RatCreature's Journal

My output this year is barely worth summarizing as I don't even need one full hand to count, but I've indexed every year since 2006.

This year there was only one piece of art, two drawbles/doodles, one icon and eight months entirely without art, compared to 2012's three pieces of art, nine drawbles/doodles, no icons and nine months entirely without art. 2011 it was six pieces of art, 36 drawbles/doodles, seven icons, and three months entirely without art. Not a good trend. Well, maybe 2014 will be better.

January
a fashion meme drawble (XMFC)

February
a doodle for Beth H's Third Time's...the Charm? (Avengers)

March-October
Nothing :(

November
an Iron Man ratcreature icon

December
Steampunk Maria Hill/Steve Rogers (Avengers), my Yuletart drawing

Like many people I collect some pieces of fanworks as chapters of a single work, to avoid horrible, horrible clutter on my works page. In my case it is drawbles and doodles, but others do it with written snippets. That is of course due to the lack of a Scraps feature like dA has, where you can separate less polished stuff from the rest, which I bemoaned here before. Unfortunately you can't mark chapters as gifts to someone to let them get a notification either.

And before anyone points to the series feature, I already collect drawbles in a twenty part series, with the works being divided by fandoms, and some of these have over 40 chapters. If I made each picture a "work" these would totally swamp the art I want people to notice in any fandom.

I have just doodled something that originally I wanted to post for the Secret Mutant Madness, but didn't get around to before Christmas, even though I liked my idea for the prompt. So now I just wanted to post it anyway, and alert the prompter. But I can't do that and put it with the other Marvel sketches.

So now I have a dilemma, in that I can either mess up my whole organization by posting a sketch as a work, or I can't let the prompter know.

I've started to post a bunch of my fanart on AO3 even though sadly you can still only embed art, not upload it, so it's not truly archiving yet. But the advantage is that many of the stories I've illustrated are there and thus I could take advantage of the associations, and also I like having tagging options.

Anyway, I've wondered what to do about drawbles, which for me outnumber "regular" fanart more than 2:1. On dA I put them in the scrapbook so they don't swamp the rest of my gallery, on my website they are in a different section, and in my fanart blog and journals are mostly bundled in a couple of drawble posts after the prompt rounds. But what do you do in an archive like AO3?

On the one hand I'm a completist in the sense that I want to have all my stuff in the places I pick (my personal website shows drawings I did in elementary school -- it's a thing), OTOH I naturally want the art that took a lot of effort to be somewhat more prominent, so that the first impression for visitors is not that I do only sloppy, quick doodles, when they browse my works in a fandom.

So how do you resolve that problem? I assume writers must have similar issues when deciding how to archive quick prompt response fic, drabbles, meme fic and the like. Do you bundle several into a single work? If so by which method? All of one fandom? Or maybe bundle chronologically somehow, like all you did for a prompt post? Some other solution? Or do you just let your other stuff get swamped and trust the audience will sort it out via tags? What's your presentation strategy?

There wasn't a lot this year, not even if I count all drawbles and icons and such, i.e. I can't even do the meme thing with the squares of one preview picture for every month.

January
a Numb3rs Don and Charlie ratcreature icon

February
Nothing. :(

March
Diricawl (Harry Potter fanart)

April
a fail! ratcreature icon

May
Five drawbles: 1-3, 4, 5
Robin (DC fanart)
Nightwing (DC fanart)

June
an Uhura ratcreature icon
a weird comment doodle for Kass' story Zygote (SGA/Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* (but were afraid to ask) fusion fanart)
Star Trek Reboot art meme (Star Trek: Reboot fanart)

July
Nothing. :(

August
Nothing. :(

September
Nothing. :(

October
Nothing. :(

November
Nothing. :(
(I did work on my Yuletart assignment that month, though I only finished in December with an extension)

December
Twelve drawbles: 1-6, 7-10, 11-12
Santa!Cthulhu
and the not yet revealed yuletart art.

This is even less than 2008, and it's not like I was prolific then. I suck. :(

Though I don't draw professionally or even all that often, I still have a habit of collecting interesting visual things for reference or inspiration. Even with libraries and these days internet image searches it is not easy to find the exact kind of interesting picture you need when you need it, or sometimes you don't even know what exactly it would be you need to realize some vague idea. Or at least it is like that for me, so if I come across something that is visually stunning, unusual, interesting, seems like a good inspiration, or a possible reference for something I might draw some day I keep it.

