SVG is a vector graphics format which is similar in structure to the code that makes up an HTML web page. As well as the obvious graphical elements, SVG files often also include text (such as the speech and captions in our comics) and metadata (embedded information about the image – such as the artist’s name, or the license the image is released under). These bits of text should now get indexed by Google.

All our comics start as SVG files created using the free Inkscape application. As we’ve been assiduously inserting metadata into our files right from the start, this should hopefully make it a little easier to find our comics with a Google search.

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The world seems to be going through a phase of fascination with 3D. It happens every few years; “3D week on BBC2″ with a free pair of anaglyph glasses taped to the front of the Radio Times (or, as is often the case, formerly taped to the cover, before being nicked by someone who desperately wants to watch the rare archive footage of The Queen in 3D, but doesn’t want to incur the cost of the magazine in the process).

This time it’s different though. This time the technology companies are getting involved. We’ve moved past the cheap-but-limited world of anaglyph images, beyond even the more colourful but nauseatingly motive Pulfrich effect and into the world of full colour 3D, even for stationary scenes. Cinemas use polarised glasses, the new breed of 3D TVs typically use LCD shutter glasses. There are even some glasses-free technologies – which is likely to work well for the 3DS, but not so well in practice for typical TV viewing where heads tend to move around and programmes are often half-watched while trying to simultaneously read a magazine, complete that urgent Powerpoint presentation, or eat dinner.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of 3D films, just not the implementation. I’ve been to an arthouse double-feature of “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” and “It Came From Outer Space” and loved every minute of the camply over-the-top oohs, aahs and occasional gasps from the “terrified” audience. I’ve got a stack of anaglyph and Pufrich glasses from various promotions through the years. I’ve loved the 3D features I’ve seen at IMAX cinemas. And I heartily believe that the 3DS will be an absolute winner.

But the real me – the one who’s not looking for a short gimmicky experience – doesn’t want 3D in a television. For games, maybe – but not for movies, and certainly not for normal run-of-the-mill TV. The fatigue that sets in after a period of wearing 3D glasses (or of having to sit in a predefined spot) makes it a less-than-appealing feature. It seems that I share this opinion with just about everyone I’ve spoken to, and even some technology journalists are less than enthused.

So if nobody is really all that excited about 3D in the home, why is every company trying to push it? Perhaps they’re all trying to out-feature each others products; one adds 3D, they all add 3D to keep up with the Joneses. And the Sonys, Panasonics and Toshibas. But the cynic in me can’t help but feel that the real reasons are twofold: firstly to make all our HD Ready TVs seem as archaic as last century’s CRTs so that we’ll feel compelled to “upgrade” that little bit earlier than we otherwise would; and secondly to finally add a truly distinctive feature to Blu-ray – after all, it seems that most viewers can’t really tell the difference between high- and standard-definition, so without features like 3D what does Blu-ray really offer that DVDs don’t?

Cynicism and personal preferences aside, 3D is all over the tech news these days. And if there’s a bandwagon rolling past, we’ll do our best to hop on board, take the mick a little, then jump off again. It’s what any good satirical webcomic would do.

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My first idea was for a poster-sized print of one of our comics. I went for an A2 sized copy of “The Edorian Job” which was expertly handled by our old friends at Bluepepper Designs (if you need an independent design and print company and are located in or near to Aylesbury, give them a call). The initial A3 proof showed a couple of issues that had sneaked into our original design, but which don’t show up much at web-site sizes. A tweak to the original file, and a bit of colour correction on their part, and I was furnished with a glorious A2 print a couple of days later.

As great as the poster is, I decided to really shame his forgetfulness with a second present. Something that I knew he would like, and that would also help to advertise The Greys. A T-shirt.

This one took a bit more effort as our comics aren’t really designed for T-shirt proportions. A little jiggering and pokering, however, led to a suitable arrangement of the key parts from “Reservoir Aliens“. I added a web address, and one of our trademark Easter Eggs, then placed an order with spreadshirt.co.uk for a pair of light blue tees – one as the present, and one for me.

