QTMC presents: Quick Time Moral Tales.

I came to a conclusion recently. It was one I struggled against my own entrenched preconceptions to avoid. But there is no way around it, I now realise. You, my dear, dead sexy readers, who have been scientifically proven to have the hardest of asses and the silkiest of hair, are not going to be satisfied with me posting my stupid doodles in comic form every couple of months. You're not going to keep coming back, and gifting me with that which I crave most of all on this earth: more clicks. So, in a desperate attempt at pulling your mouse pointers in my direction, I hereby am proud to announce a new, and very special feature to my little blog I keep hidden away in the internet's basement. I mean, the fact the you've even found it, proves that you are a sleuth on par with Batman himself.

Anyway... QTMC and its creator, me, are proud to announce Quick Time Moral Tales. That's right, from now on I will actually write stuff on here, and not just dripfeed you the comics I provide you with far too seldomly. Quick Time Moral Tales will mainly consist of stories that have accumulated in my warped mind during nearly two and a half decades of video gaming. This bi-weekly feature will occasionally contain illustrations by me, Hjels, your humble servant, and to kick off, I will take you on a tragic and oddly metaphysical journey to the world of Harvest Moon, and a piece I call "Harvested: A tale of love, loss and daily produce."

Look forward to that sometime between christmas and new years, and keep checking back for the comic, which I will release as soon as it's ready.

Did anyone else get caught in that temporal anomaly? No? Just me?

Whoa.

So there I was, minding my own business, slaving over a hot sketch pad, trying to work on the comic you, my handsomest readers where patiently waiting for, when all of a sudden, my room evoporated into a festival of colour and light. I felt like I was pulled through a tunnel of truth, like my very soul was cought in the changing and merciless currents of time itself. It lasted only a moment, but when I regained consciousness, two whole months had passed, leaving you, my stunningly gorgeous audience in the dark as to what was taking the strips so long.

What's more, it seems my sketches must have been eaten by a temporal dog of some kind. A big one!

.......

Alright, fine. I'm just lazy. But despair not, QTMC is still alive and, if not kicking, then at least shuffling along. 7 is still coming up, and I appreciate your patience.

You sexy thing, you....

Back in the hamster wheel

Just a quick update this time, I'm afraid.
I'm back from vacation, and working on the strip again. (When are you ever not on vacation, Hjels?) Number 7 is taking a while, as those who follow this blog will know, but it is still coming, and wihtout promising too much, I think that this is going to be something special.

Struggling a bit with getting the model for one of the characters right, let's call him Adam J. No, that's too obvious... A.Jensen. That's the one. (Well done, Hjels. Is your next strip called "Who shot mr. Burns"?)

Anyway. Long story short; strip, work, will be done, something special....

The Process

I often get asked; "Hjels, exaclty what kind of unholy sorcery do you use to conjure forth the images in your comic strips?" I'm just kidding, I never get asked that. Some times it feels like no-one even cares. Like I can be in a crowd of people, and still feel like that last man on earth. Not nothing I do matters to anyone else in the slightest. Who would know it if I vansished off the face of the world tomorrow? Who would care? God, I'm so lonely, I...

*Ahem*

Where was I? Ah yes, the process. How is my comic strip created, what steps go into forging the hilarity (or at least, relative mirth) of QTMC? Well, my friend, in case you are interested, let me walk you through it. If you're not, I don't blame you. Just go. There are probably several cute kittens on the internet you haven't seen yet.

Still here? Sweet

• Step the first

It all starts with a pen, and a sketch pad. I do have a decent tablet, but after trying it for a while, I found that I missed the tactile feedback of a good, old-fashioned ink-filled sylinder against paper. I am self-taught, meaning I don't really have a process for getting the proportions of my models right, which again leads to more trial and error than neccesary. But that's the way it is. 

• Step the second

With the ink sketch done, the analogue part of the process is over. From this point on, everything happens on my computer. I start by scanning the sketch into Photoshop Elements. (I don't have the cash for the proper one, but I make due) This scan is usually pretty rough, and need alot of cleaning up, as the example below shows. Notice how I missed the shoulder, and had to draw over it to get the proper proportions on Marston's body.

