blog.maljones.com

• 2012-12-03

  The Giant War: Not quite ready yet.

  Just another update. We are coming back!

  thegiantwar:

  It is December 3rd, but we aren’t quite ready for the second season of The Giant War. Rather then rush out some quick updates to meet the schedule (which we made up), we want to keep working on making the project stronger.

  We’re looking at what worked (twice a week is the way to go), what didn’t…

  Source: thegiantwar

• 2012-11-26

  Building community is a pain in the butt

  While I was in high school, Warren Ellis started up a thing called the Warren Ellis Forum. It was a Delphi Message Board with a low barrier of entry and a high level of engagement. It had an excellent sense of community, and most importantly, was a destination. We went there to talk. We didn’t expect Ellis or any of the other creators to come to us via our feeds, nor de we think they needed to. It was a big promotion engine for Warren of course (look at the name of it for God’s sake), but it became more than that.

  I’m sitting here planning out the next phase of The Giant War, and I’m just wondering where those hubs of conversation happen now. Facebook has become the default stand-by, but it’s effectiveness wavers from week to week (and with recent changes has hit a sudden downward slope). Twitter is good, but the signal-to-noise ratio is so high that I have very close friends that had no idea that I had been doing an online comic since March 2012. But that is all a passive experience…. you wait for me to tell you something. You don’t actively look for it.

  So where do we all go to talk? Where do we go to engage in conversation? My knee-jerk answer is The Bar or The Couch. Which are not online, and which forces me to think about a few things.

  I’m going to be doing some virtual pavement pounding over the next month and in to 2013 when the new arc really kicks off, so this shit is going to be on my mind. 

• 2012-09-24

  

  Last week we decided to start updating The Giant War twice a week (which is apparently called semi-weekly).

  I was already laying out pages that had a natural mid-page break for reading on screen, so why not fully commit and actually split the page in to two updates. It’s not like I’m not already doing the work for it and it ups the frequency of releases, which could (should… will hopefully) lead to more readers. We want to keep it simple (a goal of The Giant War is to stay out of our own way), so the page dimensions still are the same and eventually when it’s printed I won’t have to do a ton of reformatting.

  I need to point out that Warren’s post on the Shape of Webcomics a few months back stuck this in the back of my mind. Since then I’ve just  been looking for a natural place to make the change. As we shifted from the one-off strips to a more linear period of storytelling, the opportunity presented itself.

  So now you can get your Giant War fix semi-weekly! Mondays and Thursdays at http://thegiantwar.com.

  Yes we got an actual domain as well. I still can’t believe it was available.

  Source: thegiantwar

• 2012-07-05

  

  First up: A call for support (and I don’t mean money).

  We’ve been going strong for 15 weeks now, and are planning to keep on going for at least a full year. I hear from folks that you’re reading and enjoying it, but we’d love to see those numbers in notes, tweets, reblogs, and some general internet support.

  The internet is made up of connections and we need to make more.

  • Enjoying The Giant War and have Tumblr account? Follow us and tell your followers by reblogging the latest episode..
  • Enjoying the episodes when I post them on Twitter? Tweet about the comic (with a link of course) with the hashtag #thegiantwar
  • Enjoying it in general and don’t want do any of those things? Drop us a line and let us know. 

  Thanks and we appreciate it everyone.

  And now! On to the notes:

  Episode Notes

  • The Weathered Man returns! I think that just leaves the Nomad in need of an update. 
  • Note to Future Jones: I think I need to tighten up the line height in the lettering going forward.
  • Giants aren’t the only bad guys in the world. Fact.

  Source: thegiantwar

• 2012-06-08

  

  Episode Notes

  • He made it out of his troublesome spot thanks to the Nomad.
  • I redrew the Solider for each panel. Past Jones would’ve just drawn him once and photoshopped him into each panel. Good job Current Jones!

  Source: thegiantwar

• 2012-05-29

  

  Episode Notes

  • It’s the brothers and sister from Episode One. Now we know what they were tracking.
  • Proper planes just get swatted out of the sky by giants, but the ultralights are more like annoying flies then giant mosquitos. They let the crew get closer for attack runs. 
  • I’m using an already limited palette, but I seem to be settling in on a few dominant colors these days.

  Source: thegiantwar

• 2012-05-16

  

  Episode Notes

  • Almost didn’t get this one in. I was out of town a lot last week for the Day Job and to visit Mom and Dad. I guess getting the update done under the wire makes me an official webcomicer.
  • The riders are not giants.
  • I’ve always loved the style of sound effects as speech. Comics everybody!

  Source: thegiantwar

• 2012-05-07

  

  Episode notes:

  • Our lead this week has on a spin on Moebuis’ Starwatcher’s outfit. He passed away recently and the comic world is a little bit dimmer because of it.
  • And suddenly we’re revisiting places from earlier Giant War episodes. Continuity!

  Source: thegiantwar

• 2012-04-29

  

  Workin’ an homage to Moebius in to some Giant War

• 2012-04-26

  

  We’re five weeks in at The Giant War. If you’re following the story on Tumblr, do me a favor and like this post. I just want to see how is actively out there.

  Episode notes:

  • This is one of the original stories that sparked the whole Giant War idea.
  • Yes, she has Tank Girl’s haircut as grown up.
  • It’s not a Mal Jones drawn project unless I work DC in there somehow (that’s the Metro in panels 2 and 3).

  Source: thegiantwar