"The Sweet Escape"

"The Sweet Escape" is my absolute favorite track of Gwen Stefani's latest album, and the video is terrific as well. She's gorgeous and glamorous and hot and sexy and her videos are packed with the kind of intense, colored-saturated, fun design that I love. Check it out:



Jeff

5:12pm

As of this afternoon, the new user and new comics processes are working properly. The new user process had a couple of bugs in it yesterday, but it seems to be functioning now.

The new comics process is a new addition. I've created a multi-step process when you add a new comic.

It works like this:

basic | add pages | edit pages | logo | describe | publish | congratulations

Basic Information

You enter your basic information about the comic here. The comic's name, who it's created by, and its web alias. The name and web alias must be unique, and the web alias must be a single word with no spaces or punctuation in it. (I haven't added that validation yet, I need to do that still).

Add pages

Once you've set up the basic info, you're prompted with five file input boxes, where you can upload the first five pages of your comic. Right now it's the first five pages only, but I'm thinking I may let you keep adding indefinitely at this point, so you can go ahead and add your whole comic here if you want.

Edit pages

You're then shown the thumbnails for the pages you uploaded, along with fields for the page Name, Description and Publish date (all optional). If you don't set the publish date, it's set to the current date.

Logo

Then you upload a logo image for the comic, and confirm that it's correct. If you want to change it, you can upload a new one, the process advances when you're satisfied.

Describe

Here you give the copyright information and add some tags to describe your comic. The tags function isn't wired up yet, but it will also include some text explaining that this is how you can define the genre or genres of your comic so people can find it more easily.

Publish

Then you tell it how often your comic is updated ("weekly", "daily", "whenever I feel like it") and give the publication date for the whole comic. Click on Publish and you're done.

Congratulations

The last page gives you the option to edit the comic's info, add a page, or go back to the home page.

I'm thinking I may move the "add pages" section to be the last step, or second to last step, but I'm not sure. "Publish" should be the very last step, but that may consist of simply viewing a summary of your comic's information, (name, alias, byline, description, copyright, logo, update schedule, publication date, and number of pages) and clicking "Publish".

I haven't done any visual styling on these pages so they're still very simple. They won't change too much, but there's a bit more visual design work to do on them.

I also need to create the Edit Comics process, which will compile most of that information onto just a few pages accessible from a single Manage Your Comic screen.

Jeff

Showdown at the House of Blue Mushrooms

Kill Bill with Super Mario Bros sound effects:



Jeff

"Some evil eye shit"

Some lazy subtitler in the pirated DVD factory decided to take it easy on the day he was supposed to do the LOST box-set. The real dialogue is, "Jack! Come back!"



In other news, I've been looking for jobs and coding in Ruby On Rails all this week. I'm hoping to find something simple immediately (AS SOON AS POSSIBLE) while I work on my Rails portfolio to get some work doing that. Next week I'll make more time to get some comics work done.

Also finished watching the first season of Veronica Mars. Pretty cool detective stories, definitely left me interested to keep watching. After 20 episodes I still couldn't tell any of the guys apart.

Jeff

"25 Years of Love & Rockets" at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, February 10 - March 7, 2007

"25 Years of Love & Rockets" at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, February 10 - March 7, 2007
Originally uploaded by fantagraphics.

25 years of Love & Rockets. Sure would love to be able to go to this!

Jeff

Lia, by Rubens Rodrigues

lia
Originally uploaded by rubens rodrigues.

Rubens Rodrigues creates amazingly lifelike and vibrant vector illustrations and posts them on Flickr. Here is one of his latest pieces, "Lia", probably my favorite of his works so far.

Jeff

Movies and TV this week

A Wii catastrophe averted!

Hung out with Reed on Friday, as usual, and had a blast. One of regular entertainments is multiplayer gaming on the Wii. Wii Sports is, of course, a favorite--mainly Tennis, Bowling and Boxing. I've got Street Fighter 2 on the Virtual Console and that is a blast as well, but our absolute favorite multiplayer game is Excite Truck. It's just the right mix of challenging and accessible and has become a mainstay of our gaming.

