It sucks. Specifically hands, environmental perspective and keeping the cast on-model (re: boobs, faces). Non-specifically, everything else. Trust me, nobody has a more ready awareness of just how much I'm sucking at this than I do.

The contents of the Lexicon, cast bios and other sections are considered a Working Copy until mentioned or detailed in the story.

Until then, I'm leaving myself some breathing room in case I need to make any adjustments or major changes.

I suppose it helps that the major characteristics of ATC won't be explained until the story that follows The Dualist.

Chapter Zero was executed after Chapters One through Three and before Chapter Four. It fixes the critical issue of having started the story at a later point than I should have. This whole thing being something of a Learning Experience™, I (naturally) realized this the Hard Way.

Chapter Zero isn't a bandaid. A bandaid would be shitloads of lesbian bondage sex with plot-exposing narrative sprayed around with a semen-flavored firehose. Zero, in conjunction with The Edit, straightens out The First Half of The Dualist and makes it all nice and readable.

11:12 < ejp> hrm. does this rule out lesbian bondage sex for future chapters?
11:12 < solios> not in the least.

Zero is an artifact of the "lol, webcomic!1" era of 2003-2005. Future projects (Dead City Radio, Transitional Voices, etc) will start with 1. Like they should.

A few sections of ATC are comment-enabled. There are a few guidlines I impose when it comes to comments. Stick to them and I'll be able to spend more time drawing and less time editing. :)

A. Don't ask about porn. This isn't the place.

B. Spelling is important. If you write like a third grader, I'm going to wipe your comment. Intelligible articulation helps the whole "for mature readers" thing I'm aiming for here.

C. Flaming, spamming, and general asshatery just aren't cool. And we're cool, right? Cool like Fonzie.

It's all © Daniel H. I write it, I pencil it, I ink it, I model it, I texture it, and I photoshop it. I'd rather somebody else pencilled and inked it, but them's the breaks.

Everything that I didn't generate myself is credited in the CG Assets section of the links page.

The main reason ATC is hosted on an independant server is I'm one of those hasshats who has to have total control over aesthetics, contents, features, and the overall end user experience. The main reason there isn't a forum is that having one would mean giving up some of that control - and it would be an even nastier form of ego poisoning than the low volume of comments in the comment-enabled sections.

I'm not a big fan of forums, honestly - browsing them is a constant reminder of why ATC doesn't have one. You're here to read the comic. If you want to talk about other comics or video games or lolcats or whatever, there are other forums. If you want to talk about them with me, there's IRC.

21:30 <@ejp> huh. ATC looks better at 1.8
21:31 <@ejp> still doesn't make sense, but the pretty is prettier.
21:31 < solios> that's because it's produced entirely at 1.8. On a painstakingly corrected G520.

As of 200508 the comic is produced on whatever Apple jammed into their 20" flat panels. The "proofing" monitor has changed from a 21" KDS to an E540 trinitron to the G520, which has gone fuzzy and is now a funky soothing sepia.

20:53 <@john> solios, so I saw the beginning of appleseed tonight
20:54 <@john> solios, and there's a character in there
20:54 <@john> totally ripped off from ATC
20:54 < solios> skfljghfjhk.
20:54 * ejp backs away from john
20:54 * solios stabs john with a tuna fork
20:54 < solios> john: <3
20:54 <@john> ?
20:54 < solios> fagbot: doot for Bri v. Tantek
20:54 < fagbot> DOES WAVING A FLAG IN YOUR FACE FOR THREE HOURS COUNT AS PATRIOTISM
20:54 < solios> hah.
20:54 <@john> what am I not getting?
20:55 < solios> I based tantek's tactical helmet on Briareos (sp) from Appleseed.
20:55 < solios> the five lens :o: layout.
20:55 <@john> oh
20:55 <@john> yeah
20:55 <@john> damn
20:55 < solios> hah.
20:55 <@john> I got all excited

I'm fairly certain that this is the only (major) Obvious Influence, which is partly why Tantek is frequently seen with the helmet either Off or Open. He has several different models, each mission specific, all of which plug into his optical jacks (on the outside of his eye sockets). Their resemblance to certain popular mecha and cyborgs is both obvious (I'm not strong with mechanical design) and (as a later development) intended as incidental humor of a sort.

For the record, Xand's original design was strongly influenced by Battle Angel Alita, but I later realized that (a) borg limbs aren't much fun for me to draw, and (b) three subdermal prosthetics and one full replacement would eventually make for some nice character development. In the case of (b) the boobs are real, which I imagine is an added bonus for those of you who think about these sorts of things.

