I did three Weird Melvin space fillers for the Comics Buyers' Guide (that I'm aware of), and this one appeared in #999 in January 8, 1993. I don't have the finished art for this and had forgotten all about it. The Weird Melvin comic strip ran from #985 (10/02/92) until #1098 (12/02/94). The other two space fillers are on the back page of the Weird Melvin Comic Strip Collection.

Beer number 47 is a wet hopped cream ale (wet hopping is simply using fresh hops that haven't been dried). Had to pick probably 4-7 days early due to an incoming storm with possible high winds and hail. Survived a hail storm a few days earlier and didn't want to risk another. My plants are young, so I didn't get much, only 6 ounces, but should be just enough for this one batch. Lame, I know. Cooking the cereal mash... Meanwhile, the 6-row malt is going through it's first rest. Cereal mash then added to the mash tun for the second rest. Note the high-tech Home Depot cooler. While it ferments, I'll be working on layouts and lettering for Ralph Snart #8.

Um, hey, Weird Melvins are still in-stock, and I'm still selling them at cover price. You can pay more if you want.

Twitter is freaking out again...

237,167 impressions July 4, followed by 493,649 the next day and 221,389 the day after that. Nothing special tweeted. No new followers. Yes, that's right, 1M impressions over three days. Wuttup?

If anyone has had problems downloading my ebooks, that should be fixed now. My new web hosting plan has it's limitations, so I came up with a better way to handle it.

Beer No. 46 was born yesterday.

It weighed in at about 50 pounds and appears healthy. BTW, beer No. 44, which I bottled, started uncertain but aged well. Beer No. 45, which was kegged, was pretty awesome from start to finish.

Work begins (writing) on the next issue of RSA. I'd like to write it over the next couple months (while it's hot) to begin drawing in September. Inking in the Summer sucks, so it's to be avoided. Some of the back-up features are either done or partially done already.

This week I'll be brewing Beer #46. Still experimenting with the cream ale style -- there's only one last thing to figure out. Getting close since Beer #45 turned out more than pretty damn good.

Same provider (GoDaddy), just different plan. Major headache -- not as easy as in the old days. Used to be you get a new server, copy over the files, change the DNS and bam! you're done. Now there's SSL certs to rekey, PayPal certs to copy over, mySQL databases to export/import, PHP to test. All of my CSS or JS minifying was broken. Some of which GoDaddy mistakened for malware (maybe because CSS and JS files aren't compressed -- yet). HTACCESS needs to be retested, which I don't know if cPanel even allows (previous plan didn't have cPanel).

GoDaddy costs more but tried the cheaper ones (InMotion and BlueHost), but they sucked -- hidden costs, poor customer service, no process or clue on transferring a site, SSL, et al from one host to another.

Two things... updated the blog with some old entries from my original blog (before the blogger.com blog), so now this blog goes back to 2005. Note the Year dropdown above.

Resurrected some old interviews from the Wayback Machine. With these old interviews, the operative theme is ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. Also, these pages are the original html, so they're definitely not mobile-friendly.

2003: ralphsnartfanclub
2003: www.newsarama.com
2004: www.ralphsnart.com
2006: www.popthought.com
2007: www.thecartoonists.ca
2008: www.jazmaonline.com
2012: www.comicchatcast.com

Here's one interview from 2013 that's still online.

Here's Tony Caputo's response to my popthought.com interview.

Finally, noticed that Tony Caputo gave up on the dream. So if you want to start a comic book company called NOW Comics, go for it.

[UPDATE] Ralph Snart #7 has now released.

Here I am inking panel one of page five of the upcoming issue of Ralph Snart Adventures (#7). It's strangely relaxing to watch. The GIF below shows the progression of storyboard script to pencil to ink and then to lettered and colored final. One thing to note is how close the storyboard script is to the final, even though, in this instance, it's very rough. The pencil is pretty simple too, but since I'm also the inker, I can get away with that. This makes the inking a bit more creative -- I'm not just delineating, I'm drawing as I ink.

The storyboard scripts I did for other artists, like the stuff I did for NOW (Married... With Children) and Disney (Goofy, Roger Rabbit), were much tighter. In most cases, the artists followed my storyboards as if they were layouts, which is the main reason I stopped doing work for Disney -- they didn't pay enough to justify what I was contributing. Sorry, but $50 per page for story idea, script and layouts doesn't cut it.

Good article.
"One preservation network is known under the acronym LOCKSS – Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe – and that’s a good rule of thumb. Always have a backup, and always have multiple backups." LOCKSS

I keep all of my comic book production files on my daily user laptop and backup often to one of these. I also have two more of them, which I keep updated (one is kept in a fireproof safe). I also backup the entire hard drive of the laptop periodically to multiple external drives and burn DVDs annually and keep in the safe.

I don't keep anything on a cloud server, although my website, with all of it's files, are technically on another server. Don't use the cloud for anything proprietary. Google, et al can't be trusted to keep your files safe or private.

Not saying you need to go to these extremes, but, at the minimum, have at least one means of backup and do it often.