A Stray to Botaram updates on Tuesday and Thursday.

Transcript

Title: A Real Beating
(Aun leaps off the pillar with a look of concern towards Chax.)
Aun: Hold on, Chax. Just sit and rest a minute. Let me go find the bandages.
Chax: We were never taught of foes such as these. Why not?
(Aun finds his pack in the remains of the dendrite creatures. He pulls it up; it looks battered and unknown fragments fall from it.)
Aun: Yii, my pack took a real beating!
Chax: Why were we never trained to face them? Did they think us not worthy?

1905

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A Real Beating
Posted on June 5, 2025 by JJA

Road Trip Continues

Posted on May 5, 2025 by JJA

My journey of over 2000 miles is nearing the halfway point. I had enough time to complete a story page this weekend, but I will likely need to fall back on more filler art before I make it home again. One way or another, the story and I will continue our travels…

A Jaunt to Old Haunts

Posted on April 24, 2025 by JJA

I am off tomorrow on a multi-state road trip to visit friends and relations. I will bring my Botaram-creation laptop with me and I plan to continue the story while on the road, but there is a chance that I will have to fall back on filler art here and there. One way or the other, the distant spire draws closer and this strange tale will persist to its end. Thanks for reading!

A Newer Machine

Posted on April 14, 2025 by JJA

The computer on which I am presently composing Botaram is an Asus laptop that was new circa 2016. It is a great little computer and I have been keeping it running one way or another, but it is starting to show signs of its age. Thus, it’s prudent for me to make sure that I have more than one system with the tools I need to create the artwork.

At the same time, I would like to get off the Windows bus before the descent into 11 begins in earnest. Thus I have secured a gently used desktop PC and am in the process of preparing it for its new role as my daily art computer.

MSI Z390, Intel Core i5-9600K, 16 GB, Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti

A key issue is whether I can get Illustrator working under Linux Mint. Adobe is a Linux-unfriendly company and does not make it a trivial task for its software to function under a Windows emulator. My attempts to get it running are going slowly.

A more flexible alternative is to switch from Illustrator to Inkscape, an open source vector drawing tool. I explored a move to Inkscape when restarting the story back in 2024, but at the time I was not successful in importing my working files into it and I decided that it was more important to get the story moving again with the tools that I knew.

Recently, I tried again and after fiddling with some artboard settings I was able to see rendered Botaram pages in Inkscape. I still have some distance to go before I can produce new pages and remaster old pages in this tool, but it’s a promising start.

Meanwhile, my old laptop with its older copy of Illustrator lurches onward…

New Resolution

Posted on January 9, 2025 by JJA

And so we begin again.

Up until now, the new work I’ve done on the comic has been in the past, restoring and upgrading what already existed. Even when creating new art, it has been to replace written story entries that technically had already been done.

With the last two pages, I now resume with moving the story forward. They are the first truly new Botaram material in over ten years.

I am back, and my resolution is to continue this tale to its strange conclusion. Thank you for reading, and for long time readers, thank you for your patience.

Reboot Report

Posted on December 2, 2024 by JJA

There’s been a lot going on since my last blog post, most of it positive.

I have established a routine for the “Remastering.” Alternate open fonts have been selected and as I repost older strips I am outputting them at higher resolution. I also committed to regenerating an older strip at the same time that I repost a newer one, so that the remastery would proceed slowly at both ends of the story. (This bogged down at strip 22 for technical reasons, but I hope to resume it soon.) I am also taking the opportunity to correct old mistakes and try to put the earlier strips into a better arrangement for being published in print format.

After several experiments, I decided not to move to SVG, but to use PNG and upgrade the resolution to 1200 pixels across. This shows as 800 in the site layout but you can see the full resolution by opening the image in a new tab. I am also adding transcripts to each comic. These are for general accessibility, but if you are confused by what I was getting at in any strip in particular, the transcript may also offer clues to what I was thinking. : )

I mentioned three projects that I needed to accomplish to get the story back on track. The first one was to complete the Kollen set artwork so I could rework a significant section of the story; this is now done. The next project is the completion of the Station set where Aun and Chax are going next. The third is for an upcoming destination that will be revealed later.

About twelve years ago, I had run into some trouble in producing the story graphically and I got around this by writing a number of text entries. This did keep things going but I always regarded these entries as a hack that I needed to update and correct. All the text entries are now converted into proper comic pages and the story is now ready for me to continue it from the point where I left off.