• Step the third

I now go to work cleaning up the model, making sure to remove any lines that do not belong, and completing those who are not long enough. In this case, I realised that I hadn't drawn enough of Marston's legs, so I had to extent them in PS. 

• Step the fourth

At this point, I'm ready to start colouring. I do this by selecting the parts of the model that fit together, and create one or more seperate layers for each of them giving me the chance to create the shadow effects. The vest, for example had two, the hat had two, and the skin had three. Using this technique makes the colouring process prett easy, but it also makes it easy for the shadows to become disjointed from each other, because I deal with such isolated areas in the model. 

  

                                                              

• Step the fifth

With the colouring done, I move onto the home stretch. I very rarely draw more than one model on the same page, unless they are directly interacting. Instead, I do each one seperately, and compose them together in PS. The backgrounds are screengrabs from the games my comics depict, since I'm not a good enough "draw-man", (I'm afraid I can't use the word artist) to do it properly myself. I apply filters to both the charactes models and the backgrounds to make the aliasing between them appear less stark, and I finish the whole thing off by adding captions and speech bubbles. Then I repeat the process for all the panels. 

The logos I use for each of the strips are meant to ape the logo of each individual game. This means, I have to hunt down the font used in the games logo, and find a way to ape the layout, to create a familiarity. I find that having named my comic Quick Time Moral Choice, I get alot of lee-way, when doing this, because has enough letters to fit most the names of the games I've done so far. God help me if I ever do one for Rage or SiN or any other game with few letters in the title. 

So there you have it. Simple really. I wouldn't recommend this process to anyone else, because it is highly personalised to the way that makes me feel comfortable. But I hope you've gotten something out of this post at least. 

Stay tuned for 7.

An augmented future

So 7 is now officially in the works. And you know what that means; I'll get to it eventually. For the second time, I will be moving away from the world of Mass Effect, and onto strange, uncharted territory. And for the second time, I leave it to you, my incredibly intelligent and beautiful readers (seriously, have you lost weight?) to crack my astonishingly subtle clues as to what corner of video game absurdity we shall be exploring next.

I give you the QTMC 7 logo:

I mean, what kind of tier one mastermind could solve this puzzle? Can you? I mean, I made the thing, and I barely know. Stay tuned.

QTMC #6

Aaaand, here it is... My quickest turnaround from conception to finished product yet, and maybe a promise of  more frequent updates in the future. Maybe.

In the mean time, I hope you enjoy it. As always, I'd love it if some of you could leave me with a comment or two? Please? Just one?

I'll dance for you...

QTMC #6 coming along, and... something else...

So I thought I'd give a quick update in the wake of the fifth strip getting cancelled in an unexpected turn of empathy. The next strip, though still as juvenile but not as tactless as the cancelled one, is coming along nicely. I just finisehd the inking, and all that remains is the colouring in photoshop.

Which I hate. That's why these things always take so long.

I've got news for the Miranda fans out there though. Oh, man, you're gonna get a kick out of this...

You favorite, sultry Cerberus operative... will play no part in QTMC 6.

(-What a dick you are, Hjels.)

Tali will though. You guys like Tali, right?

Anyway, hope to have it on the blog in the near future. Oooh, and I almost forgot. On twitter I promised a little teaser for my latest, non-QTMC project. So it is with great pleasure that I give you the raw, uncleaned penned drawing of my upcoming, one-shot webcomic "One more year":

 (-Hjels, what the hell is that?)

That is a shoe.

(-I can tell...)

More than that, that is the shoe of the main character.

(-A story about shoes... I'll be sure to read that...)

Excellent! I hope the rest of you will, too. I'll have a new, seperate blog up, once I've made more progress on it. For now, QTMC 6 should be right around the corner.

Strip number 5 has been cancelled.

In light of the tragic events in Oslo and on Utøya, Norway of July 22nd 2011, I will immediately suspend work on Quick Time Moral Choice #5. The reason for this is the theme of the strip could, in the aftermath of yesterday's senseless attack, be construed as making light of the notion of terrorism, something that was never my intention. It holds no direct allusion to the events of yesterday, or any other such cowardly action, nor is there any violence in it, but rather than releasing something that could be seen as poor taste by some, I will instead probably never realease it.

