So, there is an old saying in Hollywood-

“Everything you have learned in life you will re-use later in life, so don’t forget anything -ever- if you can help it because you might need it later.”

This goes for people, places, props, techniques, jokes- anything… So let’s focus on people for a second.

This is a Guest Comic for the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan by Reinder Dijkhuis by Frank “Damonk,” Cormier who is a former member of the Four-Toon Tellers.

The Four-Toon Tellers

While I have worked in and out of Hollywood for a time, I started in webcomics, online, with a half-a-million other creative people out there. During the time we were all making comics on Keenspace, a small group of cartoonists banded together, creating the Four-Toon Tellers to help promote and distribute each other’s work online.

The gambit worked. Over time, they added a fifth man- John Troutman, their evil nemesis. Now John wasn’t actually their nemesis, but it was fun to pretend. They had their fun, search engines changed encouraging more people to find new comics through them instead of sites like Keenspot. Portal sites like Keenspace were no longer a requirement for gaining an audience and groups like the Four-Toon Tellers were no longer required for keeping it.

So the group dispersed. Never being a part of the official group, I liked to follow their updates and -admit- I was a fan of every comic produced by it’s members. Paul Rouston (who is apparently doing body painting now), Frank “Damonk,” Cormier, Brandon “Scrubbo,” Sonderegger, Joe Nadeaus, and Meagan Quinn (Cormier)… and, of course, John Troutman. My life went it’s own direction and I stopped actively reading webcomics myself. I stopped producing them…

Comicpress

Archives

In the time that I was gone, things changed. The portal changed from Keenspace to Comic Genesis. Modern Tales kept tweaking, Drunk Duck was bought by a film company, and Comicpress was created for WordPress. I never really operated a WordPress site but I kept my eye on Comicpress to see what it could do. I’m glad I did because the original designers of Comicpress stopped supporting the plugin for WordPress. I played with it but never consistently updated anything using this system. I guess it was riddled with problems which is why the project was abandoned. One of the Comicpress designers took up the banner himself and designed Comic Easel. Frumph is a very talented programmer and his code is pretty easy to follow, but he suffers from -what I like to call- “expert-expectations,” from those who use his plugin. We all do it sometimes… We forget people have to learn along the way… We assume they should be able to do a task… So, for as helpful as his forums have been for me, sometimes I’m just left scratching my head as to how to get it to look right.

My most recent head-scratching moment was when I was stuck trying to figure out the character pages for Life of Glych and No Stereotypes. Frumph’s code allows for an automated list to be generated with interesting information like the first appearance and a description… but “out of the box,” the code doesn’t display any image or ability to upload an image to show up. I scoured the internet, I came across an obscure reference to the problem on the ol’ Comicpress website in the comments that pointed me to Mary Elizabeth’s Sock and I had pulled some code off of the website using Chrome’s developer tool (Thanks AJ!).  But it didn’t make much sense to me at the time, as I haven’t dabbled in CSS for over 2 years now… So I gave up… I look up at the creator of the comic for hope, a prayer that this person might help me…

…And it’s John Troutman… Huh? I wonder if he remembers me from Keenspace?

Photo of John yanked from the Internet.

The Ever-Ready Troutman

Now, I had lost contact with him over the years. I knew he wrote more than he drew these days and studied English at college… I had heard he became a teacher in Phoenix  Az, but I didn’t know anything more than that. It was crazy that he’s still plugging away at comics! And I’m blown away.

*types, tappity, tap tap, tip tap, types*

Help me Obi-John Kenobi, you’re my only hope.. No… That’s not right.

Erases…taps. Hmmm…

Hi John-

Long time no chat. I had a quick question about comic easel you had solved on your site and was just wondering if I could pick your brain. I pulled this from your site using Chrome’s web developer tool:

Ah those are done with CSS, say for example your characters name is “Monkey Todd” .. and the slug is monkey-todd, well the css element to use to add the picture to the casts page is .character-monkey-todd { } so .character-monkey-todd { background: url(‘/images/bios/monkey-todd.jpg’) no-repeat; }

<div></div>

media=”all”

.cast-pic {

float: left;

width: 150px;

height: 150px;

background-color: #cedfe3;

border: solid 1px #282828;

-moz-box-shadow: 0px 1px 2px #000;

-webkit-box-shadow: 0px 1px 2px #000;

-khtml-box-shadow: 0px 1px 2px #000;

box-shadow: 0px 1px 2px #000;

}

.character-basil-flint {

background: url(‘http://maryelizabethssock.com/images/cast/basil.png‘) top center no-repeat;

}

My question-

Did you have to hand-add in each character image or were you able to upload them with the character page?

Thank you for your time and attention. Hope all is good in your neck of the woods.

Heya, Amber!  I was kind of a guinea pig for Easel, so I know the ins and outs fairly well.  While empty boxes for each character’s portrait pop up automatically as part of the [ cast-page ] code, each portrait does have to be defined individually.  I first created a folder entirely outside of WordPress on my server (/images/cast/) and uploaded all the portraits to it.  Then I defined each portrait using the following code in CSS:

.character-amanda-beaumont {

background: url(‘http://maryelizabethssock.com/images/cast/amanda.png‘) top center no-repeat;

}

.character-andie-thompson {
background: url(‘http://maryelizabethssock.com/images/cast/andie.png‘) top center no-repeat;

}
.character-basil-flint {
background: url(‘http://maryelizabethssock.com/images/cast/basil.png‘) top center no-repeat;
}

Etc, etc.  Obviously, each “.character-name” part refers to the character’s tag in Easel.

I hope that helps!

Ding*

And thus my problem was solved. Still a bit of hand-coding, but not nearly as bad as I had figured. It took some stumbling, but I finally got all of the images working now for the two character pages. So, to John Troutman! You’re an unsung hero, son, and I salute you! Thank you!

You can view the working character pages for No Stereotypes and Life of Glych here.

I can’t give him money to pay him back. But what I can do is point out his Facebook page and how awesome his work has become over the years. unlike me, all of his archives are available online and are completely linkable from his site. So go, check it out, be amazed, come back and wonder what the hell you were doing here in the first place, then go back and continue your amazement. Also, funny writing and good storytelling. So there.