To do this without losing the old comment history, I wound up inserting and integrating the new pages with the older pages by using older timestamps on the new material. This has the side effect of making it seem that the comic is not currently updating, but I am almost at the end of the interwoven old and new material that I have to repost and this issue will soon be resolved.

This is where I stand on the cusp of a new year. To new readers, welcome, and to old readers returning, I’m really pleased to see you again. I wish you all the best. I am ready now to tell this tale until its end.

Turning a New Leaf

Posted on January 18, 2024 by JJA

The logjam is broken; I have produced the next page of the story. It seems I have not lost my touch after all this time.

The story is still set to resume on February 26th. I will continue to compose pages so that I have a workable backlog to keep posting on a regular schedule. I ran myself dry and ragged last time and don’t want to repeat this mistake.

I can’t discuss too much of what is going on behind the scenes without giving spoilers, but in general, there are three projects that need to be done for the story to fully move on to its next phase, and I have completed one of them so far.

This first project was the background work necessary to portray the new page that I just made. I have mentioned before that Botaram is somewhat analogous in presentation to a puppet show, with the shapes and characters on invisible supports. Some scenes only require some ground under their feet and some mountains in the distance, and I simply call this a background. When I render the background of the world in deeper detail so that the characters may interact with it, I call that a ‘set’. Over time, the sets have dramatically grown in complexity as I create more details about the world and strive to keep the art varied and interesting within its constraints. The first two of the three projects involve building sets where the story will happen next.

The third project is on track due to the skills, help and encouragement of my partner Hamachisn’t, and it will form part of the backbone of the story’s next major segment.

Apart from these concerns, there are a few technical issues relating to how the comic will be presented henceforth. The story got its start in GIF format, with images 530 pixels wide due to the space constraints of my old art blog, pageatatime.com. Times have changed, and I plan to upgrade the graphics and resolution as well with a move to SVG format. None of these details will stop the story from moving forward.

That’s all I have to report for now, I will provide additional status updates when there is more to say. Thank you very much for reading!

Status of the Dig

Posted on January 4, 2024 by JJA

The first phase, that of locating and ordering my working documents for the story, has gone well. A mass of written and hand-drawn notes had gotten misplaced during a move, but I had the foresight to scan them and so nothing significant has been lost there. I also have multiple copies of my text file of notes for the story, as well as the working files.

Botaram is composed mainly in Adobe Illustrator, the tool I’ve used for most of my working life as a graphic designer. My tangram / puzzle piece approach to the art has led to most of the working files looking like sprawling jigsaw puzzles in progress. I am sifting through these at present and looking for clues for what I had in mind at the time. It has been both fruitful and somewhat frustrating, but I am confident that I can resolve the prior issues and get the story back on track to its very strange conclusion.

I plan to start posting entries again in February 2024. Some of them will be repeats for those who may have read the story before, so I ask for your patience as I recover my stride. Thank you for taking the time to read my odd little tale.

What a Short Strange Strip

Posted on December 25, 2023 by JJA

I’ve been away a long time, a reintroduction is in order.

This comic was the labor of my heart for a number of years, stretching between 2006 to 2014. There were a number of factors that led me to cease work on it, but from a storytelling perspective, the primary reason was that the plot was being sidetracked. I had a goal for the story that required certain things to happen, but I was not succeeding in getting these rendered and the work I needed to do so seemed daunting, and so I engaged instead in a certain amount of creative worldbuilding. This was fun but was not advancing the story where it needed to go. At a certain point, I felt I had written myself into a corner and was blocked on how best to continue, and once I stopped updating regularly my feelings of guilt and shame conspired to keep me from returning to it.

To give it the best chance of restarting successfully, I have rewound the story a bit while I consider the best path to take next. After almost ten years, it is a task akin to sifting through an archaeological site; when I stopped work on it I laid my tools down haphazardly and wandered off, and it is not always clear to my time-fogged brain what I intended to do with them. I still have all of the working files and notes I made, but they are a skeleton of what was going on in my mind at the time, and I need to do some work to reconstruct the flesh upon these bones.

I am also no longer the person I was ten years ago. I wish I had the ability to speak to him directly, not to tell him that everything would be all right (true in some ways but not others), but perhaps to give him some better way to face what he was going through, and help him to appreciate what he had while it still enriched his life.

For better or ill, I now take up his torch again. He had a power that I hope once more to make my own.

Botaram is returning.