Alt Text: Genius Strategies for Defanging Web’s Harshest Critics.

Interesting bit about this one: drawing the cartoon. I’m nowhere near where I’d like to be as an artist, but I think I’ve gotten better over the last six months. In particular, in drawing the “crappy anime” illustration for this column, I had to ignore some of the things I’ve learned. I also tried to incorporate mistakes I still make, like fingers of vastly different widths.

I’ve been working on character design for an animation project. If I wrote this post correctly, above you should see a looping animation of Skiffington and Brumbach, just standing there in a featureless void, breathing.

A Hard-Core Proposal for Gamers.

I’m writing the titles these days, so you can blame me for any actual or perceived lack of quality.

The Wheels of Wormwood continue to turn. It’s been really interesting writing this arc, this is going to be the first full-on narrative I’ve finished — knock wood — since college. It’s really different in a lot of ways from one-off gags or short arcs. Once this storyline is finished, I think the next one will be somewhat different in tone and approach. Maybe. We’ll see.

For June, I’m considering whether I want to keep with four-a-week Sean and Wormwood, or do three-a-week plus a couple other things, preferably a Monster Manual Comix and something else. Obviously, this week I’m going with three due to circumstances within my control, so maybe I’ll just play it loose. So loose!

In other news, I have the Bugbear T-shirts and I’ll be getting them out this week. Thanks for ordering, those who ordered!

“Nebulous Internet Disease” is Colette’s term. I actually wrote this column before the one that ran previously, but I held on to it because I didn’t want people to think it was specifically a swine flu reference.

I’m trying something fun with Twitter. During the day, while I’m at my desk, I’m doing goofy little sketches and including them in a Twitter stream I set up for the purpose.

The sketches are in the spirit of Twitter: they’re small, odd, and usually pointless. I’m having fun drawing them and I hope people will have fun seeing them. If you’re not into the whole Twitter thing, you can also check out the archived images at Twitpic, or just look over there in the sidebar a couple times a day. (You can click on the images to see them larger.)

So the plan for May is to continue with the current Sean and Wormwood storyline Monday through Thursday, and have Friday devoted to Something Else, preferably Monster Manual Comix if I can manage it. I still feel twinges of animation-longing, but every time I introduce a new character and don’t have to come up with a voice or find someone to do a voice, I know I’ve done the right thing. I’ve wanted to tell an ongoing story for a while, and repeated listening to old Goon Shows has convinced me that the implausible adventures of the Friendly Satanists is the story for me.

In shirt news, the shirts are shipping on May 13. When they end up on my doorstep the pre-order is over, so if you want to get the free quickie sketch of the monster of your choice, it’s not too late. Just go to the store, order one or more shirts, and tell me what you want drawn in the “special instructions” box at checkout.

Also: the next Alt Text column should be up today or tomorrow. So that’s nice.

So I came home from a vacation to find my computer refusing to boot, although luckily enough I had a backup of the important stuff, and I was able to get the rest copied off the recalcitrant drive anyway.

Long boring story short, I’ve spend the last few days staring at progress bars and shopping at electronics stores, and the thing still isn’t booting. I’m hopeful I’ll get it working tomorrow, but in the meantime obviously there haven’t been any Bad Gods updates.

However, in good news, I’m going to be writing text columns for Wired again. Only twice a month, unfortunately, but it’s nice to be doing something. The weekday updates will continue as soon as I get my box booting again.

A couple people have mentioned Wormwood’s new look. It actually arose out of some design I did when I was still thinking of animating it. The idea was to make the characters very simple and very “flat,” to make them easy to animate. Here’s the direction I was going:

As long as we’re talking about animation, congratulations to those who recognized Wormwood’s voice as a Wallace Shawn impression. A lot of times voice actors base their characters on famous people — Homer Simpson, for instance, started as a Walter Matthau impression — and I started with Shawn. Hopefully if I ever go back to animation, either the voice will evolve until it’s not so obvious, or I’ll be in a position to just hire Wallace Shawn.

At long last, Sean and Wormwood return to Bad Gods. I’ve been putting this off because I still have an urge to animate them, but my new approach is to do things while thinking about them, so I’m going to start with a story arc in comic form and see how it goes. I’m pretty happy with it so far.

Some people have been asking, so I’ll clarify. The pre-order offer on the new shirts doesn’t expire until the shirts arrive. I’ll announce that here, but until then, if you order a shirt, I’ll enclose a free quickie sketch of the monster of your choice. Just put your selection in the “special instructions” field at checkout. There’s no mention of it on the store page because this is a special blog-and-Twitter offer.

Now I want to start an old-timey pub called “The Blog and Twitter.”