The homestretch! That sounds kinda creepy!

SuperVillain IV has finally finished the animation stage. I am not half delusional from the last week's inconstant trickle of sleep. My computer is coated in lead and other coloring implement residue. Anyways.

Filming starts soon (Friday?) if my camera decides it has enough fight left in it for getting through these odd couple thousand of frames or so. I attempted to start filming today, but it insisted on zooming inwards constantly. I told it not to and it threw a fit. If it insists on being generally senile throughout tomorrow, I'm probably going to have to shell out for a new one which could delay the release again. I wish there was, along with bold and italics, an agonized, blood dripping, horrifying angstmuffin emphasis that I could have put 'again' into. Graghhhhh. The only plus to the delay is that I can start working on the new Sock short in the meantime.

Speaking of delays, I worked myself to death this week and I have no comics for next week. I won't put up a hiatus thing quite yet, they may still show up at my door. With a warm pizza. And a hug.

Still chugging along!

Right, I feel bad for unintentionally becoming one of those people who always saying they're working but never have anything to show. Rest assured, I'm pumping all my free time into these upcoming projects, however they are numerous and are all clogging up at the exit of the creationering machine... is that my brain? Maybe the lack of updates is because it sounds like I should be having a stroke. Huh.

'SuperVillain IV' is beyond massive. It's a solid 30% bigger than the previous larger projects and after I finished 'Perform' I've been working harder on coloring and making things look shiny, hence another delay as I'm no longer chicken scrawling with some Crayolas. I am a sixth of the way through coloring, but I haven't gotten to work for awhile on that because of the other projects.

Komix Games and I are teaming up to do a SpermRider game as previously rumored. I can't honestly give a release date for this, especially because I'm not the one doing all the programming so I have little idea of how far we've got to go. But I can say that Komix is a fantastic programmer and this is shaping up to be a very addictive little game. 

Currently working on background art and explosion particles.

And finally, the week hiatus on the comic gave me time to whip up a short 6 page graphic novel type story called 'Glucosian Shank' which will go up on Friday in time for the 300th Tales of BarfQuestion webcomic. Wooooo.

In summation, there will be lots of stuff, round about soonish. Not updating sucks, but the suckage should soon be evaporating into a sunrise of happy awesome new content.

PHWWWOOAAARRRR

Holy Bejezus this movie is long. See you in 18 years.

Comicky Business

Tales of BarfQuestion now has an official comic book out! This is 200 pages of web content as well as completely unseen exclusive features for $19.99!

THE COMIC

In the last few weeks my imagination threw a tantrum and I decided to stop the webcomic and stick up an alternate project I was working on. However it takes 10x the work to update that comic twice a week than it does to do Tales of BarfQuestion 5x a week. Right now the monster that is SuperVillain 4 is taking up all my time, but I intend to start doing the regular comic again as soon as possible, most probably on the 14th. So stay tuned dammit!

SUPERVILLAIN IV

Is bloody ginormous. The first of two fight scenes has a higher frame count than the whole of SuperVillain 3. On top of this, there is an actual multi-dimensionalish story with character development (!) that has to be conveyed which adds to it. This will probably be surpassing all other projects in terms of frames and work involved, so I will be insanely busy as I still want to get Advent of Sock and the winter holidays special out this year as well as two top secret projects (which are secret because I have no guarantee that they'll pan out). 

I'll be posting tons of making of materials and stuff in the blog once it's released, and you can also expect two new SV shirt designs (actual detailed ones this time), a free downloadable SuperVillain stencil for making your own box/graffiti, and Sulek's SuperVillain EP which contains previously unreleased music from the SuperVillain shorts as well as new music made for the currently under production film.

TL;DR- I'm busy, there's SuperVillain stuff coming, and the comic's coming back Monday probably.

Back to BarfQuestion

Perform

And after a couple months of hard labor, the new, and final commission piece for a long, long time is here! I'm very pleased with it; visually this was a series of experiments and ventures into new territory and it has all paid off quite well, in my opinion. Monarch, the band behind the music, was also extremely awesome to work with and you should check them out (click).

It's hit me now that it's over halfway into 2008 now and I've only done one piece of completely original work. Commission work is good for making new connections and broadening your horizons, but both of these new pieces (You Don't Wanna Leave, Perform) are kind of hybrids and I miss doing 100% my thing. This isn't bad, but I miss my little BarfQuestion universe.

Concept art for SuperVillain IV

The rest of the year is back to regular BarfQuestion programming, and am I ever excited. This next week or so is going towards getting the new BarfQuestion comics compilation book out to the printers. From there the rest of the year will see, for sure, SuperVillain IV and Advent of Sock. The frame count on all of these new ones is rising so fast that the number of shorts I can put out has been decreased dramatically. However I also want a small project to accompany each of these, which I will utilize by getting some adventure games together to go on the games page I keep talking about but never doing.

More on that later, better get back to the book.

Next Up

The 2008 Wisconsin Film Festival was awesome. Kind of surreal seeing something I had only previously seen on the internet exploded one million percent and projected on the big screen. 

In other bragging related news, the new Mike Mangione video is doing very well; it's been on the front page of NewGrounds.com for about a week now and took the daily first and weekly third place awards. 

Anyways!

Pre-production is almost finished for the next piece, which is another commissioned music video. This time it's for the very awesome Monarch, and I'll be doing a video for their song "Perform." It's a darker noir piece like "Monarch" and "the Closing Hour," but it's shaping up to be more uplifting and positive because for once it's not about some hopeless guy slowly dying because of a heartless corporation. Yay!

Below are a couple conceptual sketches.

2008 Relaunch!

Barfquestion.com is now officially in flash with a bunch of snazzy features and content! Plus check out the store for a ton of new merch, including a line of Adventure Toast products just in time for the new Mike Mangione music video!

I upped the number of frames I drew for each sequence for this one, which is something I plan to continue to do because, you know, quality and all that. However updates will be a little more sparse just because I'm taking my time more. Anyways, the new video was fun but I'm looking forward to having more creative control. This one just seems a little bland in certain aspects, but hopefully that's just me. The next project is another music video, but I am super excited and have some really exciting plans for it. I'll be posting sketches and previews as I go.

Anyways, it's off to Madison for the Wisconsin Film Festival! If you're in town, swing by on Saturday and catch "the Closing Hour" on the big screen!