So here’s the landmark birthday boy – but remember, he doesn’t like to talk about it – in his nice new “Reservoir Aliens” T-shirt. Happy birthday Vince!

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
— Arthur C. Clarke

It’s often been pointed out that science fiction and fantasy are essentially the same thing. Blasters and photon torpedoes are replaced with wands and spells, spaceships with dragons, and matter transporters with sooty chimneys and more spells. Star Wars blurs the line more than most with its use of The Force which is closer to fantasy than sci-fi (despite George Lucas’s attempt to science-ise it with the woeful introduction of “midichlorians” in The Phantom Menace).

Harry Potter is, to some extent, Luke Skywalker – taken from a mundane existence to discover that he’s destined for greater things. And we’re not the only ones to have spotted this. Of course it’s partly because they both stem from the same kind of story telling that pervades western literature – similar plot points can be found in just about every attempt at an epic story, all the way back to King Arthur, Beowulf and even the bible.

We grew up dreaming of flying swiftly amongst (and probably into) the trees of Endor on a speeder bike. Many younger people have similar thoughts of swooping round a Quidditch field on a broomstick. We just wondered what would happen if our dreams met theirs.

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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A bit of an obvious joke – I’m surprised that I haven’t seen it used on any other webcomic yet – and not quite as topical as it would have been a few weeks ago when we started it. Unfortunately our stock of Flash Gordon characters was pretty limited at the time, so it’s taken a while to draw Prince Vultan, Dale Arden and “war rocket Ajax” in the background. In fact, of the main strip, the only character we already had was Ming, courtesy of “The Unusual Suspects”.

Drawing this strip has involved several weeks of Vince’s Brian Blessed impersonation – enough to drive any man to despair. Yet despite hearing it numerous times over the past few weeks, I’ve somehow managed to suppress the urge to squeeze a “Gordon’s Alive?!” into the Easter Egg.

With our earlier pair of comics (1, 2) and our recent last-minute gag about the reception issues, you might think we’ve got it in for the iPhone. In practice we just go where the opportunity takes us – and Apple has been a good enough to provide us with a few jokes at their expense. It will be someone else’s turn soon enough, but if you do insist on marketing your product as though it’s the greatest creation in the history of mankind, you’re just asking for trouble when people discover it’s less than perfect.

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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The original plan for The Greys, back in 1994, was for a single panel format that we could sell to a magazine. We did have a few ideas for multi-panel gags, but figured that most editors would like a consistent size from month-to-month so that they could just draw a box early on in the layout process, label it as “Greys go here”, and know that at least those few column inches were done and dusted.

This was originally one such single-panel gag. We’d factored space for a title into our design, so this strip originally consisted of nothing more than the last panel (sans Sherlock/Colin) with a title of “The Greys Play Cluedo” (we’re in the UK – “Cluedo” is the board game known as “Clue” to readers in the US). Along with a host of other single-panel gags it lay dormant as nothing more than a line in my 15-year-old list of potential Greys gags, and Vince’s early sketchbook rendering:

That’s where it would have remained, if it was down to me. I’d glossed over it with the same disdain I reserve for many of our other ageing one-liners. But Vince evidently saw something in it that I didn’t, so offered to work it up in Inkscape. Figuring that, at worst, we’d end up with a spare “emergency” strip (the ones we trot out when we’ve got nothing better available and are pushed to a deadline), I told him that he was welcome to work on it if he wanted to. I’m glad he did.

What came back wasn’t the single panel of old, but rather the basis of the five panels you see above. Sherlock had made his initial appearance in the first scene, and the outline of the body populated the middle section. With five panels to fill I quickly realised that the old one-liner wasn’t going to get us very far, but the Sherlock Holmes character provided the inspiration to bring in a classic whodunnit monologue. There was more to do, of course, but the basics were there – and the joke was suddenly a whole lot richer than the throwaway panel in the sketchbook. I wonder how many other potential gems I’ve overlooked from that ageing list…

Another source of inspiration for this strip is the 1985 film “Clue” [IMDB listing] – a generally underrated comedy classic which we both love, and which was itself based on the Clue/Cluedo board game. One of the more distinctive features of the film is that it was released in three versions, each with a different ending, so the identity of the murderer varied depending on where and when you went to see it. If only there were some way to achieve that sort of effect with an SVG file…

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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This is the last in our trilogy of heist movie poster parodies.

