While looking at examples of Web 2.0 (or html5 or dynamic html or whatever name people will be using tomorrow), I'm reminded of a comment I read on the web six or seven years ago: Web 2.0 is the Flash of the future. Flash came our around the turn of the millennium. It's big draw was offering great motion, animation, and sound that could be sent over the Internet and viewed consistently on several browsers. Sites built with it looked pretty cool.

But there were issues.

For one, search engines couldn't properly index the sites which led to some awkward workarounds.

Another problem was time it took to load. One had to wait for the entire site to load to view it. Some people started building sites modularly which helped.

Another problem was all that sound, animation, and motion became gratuitous--they didn't really add to the site or make it more useful. A lot of people abandoned their Flash sites like they were landing pages and went back to the "old" way. This was helpful when Apple decided to not support Flash and move to a new set of technologies that others have followed.

Today html5 offers the same types of gratuitous decorations. And people are jumping on the band wagon left and right. But do these really add value?

Some of them do. Sorting my queue in Netflix by dragging instead of typing numbers is much nicer. DeviantArt's ability to drag an image in is slicker than using the browse button. I'm all for new technologies that are well supported and improve the user experience.

I just wish people would stop there.

Play Ball!!! a Cully Koala cartoon short

For decades I've wanted to create a Cully Koala animated cartoon. The  I never thought I'd be able to because of technical limitations. But technology has exploded, and anyone can create beautiful animation  (they just need to know how).

Cully was originally conceived as an animated character. I used to watch and love Peanuts and Garfield cartoons. I thought they were animated cartoon characters; I didn't realize they started out in comic strips in the newspapers. When I created Cully, I wanted him to be like a Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, Garfield, etc. I didn't have anyway to animate him, so I followed the examples of Charles Schultz and Jim Davis and created a comic strip. Once I discovered Calvin & Hobbes, Cully took on a whole new dimension. But I still wasn't completely satisfied.

Then I discovered Richie Rich and Archie comics, and created a Cully comic book of my own. The characters worked much better in the longer format. I thought maybe comic books would be a doable outlet. But it lacked something.

A few years ago I took a graduate class in animation and discovered a way to animate with Apple's iLife. I created a really cool short, but it was so much work that I knew that route wasn't viable. There had to be a way to let technology do the grunt work while I concentrated on the creative side.

Enter Anime Studio Pro. I've been considering this program for a while, and even downloaded the demo to try it out, but I'd never had the results I wanted. I was about to give up and go back to drawing cartoons by hand, but I said to myself, "Self, you've got to push thru. You've got ideas, and this program can make them happen."

And it did.

Let me know what you think!

How Technology has changed the Illustrated Story: Case Study 1 - Pulps vs. Comics

Matt D. Williams, the author of Jak Phoenix, invited me to write a guest post on his site. I look at the early twentieth century and examine how advances in printing destroyed one genre but created a new one. It also changed the way certain types of stories were told.

Read the entire post at http://jakphoenix.com/2011/04/13/how-has-technology-affected-the-illustrated-story-a-guest-post-by-jeff-thomason/.

As you can see, it is only one case study. The topic interests me so much that I plan to make it a whole series of posts. Don't hold your breath, because I have a lot of other things I'm working on first.

This image is a drawing of Wandering Koala^TM, and I think I'll use it for the title pages of all future stories. It's fitting, because I consider Wandering Koala to be a 21st century pulp hero who also appears in comics.

Cully Koala Daily Online Comics

I've loved comics since I was a little boy. I was first introduced to them thru animated cartoons. Snoopy and Garfield are still two of my favorite. Then in Jr. High I discovered Calvin & Hobbes and was re-inspired.

I've been drawing comics since the summer of 6th Grade. I wanted to do it for a living, and at the end of my second year of college started sending my strip off to syndicates and newspapers. One syndicate picked it up, but did a terrible job of promoting it. And my interests shifted to less limiting forms of storytelling. But I had all these great comics that the world at large wasn't enjoying.

Newspapers are dying and with them is the traditional route for making a living with comic strips. So I decided to try something different. I've created a website to promote the strip with five free comics each day, a link to a store with Cully Koala branded swag, and the ability to add the comic to your site. (If you haven't already added it, go there now and do it!)

I wasn't sure what to make the site look like. Other comic strip sites have been very unimpressive, so I thought to make it look like the comics section of a paper. I wanted lots of colors and lots of fun, and I think it turned out that way.

But don't take my word for it.

CullyKoala.com

Comics

When I was little, my local newspaper didn't carry comics, so I was introduced to them thru cartoon specials and merchandising. My two favorite were Peanuts and Garfield. When I finally got to read the actual comic strips, I was disappointed. They were too short; I was used to a half hour long episode.

Then I read Calvin and Hobbes.

I was on a MathCounts trip, and someone had brought a Something Under My Bed is Drooling. I started to read it and couldn't put it down. It was brilliant! It was funny, it was insightful, the characters were so alive, and the drawing was beautiful. I was a fan. I started going to the library everyday to check out the latest Calvin and Hobbes comic. I got the second treasury for my birthday. And I was very sad when the strip ended, and that it had never been animated. And I always wanted to create something as wonderful as Bill Watterson had.

I've been drawing comics for years, mostly trying to copy Snoopy and Garfield. As I grew older, I started reaching out into new areas and trying new things. The majority of my strip's development was done while I was in Jr. High, so you'll see appearances from my friends as the time in the strip. The characters have grown into their own and have little resemblance to the actual people they're based on. Every couple of years or so, I take another stab at the strip, and each time it does get better. Here are three comics from my latest attempt. The first one seems even more appropriate now than it did four years ago when I drew it.