I am so incredibly caught behind with my commissioned artwork that I decided to make today’s comic a bit simpler – a brief, one-paneled comic with a silly idea for a joke that popped into my head so that I could finish it early and get some work done on my other responsibilities.

Funny thing is that I ended up making a big fuss over all the little details, the layout and finally making sure that in the midst of all the visual information that’s crammed into today’s single panel everything could be seen and understood exactly the way I wanted to. What can I say? I’m a graphic designer! I’m supposed to worry and obsess over these details!

The main problem was that I probably went a bit overboard with the ninjas in today’s image and they ended up becoming a distraction. Ever since I started inserting the ninjas in the comic my intention was for them to be something in the background, something additional that you can check out and enjoy if you decide to stay a while and look at the comic for more than a second or two. But after stuffing today’s comic with 12 of them I realized that when you looked at it your attention was drawn immediately to them and they were even making a joke as simple as today’s difficult to understand.

Personally, I don’t think the problem is in the amount of ninjas but much rather in the way that they’re hidden. They idea is that they should never just jump out and grab people’s attention, so that they aren’t obvious at a first glance. It’s not an issue of making them difficult to find but more an issue of making sure that at least on a visual hierarchy they’re always secondary.

So anyway, when I finally finished coloring today’s image I realized that the ninja were incredibly distracting and so I spent a whole lot of time trying my best to camouflage them. Eventually, I ended up investing just as much time on today’s comic as I do on it any other day. No time left for anything else.

Nevertheless, I really like this whole “ninja game” I’ve been putting in all the comics during the last couple of months and I plan to keep on doing it indefinitely. I’m sure that they can be distracting or even confusing sometimes, but I also want to think that as time passes I’ll also get better and better at hiding them in the comic. Right now I’d have to ask: would you rather I actually hide them so that they’re difficult to find (thus making it more like a game of finding the the ninja) or would you rather I continue just putting them there, as a sort of decoration in the background? What do you like best? Do you even like them at all? At the moment I’m trying to do both but I’d definitely like to read what people think or have to say about it.

Good hunting;
O

NOTE: I finally discovered what the problem was with all the emails I’ve been trying to send out and never arrive at their destination. As it turns out, the cables that carried the internet into my home had been tampered with and my connection was so incredibly slow that I was having problems connecting to the servers and so emails with attachments in them frequently timed out.

At least, that’s what the technician said when he came and fixed it yesterday.  So if you’ve been expecting emails from me, late commissions or anything of that sort I should be getting myself back on track within the next few days. I’d hate to start 2010 with pending work.