New things

Wow! What an exciting phone call! I just got off the phone with my new net guru, Sarah. She and I will be making lots of changes, big and small, to QlownTown in the coming months. And QlownTown will be living on its third server in less than a year soon, but it takes time to move an entire town.

One idea Sarah threw out was: do I put photos or cartoons of myself on the website and/or blog, instead of the cartoon character who now appears there? (We're planning to put up more than one image of me.) I said that one possible advantage of cartoons is that no one can see how old I am, or what color, orientation, weight, show size or astrological sign I am. (Okay, I admit you can't tell a person's astrological sign from a photo--unless they're wearing a big "Leo" medallion.) You can believe that I'm whatever you'd like: a twenty-two-year-old bearded artist type, or a fat, nearsighted old man with a kindly demeanor, or a voluptuous Lithuanian woman who happens to have a man's name and would be the perfect life partner for you. Whatever category suits your idea of someone you'd like.

A photo, of course, puts a human face to the person who appears sometimes erudite, sometimes offbeat, and occasionally just silly/stupid through the comics he writes and draws. And, I could take a bunch of photos at once and be done with it, in less time than it takes to draw multiple cartoons.

There's also the option of posting a photo, but changing it every few months to a photo of someone else so you never know who's the real I*...but that would just be messing with people with whom I want to make a connection. There's a part of me that wants to do the strip with no boundaries, to say "damn" when the cartoon character is saying "damn", instead of writing #%@!...but I really like the idea of welcoming almost everyone and alienating almost no one. I hope to do it while avoiding cutesy, heartwarming, gee-life-is-really-like-that-isn't-it cartoons (names will not be named here, but there are daily strips that require no clever thought to conceive that are getting too much space in newspapers); but I want to build a community of people who visit the strip, or whom the strip visits via email, on a regular basis. People who like the strip will generally assume they'd like me if they met me, so what do I present to them?

I ask you: as a reader of the strip [if you're not, go check out the website right now; I can wait while you do], what do you think you'd prefer?

* That's the erudite part of me, not using "me".