Oh, and Greymalkin's aesthetic is an attemt to blend the "look" of William Gibson with the "look" of Bill Burroughs - 'malki just happened to object to this and wandered off in his own direction, like any good character should.

The Dualist is designed for print. This doesn't just mean it "looks good in hardcopy" - it also means that it's a lot easier to follow in hardcopy. While this introduces the occasional pacing nightmare on the planning end, it's made for a presentation that flows quite nicely in the physical. I make an effort to note Right/Left in the page commentary when I think this design decision may compromise or confuse the flow of The Dualist in web format.

For anyone keeping track of such things, Chapter "covers" aren't included in the working hardcopy - they're here specifically for the Web end of things, and I'd like to think they'd be the covers of individual issues if The Dualist were published in serial format.

01:03 < solios> heh. I think the sexstuff in ATC is hyperheadfucked enough as it is.
01:03 < solios> Adding lesbians would just dilute it.
01:03 < @bda> This is my surpised face.

I figure it's more efficient to define the terminology and concepts in a convenient place, rather than tacking a few pages of footnotes into the story every few pages or relying on the Clueless N00b crutch. If ATC is confusing the hell out of you, the lexicon might help. Or it might make it worse. Much worse- especially considering the fact that a good chunk of the entries exist to support other entries, and, like the story, the lexicon is a partial glimpse into a complete whole that's still struggling to get out the door.

(note: this is the old "updates" FAQ entry, retitled)

ATC does not have a regular update schedule. This has been cause for some harassment on IRC and through other mediums, but the short of it is that it would, in fact, not be possible to maintain a set production pace. There's a lot of reasons for this, and the big one is that there is a production schedule- it's just that large chunks of it do not involve the display end of things. I work on the plot somewhat continuously, and do revision work on the script as far in advance as possible. Unfortunately, the scripting and layout process has a habit of preempting Production. If there haven't been any new pages in awhile, it's usually because I'm working on script, revising the overall outline, and doing layout thumbnails, etceteras: the script for any given section is effectively in the bag when I start putting together pages for it. Usually. The script layout and dialogue are typically revised on the fly to fit how things are developing- for example, the dialogue for polarity was canned and rewritten and expanded for every single page in the sequence- resulting in a much stronger presentation.

Scripting and layout thumbnails are done at the same time, which is especially helpful for sections that rely more on visuals than dialogue. Here's an example of a script transcript- I'd condensed the rambling notebook scrawl of the polarity dialogue and layouts into two to three pages of comic per page of notebook for portability purposes, and used these notes to produce polarity 10, 11, and 12 : obviously, there were quite a few layout changes- most of them done for clarity and revising some sequential fuckups- I'm more interested in the page looking good and reading well than I am in sticking to the formula dictated in the script. The dialogue obviously got a major overhaul in the process.

When the script is bagged and I'm not hating it like I hated High School Algebra, I proceed almost immediatly to production. Having reference and actually knowing what I'm doing at this point, I typically produce between two and three pages in a week, depending on the amount of detail work, backgrounds, and new background components that have to be created. This would be why there are often LARGE time gaps between sections of chapters and between the chapters themselves- I'm the writer and the artist, and I've learned from chapter one that being both at the same time is not a happy place to be.

15:02 < _Lasar> You know...
15:02 < _Lasar> I like stuff like atc, freak artsy stuff.
15:03 < _Lasar> Or however one would define it, I don't really care.
15:03 < _Lasar> I'm referring to my definition of "stuff like that".
15:03 < _Lasar> When I see stuff that is cool like ATC, I wonder what kind of person can think of and produce such things.
15:04 < _Lasar> And.. now that I know, I think I'm scared.

For chapters 4-7, production went like this:

1. Draft/outline of What's Going To Happen, which inevitably turns into a mix of an outline, a partial script, some layouts, a few big gaps of "??," and so forth.

2. After a few revisions of outline/draft/etc, scenes begin to firm up.

3. Scenes become a chapter.

4. The chapter chunks are gathered together, revised several times, and finally thwacked down as a "script" consisting of a mix of layouts, dialogue, emoticions, etceteras. This is The Script. It would be a very rough draft of a script if I was writing it for anyone else, but I'm not.

5. The script is hacked into a pagecount, loosely based on scene flow and volume of dialogue. The page-cut script is then hand-copied into a notebook in single page increments, to the right of a 3x4 box. After the entire script is transferred, layouts begin to fill up the boxes. Sometimes I get it in one, sometimes it takes several attempts. My layouts could probably be a lot more dynamic than they are, but I'm approaching this more like a writer than an artist. That's just how it is.

