Untrue Tales
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UNTRUE TALES is a series of interconnected short stories chronicling the life and times of Gabriel Stein, semi-lovable jackass. The stories will be of varying lengths and will run the gamut from comedy to tragedy (but mostly comedy). Each segment will tell a tale that should stand on its own but will also contribute to the larger tapestry that is the Life of Gabe.
These tales will be told in a non-linear fashion, so a story about Gabe in his teens could be followed by a story of his childhood on a New Mexican chicken farm, then juxtaposed with a scene from his mid-twenties during his fruitless quest for rock stardom in Hollywood.
In some stories (like this one) Gabe himself doesn't even appear. But his shadow looms large. So pinch your salt, hitch up your suspenders of disbelief, and prepare to be told UNTRUE TALES!
Whoopsy! Go off on vacation and end up a big fat loser! Ah, whatayagonnado?
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Congrats to the Re-Evolution guys and big thanks to everyone who voted or just stopped by to drop a comment or encouragement. It's been a grand ol' reunion.
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UNTRUE TALES will continue to continue over at its own website
- www.untruetales.com -
A new tale is already kicking off over there so check it out if you've enjoyed what you saw here on Zuda.
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Many thanks to CauselyConcepts, DetectiveSpace, BlueMaxx and Aberrant Press for your comments and votes. Sorry for the untimely reply but I've been busy sitting on my ass and drinking beer. :)
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RKB: Special thanks to you for your unflagging support of Untrue Tales. I really appreciate it. I'll keep kicking 'em out if you keep reading 'em.
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Liz: Sorry I missed out on the interview opportunity. Maybe we'll get another chance down the line!
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Thanks again to all the readers and competitors and the Zuda bigwigs for making it all happen.
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Bye for now!
More good stuff, Sam... Can't wait to see what comes next, be it here or on your site.
After rereading my post, it seemed like it was a knock...but really wasn't. "Few" meant many and I mentioned yer website cuz I want your stories to continue somewhere. It's probably obvious support but people are naturally cynical...so, just clarifying.
I'm not gonna bash any of the comics in front of you, but you and this book deserves to be ahead of a "few" of the other entries. Sigh...amalgamatedartists.com still flowin' well?
What up. You got my vote, dude, because of the great dialogue, pacing, and panel lay outs. You got a good hang on banter and real speech. Yeah.
Hi Sam congrats on getting back in. I am a little surprised this isn't higher in the rankings being as how your one of the few who has kept your comic going post-Zuda which should get you kudo's from all. Love the sex trek stuff, and the why are you checking out my junk moment funny as hell. Normally i almost always gripe about "where is the color for this comic?" but the B&W really fits the strip.
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I did the whole shave my head/ bald guy thing once for whatever reason (if I even had one) and my friends to this day years later still rip on me for it, so that brought back some memories.
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Great art and story like I expected, you should have a higher rank, and keep doing untrue tales!!!!
Enjoyed the new 8. Nice dialogue.
Reviewed over at http://www.mpd57.blogspot.com - check out me checking it out.
Dear Zuda Competitors/Creators,
I recently started a Zuda fan blog, and I would love to interview all of this month’s creators. If you would be willing to answer 5-10 questions, to be posted on the Zudafan blog, please contact me at: zudafan@gmail.com (if you haven’t already) .
Feel free to check out the blog: zudafan.blogspot.com
Thanks!
Thanks, Kerry! Three cheers for E! Gimme an "E"!
Gimme an...um exclamation point!
Gimme another exclamation point!
What does that spell?
E!!
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Have a lovely weekend, one and all!
Great stuff, Sam! The dialogue flows beautifully and your characters' expressions are dead-on. Great job!
Thanks, Diego! You're another guy I voted to come back for the invitational and yet it didn't pan out.
I must have questionable taste in comics. :)
Already "favorited", and now voted! This is even better than the 8 pages you had in the January contest. The artwork is great as always, I love the facial expressions on your characters and the design of each page, but what I like best here is the story and the dialogues. I was thinking these new pages could be perfectly turned into a scene of a Kevin Smith movie.
Week two! The excitement never stops!
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passive: Thanks! I'm still holding out hope for Waterworld 2!
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Rob: I'm pretty much not doing any marketing other than posting some extras on my blog and e-mailing a few friends. Basically the same as last time. I sent out a bulletin on comicspace, made a post on the Bendis board where I frequently lurk and that's about the size of it. Marketing just holds no interest for me. I honestly don't care so much about winning that I wanna buy up a bunch of ads or anything like that and I'm not on Facebook or MySpace either. I'd rather spend the energy on making more comics. I do really enjoy being in the contest though. For me, Zuda kind of serves as marketing in itself for Untrue Tales which I intend to continue until oblivion finally folds me into its eternal cold embrace. Pickles.
