Message from Scott Meyer

Scott Meyer asked me to post this message to you:

I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of you who took the time to go look at my work. Your comments have been very useful, and so overwhelmingly positive as to make me question their authenticity. (Scott told you I was paranoid.)

My web host was, as you're aware, brought to its knees, but don't waste time feeling sorry for them. Having spent a great deal of time on the phone with them yesterday I can tell you they deserve all the punishment you doled out. (The tech support guy informed me that my strips took up 89k, which is "almost a meg.")

Comments

[probabilityzero]

64k ought to be enough for anyone... (sorry...)

[Wayne]

Scott should stick to his original artistic decision even if that means not being syndicated on traditional newspapers. The new medium has arrived and it's called the Internet, and it's the present and future of the media. Sacrificing the authenticity and uniqueness of his work to fit into the old mold just seems like a non-sense to me. Scott should try to negotiate with media outlets that will feature his work on the Internet exclusively.

[Gaby]

Love the mullet-haired boss - more of that please!
Also love the ones where he thinks he's just said his thoughts out loud, and explaining stuff to your kids - the bit about the bees just bragging about how many flowers they visit is genius!
Agree with a previous comment about the fact that it's not easy to go back/forward - a calendar would be a great idea.
In'How to share a film you love with the person you love', the last 2 panels are obviously the same (she holds her head weirdly), but the second is close up, so at least it looks a bit different.
'How to tune people out' is the worst - just the same panel 4 times. It just looks too static. There should be a little body movement at least (just to prove you've made the effort!).

[doodaddy]

I thought the wordiness would bother me... then I read a few. My suggestions is to follow Adam's advice and simplify your panels and words for papers. Let that build to a book deal, similar to The Dilbert Principle. Your work has book all over it. I'm sure you could write a *book* and not just a collection of old comics (again similar to The Dilbert Principle).

It could use the same cheeky satire to mildy pan all the silly help books and relationship "common knowledge" tricks.

I also like the idea of sticking (mostly) to relationship humor. You need a focus to make it funnier.

[mason]

For Scott Meyer,

After having commented that I don't think BI is funny enough to make it into syndication, or even really the funniest web comic I've read, I thought it only fair that I also temper that statement by admitting that I've already added it to my RSS feeds and I've forwarded a link to one of my friends who I think would really enjoy your sort of humor - something I've never done before.

[Stella]

The line "And I hardly ever used to menstruate." is the best. I actually laughed out loud rather than the usual mental titter. There's nothing funnier (or sexier for that matter) than suprise.

[niobedancing]

I didn't even notice Adams was recommending this comic - I've had Basic Instructions on my RSS feed for awhile now, since someone else on Livejournal included it in their top 10 favorite webcomics. I love the strip and hope it does well.

[Malc]

Add my compliments to the pile, Scott, I love the strip.
I don't agree that you should take time to alter the shape/format. There's a lot of crap talked about this, and people should note that your web format is the same shape as a Far Side panel, so the problem is what, exactly?
Certainly the size of words in a newspaper is important, so experiment with Photoshop and see if those words are unreadable in a newspaper panel.

Can't see what the fuss is about, and you don't need a mentor to submit your work to a syndicate. You're already on a winner, if it ain't broke, don't fix!

[Crissman]

Two comments:

Get better navigation between strips. I just read ALL of them. A back forward or calendar or something would be great. The oldest are all labelled as July, 2006, although the copyright says 2003.

Store needs work. I couldn't read the t-shirts because the pic was too small, and the text below the t-shirt didn't even say what the t-shirt said. I clicked on a few t-shirt pics to read, but got bored of that quickly.

Oh, and the strips are hilarious! Keep em broad. Relationships is too limited. For instance, I loved the one on How to win at Risk!

[Salagir]

I'm been reading the archives, and the first strips didn't occur to me as very funny. Too much nerdy (do you know how much people stop reading after [1] "lows of physics" ? About 150%! [2]) But it's the week-end and frankly, I have nothing to do with my life so I read all the archive (the navigation system isn't the best, but a geek is talking there... don't care about that)
Well bad idea : now I have about 10 tabs opened on different strips that will be printed on the office shared printer [3] to go in the bathrooms, the best reading place ever since the opening ot fastfoods.
I'm been laughing my ass off [4] on many of them. This is great material (I'm already copying punchlines for my personnal use and look cool in parties [6]).
The only things that.. well suck, is the art. the characters are good, the draw-on-photos-technique works well. But the copy-paste is killing it. When the characters aren't exactly looking at each other, the reader thinks "oh my god this guy uses *cliparts*!!!) and it kills most of the drawing part. The reader wants you to redraw every panel even when not necessary (I "draw" a comic strip [7], I know that too much copy-paste, even a little in fact, make the reader angry). I still don't userstand why, the reader prefers many badly-drawns piscture to 1 or 2 well-drawns and copied.