A few weeks ago we tried to play Wii Sports Boxing and the motion sensor on my second Wii Remote seemed to be busted! I kept putting off calling Nintendo about it but I finally did that on Thursday and ... the support rep told me to whap the remote against my hand a couple of times, and it started working. So it's back to Wii as usual again!

Pan's Labyrinth and Little Miss Sunshine

Saw two movies this week, and they were both excellent in different ways. Pan's Labyrinth was dark and mysterious, simultaneously a beautiful fable of fairies and magic and an intense depiction of fascist brutality and its drive to crush the life out of everything. The star, Ivana Baquero, is definitely going to be an actress to watch, she has the kind of natural depth of emotion that Natalie Portman had in The Professional, and with some luck she'll go on to do great things.


Also watched Little Miss Sunshine, another terrific movie with an excellent young actress at the center. Little Miss Sunshine is about the best example of an indie movie I can think of: it's quirky and unusual, with rich, interesting characters who each seem to have so much depth you could make an entire movie about any of them. Great performances from the stars, especially Steve Carell and Alan Arkin. Abigail Breslin, the central character, actually says relatively little in the movie, but she's such a captivating character who drives the whole story that you just have to adore her. Absolutely one of my favorite movies this year.

Veronica Mars

After having it recommended by both close friends and the likes of Joss Whedon, I've finally picked up the first season of Veronica Mars and started watching it. It's strange, television keeps finding ways of making us care about what happens to rich, pretty white girls in southern California!

I'm a few episodes into it, and I'm digging it so far, although I am having a hell of a time telling the guys apart. Except for her best friend, who's black, they all seem to look roughly the same, from the cute boy she's starting to date to the brooding ex-boyfriend with the mysterious past to the cocky smartass who gives her trouble all the time. It always takes me a minute once they come on screen to tell which one is which.

I have to give props again to Joss Whedon, because somehow on his shows, NONE of the characters look alike. On "Buffy" there were a big variety of teenage girls on the show over the years, but they always looked distinct in shape, wardrobe, hair color and style*, so they never seemed to blend together the way the boys on Veronica Mars do. And on Buffy, there were even fewer guy characters so they all stood apart from each other: Xander, Angel, Oz, Spike... It would be impossible to mix those characters up. Anyway, yet another in a three million part series on why Joss Whedon is great.

Jeff

* except in the last few seasons when Emma Caulfield (Anya) kept changing her hair color and style, in some cases duplicating Sarah-Michelle Gellar's style exactly. A number of the episode commentaries mentioned how this caused some problems in setting up shots with the two of them occasionally.

2:52am

I finished the layout roughs for "The Appearance of Respectability" today! It's 28 pages long and I'll beging drawing it as soon as I have more of the sets done.

As I've mentioned before, the story is meant to be an introduction to the world of the comic and to the main characters, including stern headmistress Dr. Cain, prudish teacher's pet Abigail and fiery bad girl Mina. The plot involves a prospective new student and her mother taking a tour of the school. Dr. Cain and Abigail are both determined to make the best impression possible, while Mina and her friends just want to have some naughty fun with the fresh meat!

I see these stories basically as porn sitcoms. They're designed to be simple, light and funny but also sexy and cool. After working with the super-simple stories of "Progressions X" I've been dying to branch out to do longer stories that have a bit more of a plot, although still not so much plot that it gets in the way of the sex. These stories are hardcore porn, rather than "erotic fiction", they're not arthouse stories about sexuality with soft camera angles and fuzzy filters.

I've also been working on Ruby on Rails lately, building a site to manage my music. I'm going to be updating Realty Recon, my previous big Rails project, as well, to make it a little slicker and upgrade it to Rails 1.2, which came out this week.