It was a confluence of events which led to this particular comic. We had been re-working our old “Reservoir Aliens” and “The Unusual Suspects” strips for a while, and decided that it would be nice to create a new poster parody to form a trilogy. The common theme between Reservoir Dogs and The Usual Suspects is that they both fall into the category of “heist movies”, so we talked about other films which might fit this category, and of course The Italian Job stood out as a classic in the genre. But we struggled to come up with a good idea which would work in the context of a Greys parody.

During this period of flailing around for another suitable film poster to parody I happened to be out shopping in Milton Keynes one day. Stopping for lunch at the Marks & Spencer’s café there, I found myself in the queue in front of a certain Warwick Davis. Although I had one of our Greys leaflets in my pocket I decided not to accost him with it, as we didn’t have any strips which featured a character he’d played.

That event led to a chat with Vince where we considered Warwick’s most iconic characters (Wicket, Willow and Professor Flitwick) and pondered how we could shoehorn one into any of our upcoming comics. Then it hit us. The Italian Job could become The Endorian Job, themed around The Return of the Jedi. Another look at the poster from the 30th anniversary re-release of the film and it was clear that the sewer pipe and minis could easily become a Death Star and spaceships – and Michael Caine would become Wicket:

That killed two birds with one stone: now we finally had the third heist movie poster parody to complete our trilogy, and in the unlikely event that I ever find myself in a queue in front of Warwick Davis again, I’ll be able to hand him a leaflet and proudly point out that not only does one of his characters feature prominently in one of our strips, but that he gets a couple of mentions in the associated text as well.

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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Every now and then we like to publish a bonus comic, in addition to our regular fortnightly strips. This is one of those. Unfortunately it comes in the middle of our series of film poster parodies, but as it’s a topical joke we decided it was worth publishing it now, as it’s unlikely to be so relevant in three weeks time, when we next have a free slot. So if you’ve come here looking for our last poster parody, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait an extra week – unless any other topical comics crop up in the meantime.

As for the subject matter of this strip: in case you weren’t aware some people have been suffering from reception issues on the new iPhone 4, particularly when held in the left hand. It’s been covered quite extensively in both the mainstream and technology media: BBC, BBC (again), Guardian, Engadget, Ars Technica.

I’m surprised this issue didn’t present itself during Apple’s testing – perhaps they don’t employ any sweaty-palmed left-handed phone users – but I suspect that this issue is similar to the “iPod battery death” and “iPod Nano screen scratches” of yore in that the number of users genuinely affected is quite low, while the number that complain, blog, tweet and create comics about it is quite high.

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

This is the second in our trilogy of movie poster parodies. Like the previous one, this originated with the first incarnation of The Greys, some fifteen years ago. At that time this would have been almost topical, as “The Usual Suspects” was released in 1995, with this poster:

Back then our images were much simpler, there were no Easter Eggs in our strips, and the jokes were a little more basic. So basic, in fact, that the humour in this strip originally hung on the fact that the original poster had a police line-up complete with height marks, and that our grey aliens were all a bit short. This is what it looked like in Vince’s notebook:

And this is how it looked when we stopped work on The Greys the first time round:

When we began the work to resurrect The Greys as a webcomic, back in late 2008, this was fairly high on our list of strips to tweak and update for the new media. We went back to the original source material in order to create a more accurate parody, and in doing so decided on the theme of using a few evil characters from sci-fi to reflect the clothes, style or stance of the original characters. It quickly became apparent that the characters we’d chosen were, if anything, renowned for their height rather than the lack thereof. So the not-very-amusing gag about The Greys being 3′ tall was thrown out in favour of five taller characters in a more accurate parody, which we developed on-and-off for quite some time, only now (some 18 months later) considering it finished enough to post.

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