Deed The Inky

Once again, apologies for the lack of updates in the last week-and-a-bit. Things have been a little bit chaotic for me, partly because I just started a new job. I am now an assistant animator, working on the RANT DOG cartoons! Somehow making those expired copyright theatre animations has translated itself into an employable skill. All it took was an insane fluke of luck whereby my friend Arthur, henceforth known as OPTIMUS PRIME SUPERFRIEND NUMBER ONE sold a computer to Norm, the Rantdog director, and mentioned that I use the same software for animation that he does, and things progressed from there. How the hell Optimus Prime Superfriend Number One remembered what software I used (Toon Boom Studio although I recently upgraded to Toon Boom Animate, in case you were wondering) is a mystery for the ages, but anyway. I pretty much have to salute whenever he enters the room now.

SO, yes. Take a look at the RANT DOG shorts, they are pretty awesome. Up to now they have all been sort of unrelated, but this years are all part of one continuous narrative, whereby zombies emerge from the Alberta Tar Sands and all manner of hijinks ensue. Due to the nature of animation (ie it takes FRIGGING FOREVER) none of the work I have actually done has appeared yet. I think my stuff should start to appear in episodes 3-4, but I’m not sure. When you see a zombie stripper dancing, that was (partly) me.

Oh yes, and normal Deed The Inky service will resume Monday. Sorry again.

I found a link on Reddit to a site called ShadyURL. You give it the address of your website and it makes a new URL for it that sounds super shifty. So now, along with deedtheinky.com you can also access this site by going to http://5z8.info/taliban-meetup_b3d2_racist-raps. Try it out!

Also a second recommendation to DickensURL, which does the same thing but gives you a URL which is a line from Charles Dickens. Ours is http://dickensurl.com/4303/Old_Marley_was_as_dead_as_a_doornail.

OH HELLO. So for the time being I am dragging my ass a little bit on updating the film site (it’s on it’s way soon, honest! I am just doing like 20 things at once right now) but in the meantime, they have their own page on Deed The Inky if you want to look at them. For the time being I have just uploaded the major ones, but if you want to see my fledgling efforts you still can on my Vimeo page or on Youtube.

Okay, I will leave the iPad alone now.

Hello. A while ago I took part in a Comic Jam at Happy Harbor, a comic shop in Edmonton, where I live. The idea for this particular one was to draw a random panel of a comic strip, then pass it to the next person. It was good times. Anyhoo, until I get to doing another one, you can see the results here. See if you can figure out which ones are mine.

It is January, so that can only mean one thing. Time for the annual breaking-of-my-vow-to-not-stop-updating-the-web-comic-for-a-whole-year. But for good reason: it’s website redesign week!

This time the site looks similar-ish – the colours and most of the artwork are exactly the same, the layout is different but nothing crazy – however, under the hood it’s been completely redesigned from the ground up. I’ve made the big switch, from basic HTML (which I was completely coding by hand myself) to PHP, specifically Wordpress with the Comicpress addon. What this basically means is that every time I upload a comic, the page is made for it automatically, it’s added to the archive automatically, the RSS is done automatically… basically it eliminates the extra hour I used to have to spend after drawing every cartoon trying to make it fit into the site. Not that this was a lazy decision. I had to re-upload all the comics dating back to 2004, all 300 of them, plus I had to transcribe them all and write little blog entries for each one. Altogether I’ve written about 15,000 words in the last seven days, and that’s not counting this.

Anyway, the site should be a lot more usable now – the ‘Random’ feature actually works now, as do the archives (which are also nicely formatted and everything) and there’s even a search feature. The main one is at the top, but on the bar below the comics there is a ‘Search Transcript’ feature which lets you search through all the text in a chosen comic too. SWISH.

ANYWAY, if you happen to find any problems or weirdness, please let me know at mark@deedtheinky.com

OH. Also you can comment on stuff now too. We’ll see how much of a good idea that turns out to be.

First of all, Happy New Year everybody! I hope you all felt appropriately shitty this morning. I know I did. SO, my New Years resolution this year is to keep doing Deed The Inky three times a week, all year, no exceptions. To this end I am going to have to streamline things a little bit, so some cartoons will be simpler black and white affairs, like todays. I don’t think it really detracts too much and it takes like 1/4 of the time, so… yes, we will see.

In other news, during my daily perambulation around my favourite other webcomics I discovered this…

I loves me some Toothpaste For Dinner, but this is a bit rich seeing as their site doesn’t even have a links section. So yeah, not really all that surprising. How about spreading the love around a little bit there, Stretch?

I happen to know the exact time I was born, so I wrote this sentence in my twenties. No, wait…. this should be the last sentence I write in my twenties: Even a stopped clock is correct twice a day. Unless it stopped because it melted in a fire. In which case the only time it’s right about is that one time when the clock caught on fire. And here is the first sentence I wrote in my thirties: You can lead a horse to water, but once it’s there you can’t balance it on top of another horse for very long. Ten seconds, max.

That should set the tone nicely.

Today is not a very special day for fans of Spike Milligan. It is not the anniversary of his birth or his death, or of anything significant that he did that a cursory glance at his Wikipedia page can determine. It is, however, the anniversary of him being AWESOME, in that Spike Milligan was once alive on a November 4th, and was awesome. This is of course just an awkward way of shoehorning this video into my blog. Here is the Milligan accepting a very prestigious award in 1994 at which Prince Charles personally wrote him a congratulatory fan letter. Skip ahead to 2:40 to hear him call the future King a “Grovelling Little Bastard” in front of the whole country. It’s not covered in the video, but right after this the Milligan sent Prince Charles a fax that said “I suppose a knighthood is out of the question?”

I won’t get into a whole biography here, ’cause this is just a little cosmic tip of the hat. But thanks for paving the way for Monty Python and everything that came after it (also known as just about everything in British Comedy), Spike Milligan!
Yes. So, in other news Deed The Inky is rocking out at #3 on Is It Funny Today today.

Thanks to everyone who voted for us! Subtext: there is still time for you to vote for me and my ego. Subtext to that subtext: go now and vote for me and my ego.

Deed The Inky can accept no responsibility for anybody who tries today’s comic as an actual legal defence. Unless it works.