A quickie tonight. One of the forums I frequent has been ragging on CAD a lot recently thanks to its recycled artwork and annoying habit of explaining punchlines beyond the point of them being funny. In light of that, and knowing that I've drawn things out too long in the past, I'm trying to make an effort to do some more direct strips. Ideally, I'd like to get to the level of succinctness you see in Perry Bible Fellowship, Brevity, or The Far Side. All you ever need in a joke is a setup and a punchline. Comics like Brevity and The Far Side can be so short because they rely heavily on your pre-existing knowledge to provide the setup and they just need to provide the punchline. Mechanically, it's hard to approach that level (and that's why these guys get syndicated), but it certainly won't hurt me to pick up some ideas from them.
     Nothing huge is going on right now. Work is taking me into new programming areas. I'm now learning to write applications for cell phones via the J2ME platform. It can be frustrating, but when you see code you wrote running as a real application on a handset it can be pretty exciting. I'm not that familiar with cell phones in general ... I've only had mine for about 2 years now, and it's an N-Gage QD. It's not exactly an amazing piece of hardware (I got it for the "it's free kitch" factor). Thankfully I have a work-issued cell phone that serves as my target platform instead of having to mess around with my own device.
     Brawl comes out next week, so I think I'm going to push myself to try to get another strip up here over the weekend since I will be otherwise occupied during the week. If I don't make it though, don't be surprised if you don't see an update until late next week!