6. Scenes and Layouts are then used to determine what needs to be modelled and in how much detail. At this point, modelling is done, either on an "everything for the chapter" or an "everything for the scene" basis. In the case of Chapter Four, I hadn't thought of this yet and vastly overmodeled the environments. I had this in hand by the time I got to Chapter Six, and when I started Chapter Seven everything but the ICBM site was complete..

7. After conditions 1-6 are met, the chapter is then banged out as fast as possible. While the chapter is being produced, I use my free time (such as it is) to hack out the next chapter, the next book, the previous book, or other related bits. Once everything is on ready, rendering becomes the primary bottleneck.

Transitional Voices will hopefully improve on this, with an emphasis on more dynamic layouts and a greater dialogue density.

Effective 26 January 2005, ATC has a more-or-less functional RSS feed. If you're using a reader or browser that doesn't pick up the meta tag in the site's root index, the direct link is here.

The feed used to write out on a one-entry basis to hide the fact that I lacked the fu to dig up the Global Listings MT Extension, which works quite nicely with the oldass version of MT I'm using with the project. Thank Eric for the fact that the ATC RSS feed now writes out The Last Ten Entries (comprising News, the comic, Candy and Cast).

Thanks to ejp for the kick in the ass, and to rjbs for the hand-holding.

If you were to find ATC on the shelf at a comic book shop, it would either be a hacked up, bleach-soaked and sanitized version, or it would have "Mature Audiences" stamped on it somewhere, Tipper Gore style. Drugs are used, bad words are spoken, the sorts of things Psychologists write papers about are splattered all over like so much mucus, and "fuck" is said (quite) a few times. Oh, and there's the occasional nudity thing.

None of this is strictly intentional, mind you. I haven't set an obscenity quota or consciously decided that the crew of the Daedalus act like an antagonistic posse of space truckers. They've just kind of developed that way. Ditto nudity- the decision being more "Uh... being clothed in this kind of dream doesn't make any sense at all" as opposed to "d00d I'mma draw BOOBZ!".

Not that I don't enjoy drawing boobs, mind you.

I hate comics that talk down to the reader, or assume that the reader is a complete fucktard, explaining high school concepts to {him|her} with with the tone usually reserved for handling drunkards and the mentally impaired. A good example is the TLA for LAN footnoted in an issue of Ghost In The Shell... and AI likewise footnoted in a wannabe-manga Antarctic Press put out in the mid nineties. I work with computers and study them as a hobby- consequently, I find such things to be extremely insulting. The refusal to explain comic-specific technology moreso. If your target audience is "Blade Runner Fans", assume they know a thing or two about genetics and don't waste your time and theirs with a detailed breakdown on the basic concepts of the process. If I want a textbook, I'll buy one- and it'll do a better job of explaining whatever it is you're trying to get across. I don't like unecessary footnotes so they're not in The Dualist.

I'm assuming y'all are ejimicated. If you're not, I'm assuming y'all know how to use Google. I know y'all don't live in my head and I have a fairly good idea as to what originates outside of it.

ATC does not have footnotes. It does have a Lexicon, as it's a nice way to keep the explanation compartmentalized so that people who know what's going on aren't burdened with kindergarten flashcards. It worked for Frank Herbert, it's worked for other writers, and precipitously few comics seem to make use of the device- fewer still take the initiative to actually improve upon it*.

I'm not bothering with "improvements"- I'm not that deluded. I am, however, not going to be using the Lexicon to explain commonly held concepts you can read about elsewhere, nor am I going to make unnecessary accomodations to impress upon you the bigness of my creation.

While I'm at it, I've made it a storytelling exercise to fill in some Big Fucking Perceptual Holes (WGP, West vs. Templar etc.) without using the most commonly abused crutches- crutches that I've been pressured to use on more than one occasion. Hopefully I'll know if this strategy has been successful before I get to the part where I'm drawing a lot of guns and vehicles and blood and stuff.

I've built the airframe- I'm still working out the wiring, the instrumentation, flat or phillips, etceteras. This is my baby, and I'll be damned if I want her to look like anything else in the ward- if she turns out to be as genetically defective as I am, then so be it.

* The original Ghost In The Shell trade paperback collected a buttload of footnotes in the back. Really long, really detailed ones, indexed by page number so you could flip back and see for yourself what's being referenced or talked about. The problem with this is that the original printing of the book didn't include page numbers!!.

