Hello, Mousers!

I’m sorry about the lack of update yesterday. Jenny and I are in the middle of trying to buy a house and it is taking up far more time than I think it should. It seems the world does not like to work simply and these things keep eating into my time.

I will endeavour to have yesterday’s update online today and I apologise for the interruption to the story.

Hello again, Mousers!

Oooh, shiny!

It has been many years since I coloured The Life of Nob T. Mouse by hand. In fact, it has been 11 years. The last hand-coloured storyline was Nasties! back in 1999. When I hand-coloured, I did it with coloured pencils for two reasons: I had no talent at painting, and they were what I had available.

Since the start of series two, I have inked and coloured on the computer but right now I’m considereding going back to basics for a short period, as part of the current storyline. When you see the episodes in question, I think you’ll get what I’m aiming to achieve with this. Until those go online however, I’m going to keep schtum.

Today I drew a quick picture of Nob Mouse, inked it with my trust inking pen (a 0.5mm Unipin Fine Line from Mitsubishi) then coloured it with some Crayola crayons. I was surprised just how well it came out without me having to adjust the levels on the scanner.

When I used to scan the comics on my old scanner, having any kind of waxy colour on the paper meant having to correct for shine. I’m happy to say I don’t need to do that with this HP Photosmart C4780. Maybe it’s because it’s a photograph scanner?

Greetings, Mousers!

I’m sorry it has been so long since I wrote anything of worth here. I really will be trying to remedy that from now on. Maybe then the news and commentaries portion of the site won’t simply be full of apologies for the times when I manage to forget to update the comic.

Keen-eyed readers may have noticed that the comic is 14 years old on the fifth of December. This is a huge milestone for a webcomic and although The Life of Nob T. Mouse has suffered from hiatus on occasion, I can tell you that I am working on a large number of comics to fill the gaps this has caused.

The new series of comics is called The Wandering Years and deals mostly with Nob Mouse’s early life, before he settled down in Blob City. These stories will be uploaded in batches, as and when each storyline in the series is complete, so you don’t have to wait for the next update just to see where the story is going.

The aim is to have the hiatus gap filled by the time the comic is fifteen. If my calculations are correct, we will make it with a few months to spare; which is great because it gives plenty of wiggle room.

On a more immediate note, I spent today working on the archives. Now all the older strips bar three are posted in 900 pixel wide format. This means they are much easier to read. The three comics I couldn’t put up in 900 pixel format are ones I’ve found I don’t have an original copy of, just the smaller version from the website. That means a little extra work for me because I’ve got to re-scan them, then ink, colour and letter them as if they were a new comic.

In addition, I’ve started remastering the Series One stories. The hand lettering I used to use when the comic started is not only looking incredibly dated but it’s damn near unreadable in parts because I inked over the colouring. If any budding webcomic artists are reading this, I can tell you from experience that inking over coloured pencils (or even colour in general) is a bad idea.

I started with episode 7 of Nasties! because I picked a test strip at random and now I’m working my way back, having also remastered episode 8. I’m aiming to have all the Series One stories remastered by the comic’s fourteenth anniversary.

I have to say that I’m debating whether to upload the remastered first episode or not. Maybe I should leave the first episode as a testament to how the comic originally appeared online?

What do you think?

Whoops. I set the update schedule wrong and didn’t notice until I was uploading next week’s strips, about five minutes ago. I have now corrected the schedule so Friday’s strip (which was set for tomorrow – I got the date wrong) is now available.

I hope it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience for you.

Luke Healey of the fantastic webcomic Swanny Nook sent me this brilliant picture of Nob Mouse yesterday. I recommend you have a look at his recently-rebooted comic as it is great.

I have to say I like the idea of Nob Mouse wearing shoes with recognisable soles but my own drawings of him lost that aspect years before the comic actually started.