Spring Cleaning

As you may have noticed I’ve been moving some stuff around on the site. For one, I’ve replaced the old GR Club robot splash page with one that links to all the major parts of the site. I’ve also added links to the Webtoon and Tapas versions of Antihero for Hire.

Additionally, I put up some older non-comic extra content from ADVENTURERS! on that page.

I’ve also decided to link to the TV Tropes pages since they could use some love.

I’m thinking of collecting at least some of the fanart that exists on the net and at least linking to it in some way. I’m still not ready to have the ones I have sitting on my hard drive since I don’t want to eg, accidentally put someone’s deadname or whatever up on the site, so I’d rather offsite link to individual people’s art profiles.

I’m also planning an update to the AFH cast page adding some of the more notable villains in some form.

Let me know if there’s anything else you think is missing in the comments.

Let me tell you about my Waifu

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No, Sparks is not my waifu. Just my favorite character. She might be your waifu though no judgement.

Just a few things I want to talk about today.

First: Antihero for Hire is now running on WEBTOON! This site is still the main home, but I’ve also started updating it there- twice a week, Monday and Friday at 7 PM ET. It will run one chapter at a time until it gets caught up.

However, one thing I noticed was that the comic looks.. really bad on WebToon. And really kind of looks bad at full screen on mobile devices in general. So I asked around, and got pointed to Waifu2x. It’s an AI upscaling engine designed for animated-style graphics. I’m not quite at that style but it works wonders at making incredibly readable text and sharp graphics.

As an example, here is a comic at it’s original resolution:

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Here is that same comic, at 800px (the widest Webtoon allows):

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It’s pretty dang blurry huh? Well this is that same comic, upscaled using AI:

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Look at that! Mm! Text so crisp it’s like the air in Canada in the winter.

So yeah, the version that I’m uploading to Webtoon is AI upscaled at 2x, then lowered down to 800 (or 700 for some in order to fit in the 20 mb limit). I’ll also be updating the copy on this site over time as I upload the same on Webtoon, but I’ll use the full 2x 900px wide versions here. Enjoy.

Waifu2x is available at https://github.com/nagadomi/waifu2x. There’s an online version here: http://waifu2x.udp.jp/ but that’s one at a time. You can get a windows UI version (the one I used) here: https://github.com/lltcggie/waifu2x-caffe/releases

The image at the top is scaled to 4x, if you were wondering. It almost looks like my original sized art before I scaled down and added text.

You ever make a really great pun and you don't get a single groan this is like that

This bullshit here, I did specifically to get people to pour absolute hate in my direction:

but nobody noticed

Do Your Part: Vote for Rashart/Moondale 2020

I just uploaded the second 2020 update to Antihero for Hire. I’m still experimenting with the format- when to use color, when to use black and white, whether I should use greyscale, how tones work, but I think at least some of the panels, particularly the last panels of both updates, worked very well.

I have also updated my info at thewebcomiclist and topwebcomics, and if you could drop a vote at this link you can take a look at some WIPs for the new updates, 3 year old page-format versions!

As an aside, TVTropes is one of my biggest referrals but most of their links still go through my old site. It’d feel weird updating the entire page myself, so if anyone has a free moment It would be helpful to update either the AntiheroForHire page, the ADVENTURERS page, or a large number of other pages with links to at least the correct pages. The comic pages DO let you anchor to a specific comic but you’d need to use your browser inspector to get the DIV Ids.

I’ve started work on the next update, and I’m going to try to at least get one or two updates a month.

What the heckaroonie is this

So, I haven’t been updating this site for.. years, at this point. Other than occasionally fixing missing or out of order comics. Life got in the way, both good and bad, and I just sort of.. fell off the draw wagon.

Getting back into it has been tough. I always feel like, I don’t have time to waste, if anything goes wrong, if I do it badly. But you know what? Fork that.

I’ve been working on planning stages for ADVENTURERS! 2, and I’ve been doing this:
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New pages/panels of AFH. It’ll probably be more in a ‘webtoon style’ vertical format since it fits today’s reading better. Watch this space. It’s going to get interesting again.