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Flash Hypercomics Return to E-merl

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A news update! How rare! Since last I posted I’ve been keeping pretty busy with the day job at University, although still managing the odd bit of comics research and creation when time has allowed. Although frustratingly, none of the projects I’ve been working on have quite made it to the stage where I’m ready to post about them online (yet!).

However! I do have a little bit of genuine news that concerns… the past! But in an exciting way! You see I’ve finally carved out a little time to do some much-needed spring cleaning around the place at E-merl.com. Most of this is dull but necessary stuff like sorting out cookies, updating php versions and switching the site over to a more secure https setup. But the more exciting bit – I’ve also added in Flash emulation across the whole site via Ruffle. This means all my old hypercomics and webcomics that ran on Flash are now once again accessible on the site. Yay!

From what I’ve been able to test so far everything pretty much works, although some comics work better on desktop machines than via smartphones (but since the Flash content never used to work on smartphones at all, this is still an upgrade). I have noticed the occasional graphical or loading glitch on the odd comic, but I’m hoping future versions of Ruffle may eventually resolve these issues too.

So there you go! I’ve got to say, it feels good to finally have most of my old work back up on the web in a form people can easily access. And now you’re all free to read through the extensive E-merl back catalogue at your leisure.

Comics Strike Back

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You Are Not A Sandwich And Yet You Are The SandwichHey folks! A quick little update to let you all know that from 12th to 14th of July I’ll be in Belgium to give a paper at the Comics Strike Back conference being held at Ghent University. The conference is focused on digital comics but I’m actually there to talk about something slightly digital-adjacent – approaches to applying digital comic techniques and practices within print comic formats. Or as my paper’s actual title has it: “From Digital Display to Printed Page – An Exploration of the Use of Digital Comic Adaptations and Hybridisations in Print Comic formats.”

As part of my research on the topic I’ve been busy making some new print comics and I plan to have the first of these with me at the conference. So if you’d like to get your hands on a copy of You Are Not A Sandwich And Yet You Are The Sandwich, then make sure to come say hello during the conference. If you can’t make it to Ghent in person but would still like to take part in the conference then good news – the whole thing is also going to be streamed for free via Zoom. For anyone interested in attending via Zoom, send an e-mail to digitalcomics@ugent.be and they’ll get you registered and sort you out with a Zoom link.

Key Terms in Comic Studies

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Happy 2022 everybody! This is just a quick February update to point everyone in the direction of the recently published Key Terms in Comic Studies from Palgrave Macmillan. The book aims to provide “a glossary of over 300 terms and critical concepts currently used in the Anglophone academic study of comics.” And four of those terms have entries written by yours truly. So if you want to learn the (comic academic-related) meaning of the terms “architecture,” “game,” “hybrid” and “sound” then now you know exactly the place to look.

Not much else to report at present, although I’m currently slowly working away on some new print comic projects that will hopefully see the light of day eventually. And in the meantime, Solid Metal Override continues it’s weird robotic journey at E-merl and Webtoon. This week will even be the 50th episode! How time flies when you’re a bunch of robotic rejects stuck in a bar on a run-down intergalactic space station…

Digital Narratives Symposium

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Comics Research Alert! On Thursday 25th November I’ll be taking part in an Online Research & Comics Seminar on Digital Narratives hosted by Newcastle University. I’ll be talking about some of the research I’ve been doing into Game Comic Walking Simulators, while Chris Bailey will be talking about his use of comics to transcribe children’s play in Minecraft. And then artist Kristyna Baczynski will be on hand to create a graphic response to the ideas we discuss at the symposium.

If you fancy coming along you’ll need to sign up to the event via this webpage. Even if you can’t make it on the day, if you sign up you’ll get access to a bunch of videos and other resources released at the start of the week. Then our live discussion will be taking place from 1.15 pm on Thursday.

Five Robots Walk Into A Bar

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Solid Metal OverrideTypical isn’t it? No news posts for years and then two come along at once! The reason for this second missive is to close off the dangling thread I left in last week’s post and properly introduce my new webcomic serial, Solid Metal Override. SMO is going to be taking the place of the recently departed Ghosts of The Great Mistake, updating every Tuesday both here at E-merl and in mobile-friendly infinite canvas format over at Webtoon.

Story wise, SMO is… hmm… I haven’t really figured out exactly how I’m pitching this one yet. It’s basically me taking a whole bunch of my favourite science fiction universes, putting them in a big blender and then sifting out all the bits that aren’t five robots talking shit in a bar. It’s also possible it may be a sort of sequel to MASIVO, although time will tell about how true that ends up being. Anyway! Why not tune in every Tuesday and we can discover what the hell it is I’m doing together?

In other news, Solid Metal Override’s arrival has given me an excuse to do a very light spring cleaning and refresh of the site’s colour scheme – let’s go with E-merl 8.5.1 as the current designation, shall we? While I was dusting around the place I also brought the Theory and About E-merl pages up to date with my most recent projects and publications. Oh, and if you’re interested in the comics theory side of what I do, keep your eye out for the online Transitions 9 conference from 8th to 10th April. I’ll be presenting a new paper called “How to Cheat at Comics” in which I’ll be lifting the veil on the various digital illustration processes I’ve used over the years (providing I can find some way to shave about twenty minutes off my current draft of the thing, anyway).