I do recognise my own inherent hypocrisy in this whole affair. After all, this is not the first time terror has struck, neither will it be the last. I freely admit that though I concider myself an empathic person, the arrival of terror on my native soil has personally hit me harder than other similar events of the past. For this I apologize.

This will not be the end of QTMC, though. I will continue to try to make people laugh, which is my sole objective in this project. But a strip titled number five will not see the light of day.
 

Back from holiday

Hey, do you remember about three weeks ago, when I posted, saying that I would try to have number 5 ready by the end of my vacation? You do? Do you also want to hear a funny story?

Yeah, that didn't happen...

Not the vacation, mind. That definetly happened. And I had a marvellous time, should you care. Don't worry, I know you don't. Bad news is that the strip is STILL not done. Good news, that the sketches are actually done, and only the soul-sucking tedium of cleaning them up and colouring them in Photoshop remains. Further bad news, I hate this part. So there you have it. I'm back to work again, to gift my readers with a smile or a snigger, or dare I dream, an actual chuckle.

Delays, delays, delays.

Man, am I slow at this. I haven't finished the strip I said I would finish, and for that I apologize. Part of the reason for this is my terminal laziness, but the other parts are the fact that I work full-time during the days, and that I am currently writing a script for a book. (The worn, torn pages of which will probably be found a few weeks after my death, unpublished, nearly done, but scattered about with no page count, meaning that any attempt at actually having it posthumously published will be a fool's errand.)

Anyway, I digress. I shall soon go on holiday, and hopefully, I will actually finish number 5 during that time.

And to kill time during what must be an agonizing wait, here is Luca Toni:

Mambo number 5

Alright!

It's Mass Effect again. I was working a little something from a more fantasy-flavoured part of BioWare's catalogue, but Mass Effect is such a treasure trove of potential humour. At least I hope so.

I'm trying to draw a krogan for this one. It's hard. But I think qtmc 5 will be something special. Just you wait.

Quick Time Moral Choice #4

I told you.

I told you there'd be cowboys. I'll be honest, and say that this one stayed in the pipeline for a long time. (Red Dead Redemption, Hjels!? Get with the times, grampa!)

But since I had been working on it for a while, I decided to finish it, even though looking at it now, I can say that I feel it is the least of my works on this little web-comic project of mine. But I am still quite happy with the outcome. As you can see, I am still trying to lock down the style of QTMC, and I wouldn't hold my breath for any greater consistence to my drawing any time soon.

When I'm happy with it, I'll stick with it, dang it!

Anyhoo; QTMC #4, for your viewing (and hopefully laughing) pleasure.

By the way, I shall start work with #5 almost immediately, and we'll be going back BioWare's games again. Not telling you which one, though.  

Almost there...

Two panels down, one to go.

Not to sound like a douchebag or anything (he said before doing exactly that), but this one is coming along nicely. Please note that there will be just a wee bit gore in this one, so if you are especially sensitive, make sure you only read it while partway covering your eyes.

Teasin' number 4

Yes, yes, y'all.

QTMC #4 is actually in the works, believe it or not. And for the first time, we'll be moving away from the world of Bioware, and into a new frontier. A frontier with cowboys in it! As is my new policy, I will not give you a release date, since I can never meet it. Ever.

But to kill the agonising (I'm sure) wait, here is a little competition: Who can guess what game is the basis for QTMC #4? Here are a couple of subtle hints.

I know. Practically impossible, right?

Quick Time Moral Choice #3 (really!)

"Whoa, dude!" you might say. "What's up, bro!?" you might continue.

And I would understand exactly where you are coming from. Well, here it is, children. I promised you a new strip in august, and I have duly delivered!

...in April the following year...

Now, I will not get defensive, and try to defend my lack of updates, other than to reiterate the fact that I am a lazy, lazy man, and leave it at that. And I will not make any more concrete (and empty) promises like last time. I will only attempt to make these appear more frequently. (Less frequently is hardly possible, am I right?)

Anyway, here is QTMC #3. Hope you enjoy it.

Thanks by the way, to @killjoi (that's twitter, kids) for helping me do a last minute re-write.