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Speaking of blogs, I took Rob's advice and posted the first in a series of Sex Trek outtakes over on the blog. Check it out at: http://untrue-tales.blogspot.com/
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Enjoy the week!
Okay, now that we're past the first ranking, it's time for the next question.
3) Marketing;
There seems to be a general agreement here at Zuda of the importance of outside marketing to boost a comic's ranking. I've also spoken with a number of creators who, for different and equally valid reasons, don't really feel that's something they want to do themselves. I realize that successful marketing can be an edge in the competition and as such some creators don't want to say too much about they're own methods while the contest is running, but could you discuss your own approach to outside marketing? How much time have you devoted to it in this first week of the contest? Has your approach to it changed since your first time in a competition here at Zuda? Are you marketing the comic more, less or differently than you did the first time around?
-Rob
SamLittle...in the long-run, I think you are right. Your creative talent is so strong that if you continue to produce your success is certain in the same way that we can be certain Kevin Costner will give us another bad movie. However, I think victory in these Zuda contests, at least right now, requires some hur-lum-hoo-ha. Good luck.
Happy Saturday!
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Laemeur: Thanks! I really hope to see Brave Ulysses move up in the rankings over the next couple of weeks. I think it may have inched past The Crooked Man and Teachers to become my personal favorite of the month. Good luck!
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Illinest: Many thanks for the crit and the complements. I certainly plan to keep moving forward and hopefully keep things interesting and evolving.
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BlueMaxx: Thanks for your support!
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passive: Thanks for checking in and checking stuff out. Unfortunately, I'm not so good with the plan-making and the marketing and the hur-lum-HOO-ha. I'm going more by the "If you build it, they will come" philosophy of my spiritual mentor, Kevin Costner.
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I do however have a nifty blog, if people want to check out sketches and the like:
http://untrue-tales.blogspot.com/
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I don't update it on weekends though, 'cause I'm too busy relaxing with beverages. I promise to post something interesting there on Monday.
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Go forth and make merry the weekend!
Just read your stuff for the first time and it made me pee my friend's pants. Thanks for the tip...next time I'll remember to put the stuffed sock down the front...not the back of my pants. Blue Maxx hit the bullseye...this should be a contender...in any month. I'm off to check out your website. Good luck...and I hope you have a plan to get this in front of eyes who will appreciate it and vote for it.
You are in an undeserved 8th place, SamLittle. Hopefully, people will see your talent and raise your position.
Second impression:
You've upped your game.
With the first vignette we received a third person account of this 'Gabe' character and it was hard on the reader to find out that the breasty blond girl was not the main character.
Fortunately you got a second chance to tell your story and you've not only delivered a more satisfying product with this second snippet of 'real life', you've also achieved a kind of synergy in the relationship between this tale and the first which is unmatched (IMHO) by anything currently featured on the site.
But what kind of review would this be if I didn't pick a little bit?
The rendering has a tendency to turn a bit muddled in my opinion. It worked pretty well on Camel Tongue since it's mostly med shots and closeups but here my eye gets a little lost when the camera pulls back.
And not entirely related but I find that this is a better read for me than "The Trouble With Uzi's" and I think the reason for that is that your niche is with the 'in your face' and 'uncomfortable' stuff. Definitely stick with that.
All in all I'd have to say that you're near the top of my list of creators to follow. You combine consistently good quality with something even more important, that being an obvious passion for the craft. Your post-competition output is pretty good and this is in contrast to many of your contemporaries who seem to shelve their web-comic ambitions the second their competition ends.
I believe that what we are seeing in you is the early stages of a long and successful career in comics. Don't stop pushing your boundaries.
Howdy, neighbour. Sam, this comic is excellent; I really liked the initial eight pages, they were very charming (that sounds like an insultingly lukewarm compliment, but it's not meant to be -- genuinely charming comics are rare indeed), but these newer pages had a lot more punch and left me actually laughing aloud. Great, great work. Best of luck to you in the competition.
Ah, the bottom three. I must say it's kinda cozy down here. And I'm in good company!
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Neutroncrush: Thanks again!
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Rob: The first couple of Untrue Tales I did were indeed formatted in the standard comic size, but I use a pretty conservative layout style so it was really no problem to adapt to the landscape format. I think it works really well for monitor viewing and have happily adopted the format for my own site. I still kind of think of each screen as half a standard comic page rather than a two page spread in order to avoid packing to much information in. All my comics are now formatted in landscape from the get-go. It'll be interesting to see if it will be just as easy to reformat them into print format if I ever move Untrue Tales into that arena.
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SuprrEgo: Thanks a lot, man! Starfish was one of my picks for the Invitational. Wish we could have gone head to head! At least our comics share a nice spot over at Amalgamated Artists.