A Ghostly Goodbye

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Ghosts of the Great MistakeIn my continuing quest to write these news posts further and further apart, it’s now been an impressive one year and seven months since the last one. To summarise events in this period: first life at E-merl towers got steadily better for seven months or so, and then the pandemic happened and things in general have more or less been put on hold for a year. Which, given how much worse than that the pandemic has been for many people, is something I can’t really complain about. So in lieu of complaint, lets solider on to the actual point of this news post: Ghosts of The Great Mistake, which finished its three-and-a-half year run this week.

Thanks to everyone who has tuned in regularly to read Ghosts either here at E-merl or over at webtoon. I began the series back in September 2017 at a time where I felt like I desperately needed to start making comics again, having taken more than a year off from regular webcomic updates to focus on finishing my doctorate. Between Trump and Brexit, the world didn’t feel like a particularly nice place in 2017 and Ghosts was at least partly a reaction to that. And then of course the world got worse, first on the home front and then for everyone with the arrival of Covid-19. But Ghosts kept on going through all of it and managed to do exactly what I needed it to – it let me rediscover the simple joys of making comics and it helped keep me sane at the times in my life when I really needed that extra bit of sanity. I think it was somewhere around episode 106 that I originally decided to start teasing out a storyline that might bring a conclusion to the series. I had no idea at the time that it’d take me another 76 episodes to finally wrap the whole thing up.

If you’ve enjoyed Ghosts and never sampled any of my other work, might I suggest you peruse this page and check out some of my previous webcomic series? And in case you’re wondering what you’ll do without Ghosts in your life every Tuesday then fear not – I’ve got a new series in the pipeline that will launching at E-merl and webtoon in the very near future. What series you ask? Well, more news on that soon but… okay… here’s a little hint.

On Things Broken and Things Fixed: An Update

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Well, I guess it’s been a while hasn’t it? The last year has been… let’s say “significantly not great” on the home front, leaving little time to focus on keeping E-merl properly working and updated. At last though I have managed to carve out the time to fix all the things that have fallen over on the site and write a little news update to bring folks up to speed.

So welcome to… I guess I’m going to designate it E-merl 8.5. The whole site fell over in a major way back in August of last year, forcing me to rebuild big chunks of the back end WordPress stuff. This has resulted in a spiffier looking site, but also knocked out all the old webcomic archives which each needed to be rebuilt, one strip at a time. A year later and I’ve finally finished doing all of that, although sadly The Nile Journals could not be restored due to their Flash-based nature. I’ll have a think about finding some other way to get them back online at a later date.

Another causality of the crash was the old Brain Fist archive which stopped working for reasons I don’t really understand. However, this was a problem I could at least turn in to an opportunity, and I’m now re-running all of Brain Fist with a new strip appearing every Thursday at E-merl and in a smartphone friendly scrolling format over at Webtoon. Ghosts of the Great Mistake, which I’ve somehow managed to keep updating without interruption throughout the last year, is also now reaching a new audience at Webtoon.

Finishing out this news post are some updates to my Theory and Consulting pages which have details of some of my recent achievements on both fronts. Oh, and I guess I should mention that in the last year I did talks at Comics|Games, Transitions 8 and Wandering Games. Going forward I’m going to try and get these news posts out a little more regularly, if only so I can manage to mention when I’m talking at an event before the event actually takes place.

From Brazil to The British Library

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Digital Conversation: Digital ComicsOh look, it’s March already – time for a little E-merl News Update! Top of the news pile is an upcoming event – on Wednesday 18th April I’ll be speaking about digital comics at the British Library as part of their “Digital Conversation” series. The event is being organised by John Freeman, who provides the full details over on DownTheTubes.net. If anyone fancies coming along, tickets are on sale over here.

In the “things that I probably should have mentioned last year but didn’t” department, back in December I spoke about hypercomics and game comics at the Pixel Show in São Paulo, Brazil. It was a blast! I’m going to be visiting São Paulo a couple of times a year in my new role as link tutor at EBAC, so keep an eye out for me at more Brazilian events in the future. This also feels like a good place to plug the very long digital comics interview/conversation I had with Anthony Raguel that final saw publication in December. I say “finally” because the piece took shape over more than a year’s worth of back and forth e-mails. I think it’s a pretty good read if you’d like to get a snapshot of my evolving thoughts on the topic.

And lastly, in “comics what I have been working on” news, Ghosts of The Great Mistake continues apace at E-merl, with 26 strips under the belt so far (wow, half-a-year’s worth already!). I’ve also recently been able to start chipping away at the final chapter of volume three of Necessary Monsters – check out co-conspirator Sean Azzopardi’s blog post for an update on the artwork side of things.

They Call Him Doctor Comics

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The Impact of Digital Mediation and Hybridisation on the Form of ComicsNow obviously, no one is actually calling me anything of the sort. But if someone wanted to call me that, they now officially could. Because yes, I am finally and officially Doctor Daniel Merlin Goodbrey (DDes). Wooooooo! The minor corrections I did on my thesis over the summer were agreed by my lovey examination team (thanks so much Roger Sabin and Paul Williams!) and so I can now share my finished thesis with the internet in general.

The Impact of Digital Mediation and Hybridisation on the Form of Comics has received it’s own page at E-merl, which you can read by clicking that little ol’ hyperlink I snuck into the start of this sentence. You can either grab the whole thing as one handy PDF, or digest it in leisurely chaptered PDF chunks. I’ve also included links to the comics I made as part my thesis and uploaded a new video of Black Hats In Hell for your viewing pleasure. I hope academic folk who are interested find the whole thing useful, and that non-academic folk who read it will forgive the rather clunky writing style that the form demanded I adopt.