This silly thing will post at 10am Pacific time each weekday from April 9th through April 13th, at least for the first “run.” There will probably be more, later, but I’m not making this into a formal project with a set schedule.

Yet.

When I started Quacked Panes I saw it as a way to tackle my leftover depression and growing ennui. I still felt out of place at my job, I missed my old job something fierce, and I felt that maybe I’d accomplished everything I would in this life already, so why bother trying? Clearly this was an attitude devoutly to be got the hell rid of.

So, did the comic help?

I struggle, most Mondays and Thursdays, to come up with the next comic. It’s a chore. I wrack my brains. I jostle the camera while taking a shot. I screw up the lighting. I realize after the fact that I probably used the wrong duck or didn’t give them a distinct-enough voice. And it’s not as if my traffic numbers reflect any great Internet success story.

However… this comic archive represents a body of consistent, creative output. Barring one technical glitch with the webserver itself a few months ago, I’ve yet to miss a scheduled update over most of three years. Nobody will mistake it for high art, but I earn a few laughs once or twice a week (on a good week). I learn something new every month. People send me ducks! How cool is that?

I considered giving it up, a couple months ago. “I’ll finish out Year Three and call it done,” I said. Today, however, I don’t believe that would be a good idea. I need the outlet and the challenge. I enjoy trading snarky comments with my core group of loyal readers. I like being able to claim a really silly hobby when people ask, “What do you do for fun?”

Don’t act so surprised. As if you didn’t know me for an iconoclast.

• ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas – The rewriting! The props! The walls of text! The staging! Not this year, not on this year’s budget. Sorry.
• Another rendition of The Twelve Ducks of Christmas – It’s a schtick that Wonderduck and I have both used, and while it’s certainly easy and amusing and gives lots of room for creativity, I just felt like I’d “done” that one too well the first time to give it another go.
• A running series of joke comics about how we’re all scrambling to get a Christmas thing “done” and then we run out of time – A bit meta, don’t you think? (And now I’ve ruined this idea for next year if I get really strapped for ideas. Whoops!)
• Another rendition of The Quackvent Calendar – At first I threw this out for the same reason as the Twelve Ducks… But. What if I came at it another way? I pondered this, then inspiration struck, and…

Starting Thursday, appropriately enough both a normal comic day and the first day of December, I’ll be running one “poster” comic per day, every single day, right up until Christmas when we’ll have a traditional all-cast poster. (Is it too early to say that I’m thoroughly pleased with how this year’s poster shots came out? No? Good!) You’ll even get a comic the day after Christmas, it being a Monday and all.

(I must really like you people, or something.)

You’ll suss out the theme of this year’s Quackvent quickly enough, I figure…

Also? The chessboard is an idea I wish I’d had most of two years ago. I love the texture it brings to the table (har har) and that it elevates the set enough that I can get a closer, better angle on the shots. I could’ve achieved the same angle by lowering the tripod, but earlier experiments along those lines on the original desk surface didn’t come out very well at all.

I’m still working on a new backdrop, however. That gray cardboard thing must go. My vague idea so far is something involving curtains, which is to say some kind of hung fabric. I know that’ll end up obscuring the “gallery,” but in reality that would help tremendously; I have a “thing” about covering the faces of the ducks up on the shelves, which leads to some awkward bubble placements on occasion. (You’ll note that sometimes I end up covering faces anyway. It can’t always be helped. I agonize over it every damned time, though.)

At any rate: Full steam ahead. Enjoy, won’t you? (And tell your friends…)

So… does anyone else want to take a crack? Fame and webcomic immortality await you…

How about doing some webcomic remixes?

Which is to say: If you think you could put dialog into the mouths of rubber ducks, and you have a particular Quacked Panes comic (or two) that you’d like to use as a base, what I’ll do is send you a “clean” copy, text removed but word bubbles intact so you don’t have to try to draw your own. (I can strip those out too, if you prefer.) Send me back your results and I’ll use it in a kind of “guest week-or-two” fashion.

It’s almost like I’m a real webcomic guy, soliciting guest strips. Does this mean I’ve made the big time? Does it? Huh?

(Okay, there are guidelines, and they should be fairly obvious if you’ve been around here for any length of time whatsoever. No blatant cussing, no politics, that sort of thing. If you’re not sure about your script idea then drop me a note at GreyDuck [at] greyduck [dot] net and I’ll happily vet it for you.)

Thank you for your time, and thank you for reading.

(Shing’s home was robbed. Talk about one of my deeper fears, right there. Hopefully things get straightened out soon… and that the perpetrators meet a monstrous end. Grrr.)

One of the nifty things this gives me is the ability to add characters on the fly with Webcomic 3′s built-in character management system. Upload an avatar picture, provide a name and a short blurb, and I’m done. Consider how dated the old Cast page is, and… yeah.

If anything looks horribly broken, please leave a comment. Otherwise, enjoy!