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lamison: Thanks a million! Yeah, I'm using some life experience as a jumping off point but bending fact and reality in an attempt make my wasted youth and existential pain fun-filled and chuckle-worthy. Hence the "Untrue" in the title.
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Congrats to Corey and Dead in the Now for taking the top spot out of the gate.
It's gonna be a wild ride, methinks...
will the awesomeness never cease????
sam little, i've been checking out the blog and stuff. great, great, fantastic stuff.
btw, is this autobiographical (have you been asked that before?)?
really, REALLY pulling for you. and if not you, then the crooked man.
Whoah, I've been away from Zuda for a little while prepping for the convention season. I just got back into reading the invitational stuff today and this is the first thing I read and it just blew my mind. The Star Trek stuff was just CLASSIC! You've got an amazing sense of humor and this is the kind of read you really can't get anywhere else. Professional, expert stuff Sam. Unless something else completely knocks my socks off this has my vote and anyone else's I can try and convince to log on here. Simply HILARIOUS as always.
Okay, next question;
2)Format
Zuda's "monitor-friendly" 4X3 format is something new to most of us since it premiered last year. It does create some unique differences in how the page is composed and i think artists and readers alike don't really fully appreciate that until they experiment with it a bit. Contestants this month have been working with that format for awhile longer and had some time to reconsider it since their first eight page submission. Can you talk about some of the challenges of the format? You've done probably 50 pages or so in this format since the comic first appeared and you've started to really become accustomed to it. I seem to remember seeing an old "comic page" formatted version of UT, a splash in which Gabe's shocked girlfriend tells him he was so high he wet the bed. How much work, even in layout form, did you do in other formats before going to the current 4X3?
-Rob
Yeah! Dafuggizzis?! HAHA! That's great.
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Cool stuff going on at the blog, Sam. You draw some of the greatest facial expressions I've ever seen! This is definitely one of my favorite series.
Hello peoples! I'd just like to point anyone who may be interested in more Untrue Tales info and whatnot in the direction of the Untrue Tales blog. I'll be posting some sketches and things here and there and you'll find links to even more Untrue Tales trifles and tidbits from there.
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http://untrue-tales.blogspot.com/
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frequentcontributor: The new pages coming first is, in fact, my fault. I asked the Zuda bigwigs to do that so those that have already read the first tale a zillion times wouldn't have to slog through it again to get to the new stuff. There's about twice as many panels in this new story as opposed to the previous one, so some shrinkage and itty-bitty panels was a necessary byproduct of more content, I'm afraid.
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Rob: My original plan was to have each update be one self-contained story, probably on an every-other-week basis, but the next Untrue Tale in the pipeline is turning out to be a 25+ page action-packed monster so I'd probably need to break it up into three segments or something. The stories are all of varying lengths of course so the amount of pages in an update would depend on story length, but probably limited to no more than 10 at a time.
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BlueMaxx: Thanks! Maybe you should stop reading now and just vote already! :)
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Annibot: Thank you kindly, but gee, you should probably put some ice on that.
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RiverHelix: Much appreciated! Thanks for checking out the stuff!
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Good day!
You had me at 'Dafuggizzis'. I've been checkin' your work on UT's homepage as well. And while I haven't gotten through all the entries yet, I would say that your shticks would be a nice complement to the current Zuda line-up. And while I'm reserving my vote for now, I'm really feelin' it this one. BTW- you had my azz rollin' with that Bar mitzvah joint!
G'Job and G'Luck m'Brother!
I am endlessly jealous of your skills. It hurts to envy this much. It hurts so bad.
SamLittle, man, you tell the best stories. I haven't finished the rest but you probably have my vote.
So last month's general Q&A seemed to work pretty well for opening a dialogue about each creator's plans for their comics and I thought I'd try it again this month. I'm going to try to ask five general questions for each competitor first and see where those answers take us.
1)Update and production schedule;
Sam, you've got a really solid and regular production schedule, man. Anyone who's been following this comic on it's homesite the past few month's has seen that. But you know I'm one of those guys who waits until a UT story-line wraps up before I read it as a whole. I also think these non-sequential vignettes from Gabe's life work really well in chapters with irregular page counts. So if you do win a contract this month, what sort of an update schedule do you plan on using? How many pages (on average) per month and at what intervals? Would those intervals be regular?
-Rob
Pretty funny, but my Zuda page put this new one before the old one again... Not your fault, obviously. I have to say that I liked the art on the last strip better. There were too many tiny little panels in this one, I think...
Good morning, Zuda! I love the smell of comments in the morning. Smells like... sausages.
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Michael: Thanks for the vote of confidence!