Like, if I'm at a used book store, I habitually look if there's a bin of old cheap National Geographic or other travel magazines and leaf through them to see whether any have cool photographs, if I see an interesting picture on the internet I will safe it, and so on.

Obviously after a time this results in an organizational problem if you ever want to find anything again. So I'm wondering how others deal with this.

It's not so bad with the books, I just have a shelf with books I got for their pictures, like for example collections of photographs from the 1920s, 30s and so on, books of animals, places, people, cars, design... It's harder for the magazines because things like National Geographic aren't topic specific, so I never know whether I decided to keep some issue for pictures of some place or some animal, or even whether it was in the title article. Which makes finding things again a bit harder.

Digital stuff is the least problematic in some respects, because I have created a bunch of folders labeled by topic for photos (reference for buildings & cityscapes, landscapes, actions, clothing, animals, plants, objects, symbols, textures,... with some having subfolders) and some other folders for art by other people, and yet another set of folders for fandom character reference, so it's not hard to find which folders to browse. The main problem is that I don't always know where I got some image from, because it's so much easier to just save a picture than to save it and add something to its meta-info field. That isn't a big problem if I just use it as inspiration or reference some parts of it, but if say a landscape photo was to serve as main reference for a drawn background I might want to acknowledge that, yet often by the time I use something I have no idea where it came from anymore.

Photos I've taken myself before having a digital camera are more of a mess, because those are mostly in big boxes, and most are kind of boring holiday photos with some cool landscapes and animals scattered inbetween. But the worst are the boxes of, well I guess "junk" fits, i.e. stuff I've kept for because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Much of that is also paper, like exhibition catalogs, flyers that looked interesting, clippings from newspapers or magazines, posters, but there's also stuff like feathers with a nice pattern, stones, tins, even some bit of metal that rusted in an interesting way, and so on. I mean, I try to keep the non-paper junk down to one box or so, because I really don't need to go down the road of people who end up smothered by their packrat piles collapsing on them, but well, I'm not a very tidy person to begin with, so it's an uphill battle. I guess what I really need would be del.icio.us tagging for RL objects and/or a physical search engine, but I fear that level of virtual home and computer merging is still a way off into the future.

So, how do you deal with organizing your reference and inspirational collection so that is actually useful for you rather than a pile of messy clutter? Do you have some kind of system? Or just really good spatial memory?

Since I am now crossposting on three sites, and have already backed my old entries up to GJ and intend to do the same to IJ eventually, it is a real hassle to update the SGA thematic list I maintain (the one listing stories with alien Pegasus cultures and new non-human aliens) directly as journal post, so the thematic list itself is now on a separate webpage. It's very bare bones, because it was annoying enough already to reformat it and to convert all the lj-shortcuts. I didn't even bother to replace them with "proper" author names if the pseuds differ, because there's well over a hundred stories on that list by now. But it should be serviceable enough, and I'll have to add stories in one place only instead of two or eventually three. Of course the original LJ entry is still there and now links to the webpage, so if you have for some reason linked my thematic list, your link won't be broken, though people have to follow an extra click.

On a slightly more fun note, I've posted another, slightly belated monster for amarin_rose, who asked for a "Purple People Eater":
( beware of the monster lurking behind this cut )

It surprised me that I've been quite productive fanart-wise by my (admittedly sloth-like) standards in 2006. Here's the complete list:

January
Tim as Avatar from Te's Intimates series (DCU - Batverse)
Platypus!Harry and Platypus!Harry fighting Voldemort, both drawn for Nimori's Animagus Challenge (Harry Potter)

February
Illustration for the epilogue of Beth's Snape/Kingsley story In From the Cold (Harry Potter)

March
Nightwing and Arsenal Show, an illustration for sister_wolf's Nightwing/Arsenal ficlet (DCU - Outsiders)
36 drawbles from the drawble meme I did, many of which are fannish (I should probably add a content warning here, because the drawbles were using the requesters' interests as prompts, so while most are harmless and just deserve a silliness warning, there's also stuff based on interests like "gay vampire snuff porn + zombies".)