Rails is a lot of fun to program in and the latest versions have added a lot of great stuff to learn, so I'm dividing my time between working on the comic and working on the sites.

Jeff

New Jeff Han video

Fastcompany.com has a new feature article on Jeff Han, whose interactive touchscreen display at TED last year excited everybody who saw "Minority Report" and wanted to do cool shit like that on their computer.

There's also a new video demonstration which is amazing. UPDATE: I'm removing the embedded video because it plays automatically and that is really annoying. Go here to see Jeff Han's Perceptive Pixel demo video.

Unfortunately, the article was written before the announcement of the iPhone, whose interface (especially its photo manager) uses remarkably similar techniques to Han's.

Jeff

What is this device?

The little PDA/music player she's using in the beginning of this video:



seems to be the same Fergie shows off in a bizarre breakdown section (starting at 2:56) of her "Fergalicious" video:



What is it?

Also, here's "Supersonic", by J.J. Fad:



Sound familiar?

Jeff

Running wild in the city late at night

Some videos! First, a little Shampoo:

"Delicious":


"Viva La Megababes":


"Trouble", blatantly lipsynced on Top of the Pops:


And last, "Honnou" by Shiina Ringo (hat tip to dr00):


Jeff

Synchronicity

I recently went to see the movie "Black Christmas". I knew it would be lousy when I went, but I've got a high tolerance for crappy horror movies. One possible bright side is that the cast includes the lovely Michelle Trachtenberg, and the movie's content advisory included "brief nudity". Would that the twain should meet! So, I headed off to see the film, hoping that the failed promise from Eurotrip of a topless Michelle Trachtenberg fleeing in horror from a sadistic killer could possibly come true.

Alas, it was not to be. The movie was abysmal, as expected, and save for a brief shower scene there was no gratuitous nudity, much less of the Michelle variety. That's how it goes.

A week or so went by and I was watching some old Law & Order episodes, including a second-season episode called "God Bless the Child". The story involved a couple with religious beliefs that forbid them from taking their child to a doctor. In the opening scene, the child is taken to the hospital and dies on the table while her parents plead with the doctors not to treat her.

Before this happens, we see the doctors trying to bring the kid back to life, and who should be playing the child but...




Voila, Michelle Trachtenberg. And topless, no less. Too bad she happens to be FIVE YEARS OLD in the scene. For believers in synchronicity, this just goes to show that you should be extremely specific with what you wish for! The fates can be mischievious.

Jeff

UPDATE: Apparently she was four years old, not five:

Speaking of Law and Order, Michelle recently did a guest stint on the show, appearing opposite Chris Noth (a.k.a. Mr. Big of Sex and the City fame). “I told him that he had seen me topless before,” she said. “He looked kind of embarrassed, like he was trying to figure out how. And then I explained that I had done an episode of the original Law and Order with him when I was four years old!” (Ouch-way to make the guy feel old.)

"Transient" by AP Furtado

Got this from the Talkaboutcomics blog. It's a 24-page minicomic called Transient, by AP Furtado. With an art style reminiscient of Heavy Metal and European comics in general, it's a beautifully-colored piece about life, death, reincarnation, and goofy space aliens and hippies.

Just check it out. It's probably the best webcomic I've read in a year or more.

Jeff

ZootFly Ghostbusters

MUST PLAY THIS.

Jeff

UPDATE: Yesterday evening when dr00 showed me this video, I clicked on the Youtube link that lets you send the video to your blog. It said it would show up "soon". That was around 30 hours ago!

12:45am

Today I've sketched out pages 1 through 17 of "The Appearance of Respectability", which will be the first Chastity Towers story, introducing all the characters.

These sketches have been a little rougher than usual, but mainly I wanted to get down the storytelling and panel layouts. Often when I sketch, it is basically the first stage of pencilling, with fairly solid figure drawing. In these sketches that is mostly the case, but there is definitely some cleanup to be done on the anatomy.