I think that'd be all for today. Btw, as it's Adams' blog, I just read today's strip on my calendar, and I'm still laughing at Alice face in the 2nd panel.

[1] http://www.geeksworld.org/imgs/webcomics/Frazz/20050304.gif <- this link isn't legal, as Scott Adams himself explained here why some time ago, and I agree with you, but... I'm weak.
[2] source : Leonardo Da Vinci (so overated!)
[3] for personnal use of course. What did you think ?
[4] I learnt this saying, as all my english knowlegde on the internet. Don't blame my english teacher who teached me to say : "My name is Patty[5] ! What's your name?"
[5] Patty is obviously a common English name.
[6] and there's nothing you can do about that ! YARK!
[7] the url is already everywhere in the message, what did you expect ?

[Adam]

If I had any money, I would buy some t-shirts.

[KD]

My biggest advice at this point to him is that he's going to have to change how he shades his comics. He needs to drop the gray scale and start using print tones like manga artists use. I know of at least one drawing package that has them so if he looks he can find them.

I think papers can only do black and white and not gray tones so while it looks nice and he should keep it for his webcomic, it'll definately need changing for print. :\

[Avi]

I realized Mr. Meyers (is that a correct adress?) doesn't neccesarily need to squash down all his strips - they could be Sunday size.

[bill]

After reading all of 2007, i added him to RSS feed and am awaiting the new arrivals. I don't like the change in format, it is too limiting, and while i know you want to get a paper syndication deal. i would -refer a book myself. Way too funny.

[Dave]

Since his web server is finally serving up pages, (I give up after 3 seconds. I'm like that, so deal.) I finally got to look at some of the comics.

I'm noticing one problem. The women are not drawn with the right proportions. Even Beatle Baily's got Ms. Bixly. You can have boobs on a comic character and still get syndicated.

[tpeichel]

Definitely do not focus solely on relationships. I love the strips with the boss in a suit and a mullet.

[Miss J]

Love love love Scott Meyer!

To increase market potential:
I would take the 4 panel strips like in the archives around 2006, and move them into a horizontal panel for newspaper distribution.

I sent my favorite to the fun people(see: those with a sense of humor) in my life. Now all my friends and family know how to wash a cat. (Sept 06)

[Zach]

I finally got to see your comics. They're funny... I like them.

[TaffAndy]

Underground housing? Check these:

http://www.findaproperty.com/displaystory.aspx?edid=00&salerent=0&storyid=0620

[Geoff]

OK, I read everything in the archives...and I couldn't find anything better than the reference to big trouble in little china.

[jakesdad]

not saying your hosting co isn't a bunch of idiots but being in operations for a well-known website (one significantly bigger than dilbert.com) they MIGHT have meant "your files are ~89k" bytes (big "B")- files sizes are normally quoted in (kilo/mega/giga) bytes " - that's almost a meg"abit (little "b") - network bandwith, which was almost certainly your/their bottleneck, is normally expressed in (kilo/mega/giga) bits/second. so 89kB=712kb which is still not quite "almost a meg" even in backwidth terms but may be what they meant.

of course, they might just be morons - I once had "technical support" for my cable modem tell me to "ping yahoo.com" AFTER I had just told them that I was getting no DNS resolution and had isolated a 50% packet loss to the gateway address from my modem.

[Joshua Jacobsen]

Well, that's probably exaggerated by the users (like myself) who went back and read every single comic that you posted on the site. Photocartooning vs cheating. LOLz! I loved that one.

[Lazy Boy]

"my strips took up 89k, which is "almost a meg.""

Time to write that company a cheque for $89.00 and advise them you just sent them a cheque for almost a grand...

Great work! Keep your pH between 6.5 and 5.5 and you'll do just fine.

Lazy Boy

[Andy]

Not normally one for commenting here. I have a few Dilbert books, which were bought for me as gifts. I just ordered a T-Shirt from Basic Instructions. To ship to the UK.
Well done Mr Myers.

[Pamela]

I added Scott's RSS feed to my Reader and look forward to following his future.

Here is another comic you might like:
http://xkcd.com/