April
Watership Down/SGA fusion crack (Watership Down/SGA)

May
illustration for Petra's Squandered my resistance, drawn for Comica Obscura (DCU - Batverse)
Storm (Ororo Munroe) (Marvel - X-Men)

June
Ginny Weasley (Harry Potter)

September
Tim in a visibly armored Robin costume, based on Te's request in illustrate_me (DCU - Batverse)
several Muppets/DCU fusion pieces, i.e. Kermit the Frog (as Superman) and Miss Piggy (as Lois Lane), Fozzie Bear (as Jimmy Olson), and Gonzo (as Nightwing) (DCU/Muppets)

December
Buddy Baker advertising Tofurky (DCU - Animal Man)

That's fourteen drawings, not counting the drawbles, which isn't too bad considering I only drew three in 2005 and none at all in 2004. Not exactly prolific, but at least I don't feel utterly ridiculous making a list.

Also, I tagged most of the fanart I've looked at on LJ this year, which isn't really production, but you can conveniently search and sort the links to over 2300 pieces of fanart by character and pairing (mostly comics and HP, though there's some other fandoms too), and I thought it can't hurt to mention my indexing effort again:
http://www.simpy.com/group/161

I've spent a couple of hours tagging fanart for the LJ fanart link sharing group brown_betty helpfully created at simpy.com. This method has the advantage over LJ memories that you can tag with more than five labels, also the tags of the group are searchable, and you can rather easily merge and edit them (something that turned out useful when you notice you tagged half the "Tim/Bart" "Bart/Tim"...). The only thing that bugs me is that with group tags is that there doesn't seem to be an option to just list all used tags, it just shows the most common.

Anyway, besides the fandom (mainly DC art so far) I tried to tag like the dcfic_index for characters, pairings, gen, slash, het, and femslash, sometimes team names in ensemble pictures, and in addition to that included tags like elseworld, and crossover, as well as "animated" if one or more characters were the toon versions. Also if the picture was labeled NWS or clearly showed a sex scene or character pin-up with nudity I tagged it NWS as well. So far there's 280 links, which should be enough for you to check out whether you find this system useful for searching for fanart:
http://www.simpy.com/group/161

Thoughts, opinions anyone?

After over two months of not adding anything to my Batman site (yeah, I suck), I started writing the entry for Detective Comics #785 tonight. I like rereading the issues with an eye for detail and references. I like looking into other comics and to search the net to find references, contradictions, stuff in general. It's a fun (though fairly unproductive) way to spend many hours. You notice things like that Batman's statement in DET #785 that he never fought together with Green Lantern I in Gotham is contradicted by the backup story in Gotham Knights #10, Guardian, which tells a version of their first meeting that shows them fighting together in Gotham (although they are far from at ease with each other then). I learned that the guy in the background of the GL Grundy flashback is called the Fiddler and was a member of the second Injustice Society together with the Sportsmaster, however I couldn't find other references for if/when he worked with Grundy. I mean, I would have never noticed all that without indexing. (It's up to you to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. *g*)

The last days I've managed to add about one comic a day to my detailed Batverse Resource site. So now you can look at detailed descriptions of Nightwing #1-8 in addition to details about Gotham Knights #14-21, if you're interested in where exactly we see Dick's Bat-Logo coffee mug and similar things.

So that now leaves 72 Nightwing issues, 4 Nightwing mini-series issues, three more Nightwing specials, 32 more Gotham Knights issues, about 210 Batman issues (with the, not totally arbitrary, cut-off point of the Year One storyline in 1987 for things relevant to current continuity), about the same number of Detective Comics, 94 Shadow of the Bat issues, 54 regular Birds of Prey issues, about ten more BOP in mini series and specials, 94 of the first regular Catwoman series, 18 in the current Catwoman series, 113 in the current Robin series, about 15 more in previous mini-series and such, 23 Batman Chronicles, 166 Legends of the Dark Knight issues (though I'm not sure whether all of those are part of the continuity), about 40 Batgirl issues, 100 Azrael issues, 30 Harley Quinn issues, Annuals and Secret Files issues for nearly all of the above, the Year One specials, and a couple of mini-series that are in continuity (like Long Halloween, Dark Victory, Family, Joker Last Laugh etc), i.e. easily more than 1200 comics, to go. Not counting the potentially relevant Titans, Teen Titans, and New Teen Titans issues. Those are probably in the hundreds too. *grin*

At least so far I only own about 250 of those comics...

In case anyone is interested in "beta-testing" the fledgling beginnings of the Batverse resource some more (any kinds of comments and suggestions are welcome), I used some of today for data entry (yay for public holidays *g*), and now have cataloged Gotham Knights #14, #15, #16, and #17, a page with all entries for that series is here.

