Matter of Fact

That’s right. We are down to the nitty gritty. Only 10 Matter of Fact comics left. Enjoy them while they last!

Hey guys, as you know Matter of Fact is wrapping up on December 25th. Well, that isn’t entirely true. When I was trying to make my final cut of 6 comics left to draw I couldn’t narrow it down to 6. SO, the actual ending date will now be December 26th. I would love to draw more but I have to be realistic about it.

I actually haven’t drawn a comic for about 2 months now (thank god for buffers or else this comic would have ended 2 months ago) so when I started to draw them again 3 days ago I was a little rusty. In fact I dreaded it. However, while drawing them it felt good to do again.

So, don’t forget to check back on the 26th, as that is now the official last post. After that, check out Tone Deaf at www.johnmusic.com/tonedeaf/ to read music comics once a week. Thanks!

Hello everyone! It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged on here. That is because I’ve been so busy trying to redesign my new music website and that is almost done, barring some minor tweaks and creating forms, etc. You can take a jaunt on over there at www.johnmusic.com.

Also, I just recently got done making  Tone Deaf functional. You can find that at www.johnmusic.com/tonedeaf/. I say functional because it works however I am still tweaking the look of the site by adding sharing buttons, using my own navigation graphics, and trying to use my own background for the comic background (among other small tidbits).

Again, Matter of Fact will be ending on December 25th of this year. However, starting the first of 2010 Tone Deaf will update once a week every Tuesday. Tone Deaf will be just like Matter of Fact except it will only be about music…and hopefully funnier.

Thanks for reading and don’t give up! There is still over a month of MOF comics to come!

I announced this a couple of days ago on Twitter but didn’t give a reason as I was a little busy, but yes it is true- Matter of Fact will end its run on December 25th of this year. Why? I’m glad you asked:

• Since I started the comic I felt like I have neglected my family at times. They have never complained but I think they are honestly just being nice about it. Plus, I would like to spend more time with my wife at night after the kids go down and not have to worry about cranking out so many comics a week. More than anything else I’ve been giving myself guilt trips.

• I also feel like I have been neglecting some of the minor aspects of my music writing business (www.johnmusic.com). Just like my family, it has never complained but I can sense the saddening stare my music keyboard gives me daily. Since the comic I haven’t done any concert band compositions, and while that is not the focus of my writing, I would like to do at least one small concert band piece each fall to help promote the site.

• My marching band writing season starts in January and usually goes through June. Last year my wife was pregnant during this time and Jackson was born on May 1st. She had her maternity leave during the rest of my writing season so she was able to watch the baby while I wrote. However, this year I am going to be at home with the baby and she is not going to have a maternity leave. So my writing time is primarily going to be at night and I don’t think I can afford to spend that time drawing comics. It is tough right now without having to plan for and write 100 minutes of music.

So those are the big 3 reasons. What will happen after December 25th? Matter of Fact will not update anymore, however I am going post a comic on my music website once a week. It will have the exact look and tone of Matter of Fact except it will be called Tone Deaf and will only be music related single panel comics. These will primarily be used to draw people into my music website and while they are there hopefully check out the rest of what I have to offer.

When I told my wife that I was stopping Matter of Fact she was a little shocked.She knew how much fun it was for me, and it was! In a way I think it really helped me with my music writing because I had another creative outlet. I didn’t feel as stressed writing my music. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. But besides that, the webcomic business really has given me ideas of what to do with my music business. So many ideas are easily transferable and just make sense. And at the very least I learned how to use Photoshop! That has really come in handy with my music stuff as well.

But its not over yet, so you will be hearing more from me up until the end. I still have to draw those last 7 comics though so I should get to work on them. Thanks for reading!

I’ve been watching videos on TED for a few weeks now and I am really enjoying a lot of the videos on there. I came across this one yesterday and I don’t think I’ve agreed with any video, in my life, more than this one. The concept that this lady preaches is so simple- treat others as you want to be treated. So simple. So freaking simple.

This video is only 10 minutes. It is well worth the time.

Since my big style change on July 15th I have evolved the style even more, slightly. I am not sure if you noticed or not, but it started with this past Friday’s comic. Let’s compare the refined look with the old look shall we? SHALL WE?!?!

The first comic is the newer refined look and the 2nd comic is the older look. Here are some differences, as slight as they are:

• The text bubbles now have a 20 stroke width as opposed to…as opposed to…I can’t honestly remember. I think it was a 5 or a 10 stroke width.

• For the characters in the foreground I am now using a Pigma Micron 08 pen as opposed to a Pigma Micron 05 pen. I feel it helps bring them out more. Also, it reminds to try to simplify how many lines I use and not use too many.

• Although there is not an example of this for the newer refined look in this panel, but the text below the panels will now also be Blambot Casual font, size 20 as opposed to the Times New Roman font that is in the older look. I feel like it has more character to it.

• I have the characters sitting differently in the newer look. I love my new style, however having them sit was a problem when I switched over as I did not know how I would accomplish this. I think it works well. I could be wrong about that but I think the newer refined sitting works.

• The new comic width is now 430 pixels wide as opposed to 400 pixels. This was done more so for the font and size change of the copyright and web address on the right border of the comic (which is not changed in this first one but will be changed coming up in the upcoming panels) but it does increase the size overall slightly.

So that’s what looks different in case you noticed something a little askew. I think all of those help the comic. I am sure that even more evolution will be taking place (I hope!) as the comic progresses throughout this next 2nd year.

