Yes, I did say "comic"

The first thing to say is that it is not all my own work, and it is a collaboration with a friend of mine who goes by the hacker alias “Kat”. The work divides nicely with me writing the original scripts, checking them over with her, her drawing what we’ve decided on, and then a final check before inking and scanning them. Then it’s my job to add the colour and any effects, using The GIMP of course. As for the name of the comic, we’ve called it “ChiX0r”, and if I had to describe it in one sentence I would say “It’s a tech comedy, with a serious side.” By “serious side” I mean that it has a point to make, and that there is an on-going plot with character development.

Basically we are going to release the episodes every few weeks, depending on how long they take to create. So far they have taken a considerable amount of work to produce as there is a steep learning curve to producing a quality web comic. As ever, though, people on the Internet have been very helpful, providing tutorials on the Web, and answers to specific queries on IRC, such as in the GIMP channel. Hopefully we have learnt enough to start speeding up the process, but no promises. One thing that will make this slightly easier, though, is that we have already finished 3 episodes, and I have written drafts for 9 of the 13 episodes. On the other hand, our plans and quality requirements are being raised each time.

Next, the technicalities. Naturally, we wanted the comic to be available under a Free license, and after some discussion decided on the GPL. Applying this license to something other than software is a little problematic, but we have prepared a little explanation of our interpretation of its requirements. This is not unheard of, and we were encouraged by the existence of GNUArt. Using the GPL has the advantage that our work is instantly compatible with the huge wealth of Free software, so that we could contain segments of Free software in our scenes, and Free software could contain dialogs using the text from our comics. Of course, the GPL does not put any restrictions above copyright on a work, so just for viewing the comics a visitor would not have to understand or “accept” the GPL at all. A link to the GPL and our interpretation will be made available in the blog post for each comic.

The biggest technicality, then, is probably that I will only be hosting “native” versions of the episodes. That means you will only be able to download the episodes in XCF format from this site. This is a (technically) open file format, so in theory anyone can write a viewer for it. Also, The GIMP itself is cross-platform so if you are stuck for a viewer, use that. Finally, if you are really desperate, get someone with The GIMP to download the image for you and convert it. They are allowed to redistribute the modified version, as long as they include the license and (a link to) the source.

Why the restrictions? Firstly this encourages people to mirror the comic on their own site, saving our host bandwidth costs and encouraging an open community to spring up around it. Secondly it encourages people to use the simple yet powerful Free software of The GIMP. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, by viewing a version with layers we hope that people will be able to understand what goes into these pictures, in terms of their complexity and the procedure for turning an idea into a finished comic. Of course, just seeing the component layers is not enough to give someone a full grounding in creating comics, which is why each episode will be accompanied with an explanation of the processes used and the lessons learnt in doing it. Hopefully this will serve as some sort of tutorial for people creating their own comics, or perhaps just an encouragement to try.

Do you think we’d hide Easter Eggs in the layers?