ETA: I'm thinking that I maybe should add a "continuity references" section in each entry, to list specific references to previous events (those that I notice and can trace to their source anyway)...

In a previous entry I noticed that I don't know any Batverse resource that cross-references character/canon details with the comic issues, or character biographies that cite the source for every fact they collect.

Now the scary thing is, that I'm seriously thinking about starting such a site, that is at least to give it a try. Obviously the site would start very small and not that useful, but on the other hand, because I've only begun to read and collect the Batman series it might continously grow as I read the issues, and I don't have a massive re-reading backlog yet that has to be entered, as long as I'd really update the site with any relevant Batman title I read. So at the beginning it would be very incomplete, but after all general character overviews and complete series and character appearance indexes already exist elsewhere, it's the connection between the character details and the comic issues that I'd like to see somewhere.

So last night I've pondered the best way to structure and maintain such a site to make it flexible, expandable, searchable and easy to update as it grows. I guess theoretically the best long term thing would be to create a customized database with a sound structure and then have php scripts that create and format whatever kind of output one wants from that database. However I have no time or inclination to write a sort of php/database application that is ideally suited for the task of organizing comic canon for the web. The other extreme, to create and update every page manually with each additional comic is also impractical. It might be the easiest for a few comics, but as soon as a few dozen comics are involved it would become unwieldy fast.

The main problem is that I know I won't update a site if each update has to be some massive effort in formatting and cross-linking, especially not if the aim is to simply sit down after each issue I read and compile some brief notes. That's why I'm so adverse to a completely manual site organization.

Then I thought that maybe a blog system with categories (and the potential for allowing more than one poster) like Movable Type could be set up in a way that was at least usable for such a purpose, perhaps every now and then enhanced by manual creation of some summary info pages. My basic idea so far is something like this:

Every comic would get an entry, all those entries formatted in the same way, with certain "sections" filled out for every comic (like a section for characters so that searches for minor characters for example give as results all entries and thus comics where they appear, though it obviously needs some thought of how to best organize the info), then all relevant categories would be assigned to the entry, for example categories like "Dick Grayson/Childhood" or "Batman/Origin Story", things like that. Categories that help to organize canon/character details in useful sub-sections. Then the blog archives would be set to be based on the categories, so that then someone could click "Batman/Origin Story" and all entries with comics that refer to that would be listed. That wouldn't be the best possible organization, because inside each category the comics would be listed based on the entry date, not based on any internal or publishing chronology, though it might be a possibility to give each entry the original publishing date of the comic, instead of the date the entry is created. OTOH the disadvantage of backdating is that at least in Movable Type the entry won't show up on the index page even if it is new. On yet another hand that way the index page would only show fairly recent comics, and the others would be only accessible through the archives, and the implemented calendar functions could be utilized for publishing date searches/browsing and such.

Still, even if I decided on creating "summary pages" manually every now and then to compile the data in more specific ways, it might still be useful that this way every comic had an entry in the archive, I could link to directly.

I think one kind of category should be the series title, and since for me the main characters of interest are Dick Grayson/Nightwing and Bruce Wayne/Batman, I'd like the categories "Childhood", "Origin Story", "Romances", "Trivia" and something like "Important Character Development/Turning Point" (to mark really central issues for the character arcs) for both of them, but I'm not sure what other categories ought to be there.

So now I'm wondering whether a site design like that would be usable... Obviously suggestions and advice are welcome.

As I research how to proceed with my plan towards world domination getting an overview of recent Batman canon and continuity (heh, the level of difficulty is about the same), I'm accumulating a lot of notes (both paper and electronic) on which stories are published where, what the main events are etc. And of course I continue to promptly misplace or loose them almost as soon as I gathered the information.

So I have decided to post this in my blog, sort of as a "note to self", well a rather public note, but after all there may be other people for whom such an overview might be interesting and more importantly it won't be some obscure text document lost in the unorganized mess that's my hard drive but neatly indexed and visibly posted in my blog, where I can find it.

I don't own most of these comics (yet), so I'm relying on information provided on web sites. My sources are the The Unofficial Guide to the DC Universe, this continuity page, this timeline, this German DC fan page, and information on issues and trade paperbacks provided by various online comic stores.

For now I started with the Cataclysm/No Man's Land time frame.

Corrections are very welcome.

( Overview of how the TPB compare to the single issues. )