By the way, drawing girls kissing each other is harder than drawing them doing almost anything else to each other! Who knew?

Realizing that I've been making webcomics for quite a while but haven't really been following any, I've decided to check out a variety of them and see what I can find. I've started reading about a dozen various stories from Webcomics Nation and a number of other assorted strips and stories. I'll write more about which ones appeal to me later.

Jeff

12:09am

Spent a little time with some promotional sites tonight. Signed up both Progressions X and Drug Abuse Is Fun! on Onlinecomics.net, which has a pretty good audience and posts notices whenever they're updated.

Also posted blogs about them on Comixpedia.com. Hopefully that will help as well, especially if I keep posting news when a new storyline begins and so on.

Jeff

9:51am

Now that the confessional's off my chest, here's what I got done since yesterday!

Scanned and uploaded issues 2 through 6 of Drug Abuse Is Fun! to Webcomics Nation. They'll be appearing, one page per day, starting tomorrow, Monday, January 15. Also uploaded issues 6, 7 and 8 of Progressions X to Adultwebcomics.com. They'll be appearing in new installments every Monday as usual.

And I made a spiffy cover page for Prog X #8. It's the only issue of Prog X that never appeared as a minicomic, so I was free to make a new style cover for it. Here it is (again, NOT SAFE FOR WORK)

Progressions X #8 cover (NSFW).

I also noticed I had a few raunchy pinups and gag images drawn so I decided to set those up on Adultwebcomics too, they'll be appearing on Sundays for the next few weeks. The first one is here (NSFW). Now that I look at it, I'm hoping it doesn't interfere with the flow of the story pages that are being published each week. I'll see how it goes.

And in other news, I've plotted out the very first Chastity Towers story, "The Appearance of Respectability". It's an introduction to the school and the cast and it shows you right up front what the story's all about. I'll be working on laying that one out while I'm building more sets in SketchUp.

That's about all so far today. Now I'm just hoping my carpet will dry out after the heavy rains we've had this weekend--it's getting ripe in here and there doesn't seem like much I can do about it til the carpet people come back tomorrow!

Jeff

Drug Abuse Is Fun-damental!

Got a few cool things done since last night.

Last night I uploaded issues 2 through 6 of Drug Abuse Is Fun! to Webcomics Nation. Starting tomorrow morning it will be appearing on WCN every weekday, beginning with issue 2 and continuing until all 17 issues have been posted.

Drug Abuse Is Fun! was the very first minicomic I ever did, beginning in late 1994. I had lived in Paris from 1989 to 1991, where I met Stephen Greenwood-Hyde (then just Stephen Hyde) and we created Progressions. I'd been back in Austin a few years and had just moved out on my own, to my first apartment, a bland little studio on North Lamar. I wanted to draw comics, but Stephen lived in England and we didn't figure we could collaborate overseas. I think at the time we were still holding out some kind of hope that he's find a way to move over here and we could be in the same town. Or maybe I was, I dunno.

Autobiographical comics were all the rage in 1993 and '94, with Joe Matt, Seth, Chester Brown getting big, as well as R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar and Eddie Campbell creating masterpieces in the genre. I didn't have any other ideas so I decided to write about my life, and Drug Abuse Is Fun! was born.

It started off innocuous and fairly banal. I had met Jason Smith, a talented local guitar player, in a singing class at Austin Community College. We got along great and started going out to clubs. Jason was a lot more outgoing than I was, very confident and sure of himself. I had started drawing comics about our "adventures", hanging out with friends and going out, when we decided to take a trip to Big Bend State Park, just Jason and me. And that was going to be it for my friendship with Jason.

It's pretty confusing to me even now, why I behaved the way I did. I drew the Big Bend events into four issues of Drug Abuse, issues 3 to 6. Scanning those issues in last night put me into kind of a funk, not only because I miss Jason as a friend (though it's been thirteen years since our last contact), but because I still see myself making a lot of the same mistakes I detailed in these stories. I don't know if I didn't learn from them, or what. I hope I did, but to what extent I'm not sure.

