COMIC RELIEF

Cartoon-blogging comes to Second Life...

For the longest time, I've wondered why we haven't seen more Residents using SL as a canvas for creating comics and graphic novels; somehow, excepting a few notable, preliminary exceptions (like this one and this one), we haven't seen many of those.

Now comes Second Theory, Brian Mifflin's comic featuring one man's wacky encounters with noobs, scary babes, wayward Katamaris, and other adventures.

"I think I can get one out every two days or so," Brian tells me. As it turns out, most of the comics are based on actual SL experiences he and his friends have in-world. "Everyday SL is always interesting and at least for me, funny a lot." So, a cartoon blog about Second Life.

Creating the individual frames takes a matter of minutes, he says. "First thing I get the actors I need," says Brian, "usually friends, or random people I find. Using the built-in screen shot function, get the angles I need. For [stage] direction, most of it is 'look at the ball', 'look at him', 'look at me', 'touch this', etc... then I take the shots into Photoshop, for dialog and any fancy stuff I'd like to do."

Sadly, the story of a prim hailstorm is apocryphal; happily, the cautionary tale of a wayward katamari is not. Brian Mifflin recently built a tribute to the super adhesive ball from the beloved cult videogame. "[A]nd it works! Anything it touches sticks to it. The only limitations are you have to own the objects you pick up (for linking reasons) and it stops at thirty-one total prims because of the physics limit. It's fun to roll around, but don't let it touch your house, my friend ruined a build that way."

He pictures an even more ambitious katamari, but that'll have to wait Second Life's imminent upgrade to Havok 2 physics.

"I couldn't imagine all the bounding box calculations for one hundred thumb tacks and a tuna roll," says Mifflin.