At least they’re getting use out of that trebuchet.

Hi everybody!

Wednesday, September 1st will mark the 5th anniversary of The Crown Prince.  Wow.  Thanks to everybody who’s visited the site over this half-decade, I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself.

The big announcement is that The Crown Prince will soon be ending.

At the end of the current storyline, the strip will be going on a long-term hiatus.  I’m not saying I’m never coming back for more, but since it likely won’t be anytime soon, I’d rather say it’s ending than make any promises I won’t keep.

When will it end? By my best guess, the last strip will be sometime in December of this year.

The good news, however, is that I’ll soon be starting another comic project.  Keep watching this site (or the main site BubonicPress.com) for more specific announcements.  If all goes well, I’ll start that new project in January 2011.

Thanks again.

JG

Whoops - no strip this week.  Back on August 16th!

Mini hiatus!  See you back here on August 2nd!

This is a great site I recently discovered.  Covered features many different artists doing “cover versions” of famous or historic comic book covers.  I love it!

 http://coveredblog.blogspot.com/

Fooling around with crayons the other day…

I’m driving home from my hockey game tonight and it’s the summer, I’m thirsty, so I stop off to buy an energy drink.  An energy drink?  Why would I use that euphemism instead of calling it by the brand name?  Who am I trying to impress?  I bought a freaking PowerAde, okay?  So anyways, I go for the green bottle.  I like the lime flavour, you see, I like the zing it has.

But this bottle isn’t lime.  It’s watermelon.

Watermelon don’t have no zing.

When, I ask you, did the watermelon flavour get associated with “green” instead of lime?  So now I guess I have no choice but to read the fine print every time I buy a green drink to find out whether it’s lime or watermelon?  The answer is no, because apparently all green drinks are watermelon-flavoured nowadays.  This is the kind of nightmare you have when you’re in hell.

When I was a kid, green was lime.  Actually, now that I think of it, what colour were green lollipops.  Did we have lime lollipops?  Was our civilization sufficiently advanced in the 1970s to allow for such a thing?

Yellow was always for lemon.  That, at least, is a colour I can still trust to today.  But you wait and see.  I can see it right around the corner that some genius in R&D somewhere is going to determine that yellow should be forevermore associated with banana.  If that happens, I swear we’re just a hop and skip from complete anarchy.  I just can’t get my head around an energy drink that tastes like banana cream pie.

Hold the phone.  I just realized this bottle is actually melon-pineapple.

That changes everything.

Should be up by evening…

For the past week or two, I’ve been engrossed in a number of digital artwork tutorials done by Sherm Cohen of CartoonSNAP.  You can easily find these video tutorials at his site or by searching for them on YouTube.  I hope to slowly incorporate a number of elements over the coming weeks or months.  First off, this is the first strip which was inked entirely digitally.  While I’ve had my Wacom graphics tablet for some time, I only ever used it for some minor edits.  The big step for me was to edit in Adobe Illustrator (using vectors).  This is allowing me to have much smoother, rounder lines, which I feel are exactly what I wanted for this strip.  To illustrate (pun very much intended), I’ve included below two pictures of the Diaper Fairy: the first one was drawn using my previous method of inking on paper and scanning into Adobe Photoshop; the second one was inked entirely in Illustrator.  Anybody notice the difference, or is it just me?  Just look at the nose: it’s not just a thicker line, it ’s much rounder, smoother and seems to be pulsating with life!  (Or at least let’s hope that’s life…)

If you are not already readers of Irregular Webcomic!, then you should be.  David Morgan-Mar has created well over two thousand strips in a world made up of LEGO characters, fantasy miniatures, references to Harry Potter, William Shakespeare and many, many other cool things.  What more could you ask for?  I’m a big fan but there are still big chunks of the archive that I need to catch up on.

On April 2^nd last, to accompany his strip, Mr. Morgan-Mar posted a very harsh commentary, dare I say a tirade, against the boardgame Monopoly.  His first sentence summarizes his thoughts rather clearly:

“Monopoly is the most stupid, stupid, stupid game ever invented.”

He goes on at some length (twenty paragraphs or so) to outline a litany of negative features of the Monopoly boardgame: “It’s a stupid, idiotic, brainless, un-fun, stupid, ridiculous, tedious, boring, stupid game.”

(At this point, I hope none of you are getting discouraged about checking out his site.)