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Rob: Heh, heh. Not a bad idea. Prolly wouldn't be able to run it here on Zuda though. :)
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Dan: Thanks, guy! Good luck to you too!
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JSLoomis: Thanks for the vote! Mucho appreciado. Spudman is freaking great though. If Rory keeps plugging away I just know he's gonna break big somewhere.
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Dixieflatliner: Thanks for the vote! I am, of course, very much influenced by American Splendor, as well as Love and Rockets and the work of Bendis and Kyle Baker.
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Keep them salty comments coming while I whip up some scrambled eggs to go with the sausagey goodness!
reminds me of ' American Splendor ' - i like it - you got my vote.
I didn't end up voting for this one the first time around, but you really need to be getting paid to do this stuff! So I'm voting for you, even though I loves me some Spudman!
This is hilarious, Sam! Really great! Good luck this month!
I'm kinda hoping there's a future UNTRUE TALES story in which Gabe dabbles in writing a STAR TREK "slash" fiction story. We could see clipped drawings on the TV from his STAR TREK fantasy episode while the dialogue of Gabe's encounter with Archie plays off-panel, kind of like the reverie scene we saw in "The Loop" story last month.
You guys did read "The Loop," right?
Friggin' great, it was.
-Rob
I'm going to go ahead & call it-Crooked Man & this go down to the last day.
Harlot! Painted hussy! Getcher man-hands off my rudis, Mister Godon (if that's even your REAL name)!!
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Neutroncrush: Thank ya! I do loves me some Star Trek. It's a he-manly platonic love though, I assure you. Really.
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Alex: Thanks, mate! I was hoping to see The Fool King make a return trip...but alas. Cheers!
rudis- your vote is mine i say! mine!!;p
Sam, this is definitely your best Untrue Tale yet! Those modified Star Trek lines are hysterical!
top stuff, 5 out of 5 and my vote.
These new pages are really excellent! I love how the Sex Trek lines keep busting in too. Wickedly funny man. And it`s GREAT in B&W! Carn Sarnitt!! UNTRUE TALES I shake my fist at thee!!! (Now to keep Rudis away from the computer for the rest of the month...) =D
Yay! It's on! Excitement! Intrigue! Heartbreak!
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It's great to be back on Zuda and in such good company. Should be a fun month. Thanks for the comments everybody! You're all so gosh-darned nice!
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Rob: Thanks, dude. I asked the Zudaluminati to front load the new pages so folks wouldn't have to slog through the old to get to the new. It's fun to be non-linear!
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kingofsnake: Thanks bunches!
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Chachi: Thanks, man! You guys have got it going on. Page nine is a work of art. Good luck!
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ptimony: Are you hitting on me?
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Albatross: Thanks, old bird! I felt like I owed it to whoever voted for the triumphant return of Untrue Tales to give 'em 8 new pages. I imagine the peeps who liked it enough to vote for it have checked out the other stories elsewhere, so it'd be kind of a bummer to just recycle one of those. Another bonus of inconsequential storytelling!
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I mean non-sequential! Non-SEQUENTIAL!
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Illinest: Thanks, man! I'm honored you started with me. Or maybe you're just working your way up from the bottom....
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famished: Thanks, you quazy quipper. This is indeed a well-endowed crowd. With talent, TALENT I say. Even I don't quite know who I'll vote for...
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stevesteiner: Thanks for the vote to bring me back. I was really lokng forward to your comment and I was a little disappointed...until those last two lines! Thanks, pally!
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tomstan: Thanks a lot!
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rudis: Thanks, man! You had the most entertaining comment thread ever on Zuda. And I dug Children of Bighand but it shoulda been in color (says the dude who couldn't be bothered too to color his OWN comic). I don't really anticipate being in the top two though. Top 5 would be nice....
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Thanks again, everybody! And good luck to all this month's competitors!
your artwork is beautiful, top notch really. you tell a good story in comic, man. you are major contender for my vote, its your comic or teachers, which has my vote for now. but it really impresses me that you never gave up on your untrue tales comic, you kept making it and making it, and you are back with it. very inspiring. i love you, man, you only ever said cool things to me when my comic was on display here at zuda, and if you are in the top two and teachers isn't, i'll swing my vote, i promise.
This is Frigging AWESOME! I LOVE IT!!
Sam
I gotta tell you man... I voted for you to come back to Zuda. I was really looking forward to seeing what else you had up your sleeve... And I was a little disappointed by these new pages...
until those last 3 pages! Good stuff man!
Best of luck!
Lol, just plain wrong. Dang, it's hard this month! Er, the competition that is.
i read you first dude, and i loled.
i totally loled. excellent.
fantastic! also, i loved that it's all new instead of posting an update we may have seen elsewhere! good luck!