Part of the main contention of all these earlier stories is that I find myself connecting with only one or two people at a time, and beyond that I find it tough to make friends. I'd love to be gregarious and have scores of connections, people to spend time with and hang out, get caught up on their lives, and so on. At any given time I have a few great friends for which I am extremely grateful. But it feels like I'm missing something, not the least of which is that it'd be nice to meet a girl and go on a date once in a while.

So overall it's a sobering experience to read through these old comics and see what ways I've changed and what ways I haven't. It's also a great experience to finally get to post these old comics on the web, since they haven't been seen by pretty much anybody in more than a decade. With 17 issues of Drug Abuse to publish, starting tomorrow, I will have a page of comics on the web every day for at least a year. Not to mention Chastity Towers and any other comics projects that take off on the meantime. That's a pretty cool feeling!

It's been a while since I was able to devote myself to comics wholeheartedly and I have been missing it desperately.

Jeff

New Flickr set: Desktops

Made a new Flickr set for posting my desktop image scans.

Jeff

Progressions X updates

Today I also finally created the promotional images used on Adultwebcomics.com for the Progressions X comic. They're explicit so I'll only link to them here, but I did make a new logo that I can show off. It's simple but I wanted something bold that's not complicated.

Prog-X 500x200 banner image
Prog-X 200x76 promo chit
(images not safe for work)

Jeff

Behold Chastity Towers!

school 4
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Created some sets today in SketchUp: the front of the school building, the basement shower with window, and an Edwardian school desk after some reference I found on the web.

Click the attached pic for more shots of the sets.

Jeff

Di Da Di: Coco Lee vs Maria Montell

Apparently the big hit from Coco Lee, "Di Da Di":



is a cover of "And So The Story Goes" by Maria Montell.

I did not, as Johnny Carson would say, know that.

Jeff

10:50pm

Finished the sketches for the last 12 pages of "Everhard's Harmless Hobby", so the story is now all laid out! The next step is to design some of the sets for the series using SketchUp.

I'm also contemplating doing a introduction-to-Chastity-Towers story, possibly the start of the school year with the characters meeting each other. I'll be brainstorming on that and seeing if anything comes up. Also going to be laying out "A Sting In The Tail", another short (8-page) Chastity Towers story, this week.

I also uploaded the next couple of stories to Progressions X today, which updates every Monday. The current story, running through January, is based on "Love Is Psychedelic!" with a tragic and ironic twist on the original story's tragic and ironic twist. The next story, running in February, is inspired by "Once A Gangster!". Following that in March is "Skyline!", Progressions X style. And last is the latest finished comics story I've drawn, based on "Enter the Four-Eyed Dragon".

Once those Progressions X stories finish, the plan is hopefully to have a few Chastity Towers stories already drawn so it can begin running. Meanwhile I'll be working on other comics and see where that goes.

But first up is to build some sets!

Jeff

RIP Robert Anton Wilson

Visionary writer, philosopoher and teacher died yesterday. Others will write about it more eloquently than I can. I discovered The Illuminatus! Trilogy in high school and it changed my life, more than anything else I've ever read. His writing on model agnosticism, the "isness-illness", general semantics and religion shaped the way my brain works today and he'll always be one of my heroes.

Jeff

Humor!

This little gem was on The Onion's comics page this week. It's pretty standard fare for Conservative "humor", but mostly it just makes me giggle that someone who draws a comic about politics doesn't even know which branch of the government Nancy Pelosi is a part of.

For more examples of right-wing "humor", see Newsbusters' Gaggle.

Jeff

2:40am

Hung out with Reed this evening, had a great time. Played some Street Fighter and some Bomberman, which is awesome!

