The Adventures of Dr. McNews

T-Shirt Photos

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Hastings) — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:39:00 +0000

Hey! Are you the happy owner of a Raptor Bandit Industries (formerly Dr. McNinja's Giftshop) brand t-shirt AND a CAMERA?! If so, you might want to show the internet how effin good you look in said t-shirt. Topatoco has a flickr stream set up to display what our shirts look like in real life, and I would greatly appreciate it if you contributed to this effort.

Please send in your t-shirt photos to help@topatoco.com! If you want to do wild and crazy things in your photo and get moderately more internet famous... well I can only encourage you.

Forum spam

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Hastings) — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:26:00 +0000

The spam over at the Dayfree Press forums is out of control, so I have temporarily locked down the McNinja board. I can't update forum software or install spam blockers on the Dayfree Press site, so we're going to be moving our forums here, all nice and spam free soon. In the meantime, feel free to make use of the Dr. McNinja Facebook group.

Well, ROFL my waffle!

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Hastings) — Tue, 06 May 2008 13:51:00 +0000

As you can see in my enthusiastic grin and hearty "OK" hand signal, ROFLCon was alright with me.
Thanks to Jay "Tron Guy" Maynard for posing for the photo, and for being just a dang pleasure to listen to and chat with. Truly he was the king of MIT for a day. (Never mind that I thought it was going to be at Harvard. NEVER MIND IT)

Also big ups to Randal "XKCD" Munroe, for being an extraordinarily gracious host. Why so extraordinary? Because he let us play in the ball pit in his apartment.

In other news, I have a guest strip up over at The Guest Strip Project! The GSP is a webcomic made entirely of guest strips, and it's turned out pretty neat so far. Since my comic was the last one I saw, I'm eager to see where things go from here.

Finally, let's talk about the shading of Dr. McNinja. The votes are staying pretty consistently close to split down the middle. So here is what I'm going to do. For now, the comic will continue to go on unshaded, at least till the end of this storyline. With Kent and I adjusting to our new schedules, and still dealing with various things regarding our moves, I still don't really have time to do the shading. But I will get to it eventually, at least so that there is some consistency through the upcoming 3rd Dr. McNinja book. I'm going to try out a slightly simpler, more sparse method of shading that I think will mesh with our artwork a bit better. And once I've gotten through the whole story, we'll see how I feel about handling the next one. Thank you very much for all of your input! In the end, I think we all agree that we just want an entertaining doctor comic.

A Rickroll Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Hastings) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:59:00 +0000

Hey, did you know I was in Overcompensating like... a month ago? WHOOPS.

Just as Jeffrey has said, you can do your own karaoke mashups of Together Forever and Never Gonna Give You Up, easy peasy. Try it next time! Just go with the rhythm.

Also, I liked Rick Astley after it was originally cool, and before it was cool again. Just FYI.

Wired, Behind the Memes

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Hastings) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:44:00 +0000

I did an interview with Wired, ya'all! They're running a series of profiles on ROFLCon attendees, and ole Crazy Chris the Nightmare Man is interview number one.

I made this immediately after posting today's page.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Hastings) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:19:00 +0000

FedEx be True

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Hastings) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:17:00 +0000

After living in the same dormitory for four years, and the same apartment for three, Kent and I are moving to separate residences in different states by the end of the month. I could tell you why, but you've seen me in a Robin costume, and I think that's the limit for personal information.

I should assure you that we are not leaving on anywhere near bad terms, and I wouldn't have even thought to bring it up, except that I know that people who don't know us would maybe have wondered without my saying so.

The second, obvious thing I should assure you is that this will not affect how you read the comic! It will actually ensure that the comic is more timely and regular. Instead of handing pages back and forth to each other on a daily basis, we're mailing them once a week, doing four or five pages a week till we can do it just once a month. And in fact, we've been doing this for the past two weeks while Kent was off looking for his new place. So I think the new system is working well.

Anyway, I'm not feeling particularly sappy about this, and I think we're both excited about the new homes we've found, especially since we get to move our drafting tables out of our bedrooms for the first time in our lives, and into separate studio rooms.

Enjoy your weekend! I'll let the shading poll go on till next week, and then announce my decision.

The Shades of McNinja

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Hastings) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:05:00 +0000

As you have probably noticed, (what with those working eyeballs of yours and all) but I have not lately had time to shade the comic. What is surprising to me is that I've gotten no complaints about this, but actually emails and forum comments suggesting the comic is in fact better without the shading!
So I'm putting the decision to you. Do we drop the shading, or do we keep it? Before you vote, let me present my arguments for both sides.

SHADING

Allows me to do some very cool lighting effects with things like lightning, fire, explosions, ghosts etc. It also helps "organize" the images so that it is easier for the reader to immediately distinguish the fore, middle, and background elements from each other.

NO SHADING

The shading takes me a long time to do, and this is time that's taken away from the actual drawing of the comics. If you particularly like the artwork of the recent unshaded artwork, this is why. I have been taking a much longer time to draw the pages, and have managed to draw effects that normally I left to the shading. I have also worked harder to better contrast black and white, so the shading is not needed to make out what's going on. Also, some people prefer the tone the pure black and white art brings to the comic. It makes the art more "serious" which makes the comic funnier in contrast.

Ultimately it comes down to just which you prefer more. I'm happy to go either way, which is why I'm leaving the vote to you.

LET YOUR HEART DECIDE! And feel free to elaborate on your opinion in the forum.

EDIT: Poll now closed. Final votes: Shaded: 3527 Unshaded: 3286

Some recomendations I've been putting off

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Hastings) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:48:00 +0000

Do you like little piggies dressed up like Sherlock Holmes, Nazi bunny rabbits, and a dead hamster head that just keeps dripping blood EVERYWHERE? (I do.) Then you may wish to peruse The Slightly Askew Adventures of Ham and Eggs, from the creative talent that also brought you Jesus Hates Zombies.

Another awesome comic is a breath of fresh air (oh you'll see what I did there), because it's the first environmental activist entertainment I've enjoyed since Captain Planet and the Planeteers. It's DA BEAVER and he's riding a BIKE because the BATMOBILE depletes our natural resources! Take THAT.

The McNews is back!

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Hastings) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:00:00 +0000

Greetings, doctor fans! We've spent far too long now only communicating in the tiny space below the comic, and that's just not right. As a result, there has been a lot of news backing up. So I'm going to post every day this week with a new item of note, saving my biggest announcement for Friday.

For today's news, I just found out that Dr. McNinja has been nominated for an Eagle Award!! I am quite honored, and thank you to everybody who nominated our comic. We're up for Favourite Web Based Comic, and you can go and vote, if you like.