I’ve been waiting for someone (whether within the webcomics community or without) to offer up a rebuttal of some sort, but I haven’t seen it yet.  For that reason, just as David grabbed his sling and faced Goliath, I’m going to do my best to explain why I feel Monopoly is the best board game (or, failing that, why it’s my favourite board game).

Strategy: Dave Blizzard (I hope he doesn’t mind the plug) once explained to me that “Monopoly has more luck in it than chess but more strategy in it than Snakes and Ladders“.  Well put.  By involving dice, it clearly has a luck element.  But once the properties are distributed, that’s where strategy comes in.  Monopoly allows one to learn and develop a host of complex strategies.  Books have been dedicated to the subject!

Competition: This is one that most of us are familiar with.  Monopoly brings out a competitor in all of us, even if we never knew he existed! But what’s wrong with that?  In my mind, it’s one of the reasons Monopoly is so popular with kids around age 8 (the introductory age of the game).  Kids love the fact that they can play a challenging game with adults, compete with them and yes, that’s right, they can win!  It is very empowering to a child to realize they can beat their parents at something.

Negotiation/Interpersonal skills: What other board game requires interpersonal skills to such a high degree?  This is the “property trading game” so that means one needs to know how to develop strong negotiating techniques.  You may win entirely due to luck.  But can you count on luck every time?  A strong ability to negotiate (whether it’s with your friend, your 8-year old nephew or a complete stranger) can more than compensate and help you be competitive in any game of Monopoly.  Monopoly tournament rules suggest that players become “the type of player others don’t mind losing to.”  This sounds like something I would like to aspire to, let alone encourage my kids to emulate.  Bullying or intimidating other players will only generate bad results.

Math and probabilities: For anybody with a mathematical bent or anyone looking to expose their kids to some simple (and fun) arithmetic, Monopoly requires that one be good at doing simple arithmetic extremely quickly.  A property comes up for sale.  Do you have the money to afford it?  If not, how can you get that money?  Do you sell houses to the bank (for half their value)?  Do you mortgage properties (for half their value)?  Do you sell a property to your opponent?  Do you seek bids from various opponents?  No matter what your choice, you have to do the necessary arithmetic very quickly to figure out which one will give the most money.  (Note: What I describe as “simple” arithmetic can be considered “challenging” for the younger players and therefore the game becomes a learning tool.)  As for probabilities, anybody who has watched season 4 of The Wire knows there are probabilities regarding the dice.  (Mr. Prezbo was teaching the kids about probabilities with the dice!)  Knowing that 7 is the most commonly rolled number when rolling two dice can be the key to the game!  (Free tip: Build houses where you think folks will land knowing they are more likely to roll 6, 7 or 8!)

Risk Management: The concept of risk is prevalent in the game and that’s what makes it exciting.  Low risk means low reward.  Every action has a level of risk: do you buy a property or not?  Do you put all your cash in houses and hotels or do you save a “cushion” in case you land on those hotels you see coming up?  Mitigating this risk is all part of the strategy of Monopoly: gather assets you can trade (properties or money), negotiate win-win deals, and don’t be afraid to re-evaluate your situation (maybe it’s time to give up on getting the expensive set and focus on a cheap one).

Money Management: We have enough money headaches in real life that maybe we don’t need a board game based on financial trials and tribulations.  But some key concepts such as supply and demand, auctions and mortgaging can all be clearly learned within the game of Monopoly.  Players learn how to invest their money (property, houses/hotels) in order to reap the benefits (greater rent).  What about savings?  You know the time will come when you’ll need to pay up (probabilities tell us we won’t escape rent forever) so how much do you keep in your pocket until then?

Was Monopoly designed with all these factors in mind?  Probably not.  But I believe it’s a bit of this randomness that leads players back to this game time and time again.  Factors that led you to a loss can easily lead you to a win next time with only a few different variables.

Thanks to Will Lusby (current Canadian National Monopoly Champion) since much of the above is based on a discussion he and I had last year.

One final note: Since early in 2009, Monopoly games come with a new feature called the Speed Die.  If you are one of those people who enjoyed Monopoly but didn’t like the length of the game, this is for you.  A game can easily be played in 60-90 minutes by using the new rules that accompany the Speed Die.

It’s by Max Huffman.  I especially liked this recent one: Mocktopus.