I’ve spent the past two weeks wracking my brain on how to improve navigation for the site. It’s been a long and at times, frustrating road to cleaning up the navigation, links, comic reader, and almost every other aspect of the site. I’ve done about as much as I can for the time being and while there are small problems whose fixes still escape me, I have to step back for a few days and let the dust settle on the current design. After awhile, it just feels as if I’m changing elements for the sake of changing them and little or no improvement is made on the functionality of the site.

To get reacquainted with the comic book world, I’ve spent the past several weeks reading through some of the comics I found great back when I originally read them in the early to mid 1990s. Some have been great experiences, others were missing the charm I found when I read them as a teen. Surprisingly, one of the worst offenders was Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. It’s still very well-written and the story is engaging but some of the art and panel layout makes my eyes bleed. It is definitely a victim of the early 90s Image-powered art revolution, where storytelling and cohesive layout took a backseat to flashy panel layouts that broke up the flow of the story and at its lowest, left the reader completely bewildered as to what was happening and what panel to read next. On the other hand, Frank Miller’s Sin City is just as good, if not better, than the first time I read the original story (Sin City) and its sequels (A Dame To Kill For/That Yellow Bastard). His layouts are impeccable, the stark contrasts work perfectly with the story, and while I’m not a huge fan of Miller’s love for several splash pages done in a row, it works for him. Next up, I’ll try to find my old copies of Bone and maybe take a trip back to Spawn to see what I think of it 15 years later.

Other than that, tonight I plan to finish up coloring page one of Variables and work on some for the good of the people conceptual art, which I hope to get posted up for art preview Friday. I’m trying to build up a 1+ page buffer on the comic which, with any luck, I’ll be close to doing by the time the new page goes live on Monday.

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