On Thursday January 20, 2011 at 7PM PST I will be streaming a discussion on Starcraft and Comic making, a great marriage that should have happened long before now. Originally this cast was going to be a piece of fanart for my favourite Starcraft caster, Day[9], but the time for his fanart contest has ended. Nonetheless the idea was so fun that I have been compelled to keep the project going.

For a good while now, Day[9] (Sean Plott) has been casting daily on Starcraft and how people can become better at playing it. Starcraft is unique as a video game, it is the pioneer of “E-Sports” and there are players who do really well at making a living off of playing in tournaments. I can attest to this uniqueness and the rise of E-Sports, as I myself have only played about 10 minutes of SC1, but enjoy watching the replays and analysis almost every day.

As I have been watching the dailys, it’s been hard to keep Plott’s analysis from creeping into my methods of creating comics. It has become so prominent that I have been giving his starcraft advice to other struggling comic makers in an effort to get them on the track to not only actually making comics, but also making better comics.

If you are not familiar with Day[9] or the Starcraft casting phenomenon, I completely understand. Much like webcomics, the medium is really just coming into it’s own. Nonetheless you can come and stop by the stream and join in the discussion regardless of whether or not you play the game. At the end of the day, these philosopies can be used for anything in life, as long as you’re passionate about it.

These are the dailys I will be referencing in tomorrows cast:

Daily #177: Simple Winning Techniques

Daily #233: TLO vs. White-Ra
Daily #229: Dealing with Insane Games
and of course, the infamous Daily #100: My Life in Starcraft

I drew this image while I was tabling at the Waldorf Comic and Zine fair. I decided that it’s been far too long since I did a digital painting, so I busted out the tablet and photoshop and went at it.

So, here’s a present!

Wei and I are going to disappear for a bit, holidays and all. After Christmas we’ll be out of town, but we will be back and ready to upload comics for the first week of January!

2010 has been an awesome year, for both Epidigm and Cloudscape. We got so much done this go around, and there’s some really good opportunities facing us in 2011. I think this will be the first New Years where Wei and I won’t feel totally depressed about being giant failure slackers. Not only did we get some good work done, but we now have a few books, some good conventions under our belt and been accepted to distribute Lotus Root Children. I would also like to think a few more people out there know who we are than this time last year :)

Here’s to 2011, my peeps. See you on the flip side.

Wei has asked me to send a shout out to all the Days of Leviathan readers. He has the new page, but it still needs a few touch ups. He would rather have a late, good page than an on time crappy one. He’s expecting to update on Saturday. I think it has a little to do with his final projects piling up as well, so I think giving him a little break might be the kind thing to do :)

In my world, I’m dealing with intense frustration with amazon.ca. As many of our readers will know, we live in the wonderful city of Vancouver BC. As Canadians, we don’t really have the option of selling our books on amazon.com, so we’re left with our rather decrepit Canadian version. Amazon.com has this wonderful feature for self publishers: the Advantage program. You can sign up, list your books and they take 55% off the top. Pretty much the same as any warehouse or distributor. It’s pretty sweet. Alas, we do not have this in Canada. You have to apply as a vendor and hope that someone at amazon will eventually get around to looking at your application. It’s dire, and frankly, kind of insulting.

I’m sure many won’t understand, but in Canada we have always had a cultural issue with living next to the United States. We love our brothers and sisters to the south, but find it so frustrating that we’re overrun with American content. It’s just another example that Amazon will list all of the books by big American publishers working in Canada while strangling independent Canadian content with an outdating and weak vendor service. I sometimes feel like crying at the frustration, if it’s not being blocked on the internet, it’s dealing with border harassment to go to conventions. I just want to make comics, I just want to sell books and I want the opportunity to share my content with a continent that seems so unfairly balanced.

To think, we’re really nice about it. We’re not really like many other countries where America forces it’s way in, we just try to make friends. I hate being nice about something and then being taken advantage of, but then my Canadian manners stop me from getting all righteous about it all the time.

I hope hope hope Amazon will actually take the time to look at our application. They say they list products by demand, but then didn’t ask me for any product details. We have 3000 books from our Xeric grant. In my dreams I will sell them all, but I could be happy with selling a few. With Amazon. Come on guys, work with the people who actually want to work with you.