Finally got around to watching the first episode of the Sci-Fi show "Eureka", which was... earnest but dull. The dialogue was ALL right "on the nose", with no subtlety or subtext at all. The plot wasn't great, but the show had an enthusiastic and light-hearted tone which could have grown on me if the scripting was better.

Another gripe was that five minutes after the show ended, neither of us could remember the names of any of the characters. There was an Alison, a Warren, a Walter, and some others, but the names were of such a banal and generic quality they just vanished into the background as soon as they were mentioned.

This is in contrast to quality writers like Joss Whedon, who gives virtually every character in his shows a striking and memorable name. Buffy, Willow, Xander, Cordelia--these are names you remember even after seeing the show once or twice. Even if they don't have an odd or unusual name, Whedon gives the character a nickname which stands out on its own, as in Xander, Oz, Gunn, Wash. Or he plays with the gender to make a memorable contrast, as with Fred or Jayne.

Another disappointment is that the main character of "Eureka" was named "Jack". Someday, every male character on every TV show will be called "Jack". With the preponderance of Jacks on TV, especially in the most popular shows out there, it is ridiculous to create any more. Off the top of my head I can think of prominent Jacks in 24, Lost, Law & Order, Without a Trace... and there are many more I'm sure.

The name has a good sound to it, phonically the word "Jack" has a strong ring, but writers have got to be more creative when giving their people names!

Before bed I drew another couple of pages of "Everhard", but I'm getting sleepy and I'm off work tomorrow so I want to be rested to draw a bunch tomorrow! Made a few sketches at work but nothing too remarkable. Got a slightly younger and less witch-like design for Chastity Towers Headmistress Dr. Cain, that's about it.

Off to bed!

Jeff

Desktop Jan 10, 2007

Desktop Jan 10, 2007
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Just one more post. :)

Jeff

2007-01-10-norton

2007-01-10-norton
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Sketched out pages 11-20 of "Everhard's Harmless Hobby". It's coming along nicely! Not much to say about it, I would post sketches except it's going on Adult Webcomics and hence it's rather explicit!

I was pretty beat tonight, chatted with dr00 and shared Youtubes til about 10pm and then I didn't have much energy left at all. I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep, so I did my standard powerup routine to get energized and soon I was firing on all cylinders, cranking out 10 pages of sketches in about an hour.

Drew some fun drawings today at work, which I'm pretty proud of.

Included is one of Norton Everhard, the groundskeeper of Chastity Towers Preparatory School for Girls. I'm a little concerned that my drawings of grungy old Norton are coming out better than the designs for the girls who are the main characters!

Anyway, going to watch some Law & Order and perhaps read some Savage Dragon before bed.

Jeff

Rumba Another Way

"Hello Another Way" by The Brilliant Green:


"Cherry Girl" by Koda Kumi:


"Puffy de Rumba" by Puffy:


...and "Rock N' Roll Prefecture Capitals" by Mini Moni:


Jeff

10:32pm

Roughed out pages 6-14 of "Everhard's Harmless Hobby", one of the first Chastity Towers stories tonight. Got a little sloppy toward the end but it's getting late and I just wanted to throw the ideas down on the page while I was doing it. I'll need to get some more reference to get some of the angles I want in the last couple of pages.

I've also plotted out "A Sting in the Tail", which has always been planned as the first Chastity Towers story. It's only 8 quick pages so I probably will draw that one first. Also came up with a new story, "An Afternoon with Abigail", which will likewise be fairly short. I might do it after "Sting' and before "Hobby".

I didn't do any of my comics routine tonight, except listening to Fantastic Plastic Machine. After work I chatted with dr00 who turned me on to a bunch of cool Japanese pop videos. For example:

RoboKiss, by Morning Musume spinoff W:



I also dug out some old favorites of mine, including this bluesy gem from Chinese singer Coco Lee:



Coco Lee was my inspiration for Pam Sage from Progressions, and this album, "Di Da Di" had the best videos, coolest costumes and best-looking hair.

Jeff

12:18am

Worked on "Poison" with Reed tonight.