September 29th marks a full year of updates for Matter of Fact. It has updated every day Monday through Friday for that entire year, plus a couple of bonus comics on Saturday every now and then. So after 265 comics, what happened this past year? Let’s take a gander shall we?

• September 29th, 2008. The first comic is posted (on Comic Sherpa, not on this site). This comic was just recently shown at our church as an example that related to the message. Due to my own fault, I did not get the email until late but if I had gotten it earlier I would have redrawn it in the new style.

• Sometime in October of 2008 I launched www.mofcomic.com. Everything before that was on Comic Sherpa. The site design was really sweet…if the site had launched in 1964.

• February 9th, 2009- The Record Setting Pancake comic is released. This has been my most controversial comic to date. Not the Hitler comic. Not the KKK comics. Not the one about gay ninjas. But pancakes. Pan…cakes…

• April 6th- My wife and I celebrate our one year anniversary. She rocks. I love her. She lets me dabble in this stuff and I really appreciate it.

• May 1st- My son, Jackson, was born. He is awesome. I love him.

• July 3rd- My 200th comic is posted. Act Like An Adult is also one of my favorites. I really like it.

• July 15th- My new style is launched with this comic. Again, this comic did not raise any controversy, but the Pancake comic did. Pan…cake… On another note I would like to say that in preparation for Jackson to be bron my goal was to try to get my buffer as big as possible. I knew that having him around would make it one million times harder to find time to draw. So if you notice from this blog post that I had at least a good 3 month buffer happening. I love my buffer a lot as it really makes me more relaxed about drawing my comic and giving me time to really develop ideas if I need that time. However, when I came up with that style change I had to look at 3 more months of comics in what I now consider the old crappy style, before you guys even saw what I had to anticipate.

• August 1st- my new website design is launched. My hope was to be able to do this at the same time as my drawing style change, but when you have a baby around the house you should just be happy that you have enough time to just eat.

• August 24th- My stepson, Daniel’s, first day of Kindergarten. He loves school and that is all him. He loves to learn and read and my wife and I couldn’t be happier about it. There is one downside, and that is that he usually likes to read books more in the style of kid’s encyclopedias as opposed to real stories. I don’t mean a downside for him but for my wife and I it really does bore us tremendously just spurting off facts about dinosaurs. FYI to parents- if you buy a dinosaur book for your child make sure it has pronunciations of the names!!!

• September 1st- my first merchandise began selling on the website. It is a calendar for band and choir teachers and includes 12 months of my music comics and also composers birth dates on the calendar. It was tons of fun putting together and gave me some good experience for when I put out the first Matter of Fact book.

So that is about it. Not much in terms of comics but my main goal this past year and this upcoming year was to get in the habit of creating comics and putting them out on time. Along the way so far there have been an incredible amount of people that have really helped me out. Without these guys I don’t think I would have been able to do what I was able to do:

• Scotty Shoemaker- back when I first started drawing these comics he unselfishly gave up some of his valued time to show me the ropes of photoshop and gave me some tips on creating good quality files. Check out his comic he is working on titles Marshmallow Robots. It looks freaking great.
• Andy Schwartz- he really helped me out with some of the computer stuff at the beginning in terms of coding and just little bits of information. I think I must have emailed him 1,253 times in a span of one week at one point. He eventually had my email reported as spam.
• Philip ‘Frumph’ Hofer- Without him, the new site design would not have been possible. I came up with the design but had no freaking idea of how to implement it. In stepped Phil. He was able to do things that I did not think were going to be possible. He rocks. He is responsible for a lot of the new stuff in the latest version of ComicPress. if you don’t use this, I highly recommend you do. It is amazing and has saved my butt in terms of time.
• These next few guys really helped me out with webcomics in general. Whenever I had a question for them they always responded with paragraphs of information. I consider them pillars of the webcomic community. Tony Piro of Calamities of Nature; Tom Dell’Aringa of Marooned; Brian Anderson of Dog Eat Doug; and Krishna Sadasivam of PC Weenies.
• You the reader. Without you guys it would make this job a lot more lonely. I am glad that every once in a great while that you find amusement in my little drawings and ideas. I really appreciate it. Hopefully, I will see you sticking around this upcoming year.

Thanks everyone!

One more day until Matter of Fact turns one! Cherish these moments folks!

So far, in almost a year, I thought I had created 2 really absurd ideas only to find out they actually exist (perhaps I should start to do more research on ideas). The latest was in my comic Failed Products. It had a product in it called Bilk which combined Milk and Beer. However, I found out from a reader that this was already created, actually. So, I think I will be replacing that  product when I put out the first MOF book. However, I should note that I first tried Bilk when I was in college, circa 1998, while on vacation in Colorado so technically, technically, I came up with it first. But, as we have seen it is not a failed product.

The other time this happened was when I created a comic about Jazz Harpists. I thought it was a totally absurd idea, but obviously not. So I replaced the comic with this one, to acknowledge the idea of jazz harpists.

If anyone is truly upset about these mistakes I promise to refund you the cost of reading my comics.

Recently, one of my favorite websites to visit is www.ted.com. It has so many cool and inspiring videos on there that range in topic. One video that I recently watched and I thought was awesome was a video about Lewis Pugh and his swim in the North Pole. Yes- swim in the North Pole.

I think my favorite part about this video is where he realizes that his dream he has had for a very long time might not be feasible and he is on the brink of having to turn away from it. But then his friend was there to remind him of why he has this dream and that he can do, and just offers so much encouragement.

Anyways, here is the video. I should warn you, in case you are going to watch it with any kids around, that there is a curse word early on in the video.