< @rjbs> solios: when does Optimus show up in ATC, anyway?
< solios> uh.
< @rjbs> solios: I'm getting kind of worried that he doesn't at all. But that'd be crazy.
< solios> er.
< @rjbs> or is this set in the brief post-Optimus pre-Optimus-Returns time frame?
< @rjbs> cuz I guess Rodimus would do.

19:32 < ejp> are you getting payed by bra makers?
19:33 < solios> I wish.
19:33 < ejp> the way you draw breasts your characters would need like 5 sizes. :P
19:34 < solios> yes yes. BODY BY LIEFELD and all that.
19:34 < solios> problem is I haven't had a three dimensional reference model since about two weeks before I started the comic.
19:34 < ejp> haha
19:34 < ejp> sure, blame it on that.
19:34 < solios> I think I will.

11:29 <@solios> I just flipped through Titanium Dreams.
11:29 <@xeno> dumbass.
11:29 <@solios> I think it just sterilized me.
11:29 <@xeno> uh.
11:30 * xeno thinks of a suitable analogy
11:30 <@xeno> and there's just so many, i can't really choose.
11:31 <@ejp> anal-ogy.
11:34 <@solios> yeah
11:34 <@solios> one of my friends from Back In The Day wants to see it for comparison to ATC
11:34 <@xeno> just punch him in the dick.
11:34 <@xeno> it'll suck less.
11:35 <@xeno> and after a while, stop hurting.
11:35 <@solios> he's in detroit.
11:36 <@solios> which is the spiritual equivalent, I suppose.
11:36 <@xeno> oh jesus.
11:36 <@xeno> nothing can be worse, go ahead and show him.

Blame xeno for this thing existing at all. I still have the pages (from an era in which I thought 11x17 bristol with TEH BLOO LINES N SHIT would make me AWESUM), but I "lost" the photoshop files containing the color and dialogue years ago. Unfortunately, copies survived in the wild - a fact xeno brought to my attention when he paid me a visit in the summer of 2007.

My failure is his victory, or something.

The script - being perhaps the worst piece of writing ever generated by a carbon based life form - has been redacted.

cover
page 1
page 2
page 3
page 4
page 5
page 6
page 7
page 8

Xenothaulus is the Official ATC Typornographer. This means I harass him to check a fresh page for typos and correct anything he finds before I print the thing off, duplicate the page folder and call it a night.

Linguistic gaffes don't really concern me unless they shit themselves all over a comic page- those take between a few minutes to forever to fix. I've no concern for typos in any section of the site save The Comic, the Cast, and the Lexicon. Xeno handles The Comic. I've known him for as long as it's possible to know someone you're not related to- I'd love to be able to say he got the job through nepotism but the fact is he's good at it.

21:11 * xeno WILL typornorpgrahp;l.
21:12 <xeno> some day when ki'm not having drunk all the vaodak and beers
21:12 <xeno> studid fockad
21:12 <solios> O_o
21:12 <xeno> iI HATE IST
21:12 <solios> FOCKAD
21:12 <xeno> had klike have l bottle left
21:12 <xeno> and some mt. sdew
21:12 <xeno> and was like HEY!
21:12 <xeno> NAD misxed them
21:12 <xeno> and it sucked
21:12 <xeno> SO MUCHA SS
21:13 <solios> apparently.
21:13 <xeno> it was awesome
21:13 * xeno ponders bed (re: passing the fuciknout_
21:13 <solios> I AM blogging this.
21:14 <xeno> =P

Sometimes.

ATC production goes in spurts. After outlining, scripting, thumbnailing and so forth, there's still the task of actually Making The Comic. Even when everything else is taken care of, Making The Comic is still subject to a lot of outside factors, including but not limited to: RSI, Burnout, work stress, comic stress, bad art days, Production Anxiety, scheduled maintenance (buying pants, etc) and so forth.

It's become evident that pages come in clumps. I've tried working ahead- it doesn't work for me. If I'm done with a page on Monday and don't want to put it up until Wednesday, then I wind up spending Tuesday tweaking and tuning and reworking it... so it's better to just crank it out, toss it up as soon as it's done, and keep moving.

Since I update so irregularly, and kick pages out at rapid fire when I am updating, I'd suggest checking for updates on a weekly basis. Pick a day, any day.

This might seem grossly unprofessional compared to other webcomics. Consider that ATC is a graphic novel, and consider that the guys that you see on the newstands chunk out 22-30 pages in one lump, once a month. If that.

Oh, and they have pencillers, inkers, letterers, editors, and colorists working with them, and that doing even one of those things to any level of acceptability is pretty time consuming.

I get asked this a lot. All I can say is that I'm working on it.