"Poison" is a dark horror of a story that Reed and I developed a few years ago with an eye toward making it either a comic or a movie, depending on what felt right. Now that I'm gearing up for new comics projects, we're plotting it out so I can draw it.

It's pretty vicious material, emotionally harsh and pretty brutal to work on. It combines the optimism of heroes with powers with the darkness of Taxi Driver. Might be just the thing to help work out some issues, who knows!

Tomorrow I'm going to draw the storyboards for more Chastity Towers--I want to get it ready to start drawing within the next couple of weeks.

Jeff

That's what I'm talking about...

2007-01-08-mina-moping

2007-01-08-mina-moping
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Quick fan-service-y sketch I did today. So much of my sketching is faces, I am working to draw full body images and poses out of my head while I'm sketching too.

10:15pm.

Jan 7, 2007

10:15pm.

Today I finished plotting out "Everhard's Harmless Hobby", the first Chastity Towers story. Once I had it roughed out in plot points, the next step was to create the Manga Studio template and start working on sketches. This prompted some back-and-forth deliberations as I made and remade the template, trying to decide whether to lay it out horizontally, in a screen-shaped page, or vertically, in a traditional comics-shaped page. I eventually decided to draw it horizontally, for a few reasons:

1. I've never drawn a story that way. All my other comics have been vertically-oriented pages, designed mainly for print, and put on the web because they can be. So this is going to be a new experience for me, involving some new and different design decisions and giving me an opportunity to grow a bit in my layout choices.

2. I want to publish this comic on the web primarily, with an eventual print collection happening sometime in the future. Print will be something I'm not thinking about too much at this point. I'm keeping the option open but I want this comic to be born and live on the web from the start.

3. I hate scrolling when reading webcomics!

After the template was created, I got warmed up by drawing some fan art for John L. Roberson's "This Sickness" comic, which I've been getting into on Adultwebcomics.com. John said he'd post the fan art tomorrow and post a link and a note about it. We exchanged a few emails and he seems very cool.

Once I was warmed up, I was ready to start drawing. I've found that one of the best ways for me to stay productive is to have a solid routine and some anchors that get me into the mood of drawing and get me fired up. While drawing the end of "Four-Eyed Dragon" and "Dance Dance Resolution" in 2005 I had a little routine that helped me a lot. I found it in my notes and include it here as well:

1. I light some incense, which I always light when I’m listening to fun music or inspiring tapes
2. I have a physical anchor that I do, I squeeze the index finger of my left hand against the palm. This is “CREATIVITY”, I do this anchor whenever I am feeling really powerful and creative—like if I’m thinking of a new idea, or having fun working out how to draw a page—I realize that I’m feeling super creative, and I press my finger against my palm. As I do it more, it brings back that feeling when I do it! So just the act of squeezing my finger brings back creative feelings and gets me excited.
3. Before I sit down to draw a page, I literally dance around, I jump up and down and laugh out loud, thinking how cool it’s going to be when this page is done! How much fun I’m going to have drawing it! I do this so much I get a physical feeling of INCREDIBLE EXCITEMENT in my body, thinking about it!
4. “I pledge every ounce of my being to draw the best comics page that I possibly can!” I say this incantation a few times, really loud and make a strong, powerful move with my body!
5. Then I sit down and draw!

I did all this today exactly as before, and it gave me a lot of energy to draw! I sat down and roughed out the first scene (pages 1-5) of "Everhard's Harmless Hobby" in no time.

Next steps will be to rough out the rest of the comics, design the sets in SketchUp, and draw the sucker!

Another thing that helped today was taking periodic breaks to play piano. Today I was playing "Wrote A Song For Everyone" by Creedence.

UPDATE: Just goes to show how long it's been since I did any serious comics work. When I said I'd never made a horizontal comic, I wasn't thinking clearly because Spark-Tower Wilson's Silent Song was obviously a horizontal, screen-shaped layout.