It’s an exciting day at E-merl with the debut of our brand-new serial, The Occasional Quests of Lemrin Spur. The series is part high fantasy adventure and part slice-of-life peek into the everyday working life of our titular protagonist. I’ve never written something quite like this before and it’s easily the most ambitious webcomic project I’ve attempted illustrating myself. You may also have noticed that it’s a series that likes to scroll – each episode will be delivered here at E-merl in the same scrolling format you’ll find over at Webtoon.

Lemrin will be taking the place of the recently concluded Solid Metal Override. For anyone that missed the final episode, check out the accompanying news post for the series’ final farewell. In other news, The Caption Comics Festival is making it’s triumphant return to Oxford on 16^th to 17^th August! In years past Caption sat at the heart of the UK comics scene so it’s great to see it making a return. I will of course be there, checking out all the great comics on offer, speaking on a Webcomic panel and plugging our new MA in Digital Comics. Do say hello if you’re in the neighbourhood.

Some exciting news to share from the University of Hertfordshire – come September we’re going to be starting a Master’s degree in Digital Comics. Follow that link for the full details of the course but essentially, if you’re familiar with all the kinds of comic you’ll find at E-merl, that’s what I’m going to be covering on the course. So everything from webcomics and webtoons through to the more out-there infinite canvas and hypercomic experiments will be on the table (or screen or tablet or whatever). Want to read some official blurb? Okay, here you go:

Digital Comics are a direct way to find an audience for your imagination, whether through webcomics, webtoons, hypercomics or traditional comic publication. Students will explore the design skills needed to visualise engaging characters, worlds, panels and pages. They will develop their storytelling skills and examine the new possibilities for comics offered by digital display. In parallel with their creative practice, students will investigate the commercial practices behind the publication and dissemination of successful work.

Exciting! The course will be a practice-based MA taught by me and running with both full-time (one year) and part-time (two year) routes, with students able to attend either on campus or remotely. Here’s the link to the official website again. If you’re interested in joining the course, please apply! And if you’re up for helping to spread the word then re-posting that link and the above blurb would be much appreciated.

In other semi-related news, one of those bits of research I mentioned in my last post has at last bubbled to the surface – Studies in Comics issue 14.1 is now out, and serves as a special issue all about the wider world of comics and the digital. I’ve contributed a chapter to the issue based on my Comics Strike Back paper that considers how print comics might make use of the techniques and adaptations of the form found in three popular digital formats. Hopefully of interest to those with a curiosity about that sort of thing.

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.

Hey 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.

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…

Comics Research Alert! On Thursday 25^th 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.

Typical 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 8^th to 10^th 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).

In 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.

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.