         |
 |
| | | |
 | |||
| The Sev Trek FAQ Over time, I often get asked the same questions, so I thought I might post the answers here. When will you parody 'Enterprise'? When and how is the Sev Trek Movie released? When will you draw those missing Sev Trek strips? What does "sev" mean? How can I ask the author a question? How do I suggest cartoon ideas? Do you draw your cartoons on paper or on the computer? Can you do a parody of ...? Why isn't my punchline chosen? Why was my punchline deleted? The IRC judges choose lame punchlines! When will you change Gainweight's hair? How can I pay for Sev Trek merchandise? What does the "Four Lights" joke mean? What did you originally expect from Sev Trek? When will you parody 'Enterprise'? Ever since the Enterprise pilot aired, I've been asked many times when I will draw a cartoon parody of the show. Unfortunately, I live in Australia which means it takes about 13 years for new episodes to reach here. However, a friend does have a copy I may be able to see in a few weeks. So my answer is probably in November or December 2001. Oh and the cartoon will be called 'Enterforaprize'. When and how is the Sev Trek Movie released? To find out everything you need to know about the Sev Trek Movie, I have created a Sev Trek Movie FAQ answering when the movie is released, what form it will be in, how to buy it, etc. When will you draw those missing Sev Trek strips? Those who have read through the Sev Trek Cartoon Archives have noticed a couple of 'missing strips' I haven't drawn yet (eg, Sev Trek #267, #268, #285). What happens is if I ever run out of time during the week, I cheat by running a competition that doesn't require a drawing and draw the cartoon afterwards based on the winning entry. But then it's a matter of me making the time to draw the toon. So when will I draw them? I'm sure any day now. Just be patient! :-) What does "sev" mean? This is probably the most Frequently Asked Question, and unfortunately the most Frequently Unanswered Question (I won't be doing an acronym for that - think about it). I can't give out the answer (the meaning of sev is a closely guarded secret) but a number of people have correctly guessed the meaning from all the clues I've given. How can I ask the author a question? While you're free to email me, I'd probably prefer it if you posted your questions on the Sev Trek Discussion Board. That way, if it's a question that's been answered before, you will probably get your answer a lot quicker. Also, the answer may be something others would be interested in hearing also. How do I suggest cartoon ideas? Please post your cartoon ideas or name suggestions on the Ideas Board. I visit the board daily and will receive all your suggestions. By posting your suggestion on the Ideas Board, it may also spark discussion among other Sevilians leading to other interesting ideas and thoughts. Do you draw your cartoons on paper or on the computer? All my cartoons are pencilled and inked on paper and scanned in as black and white line art. They are then coloured on computer. I've described the process in detail in The Making of Sev Trek. Can you do a parody of ...? I'm often asked if I'll do a parody of a certain show. My goal is to cover more and more sci-fi through the Sci-Fi Competition, but it will be a slow process so be patient! Due to reader request, I've started watching a few shows which I'll be drawing later this year. They are:
Why isn't my punchline chosen? There are a huge number of punchlines submitted in the Toon Zone Competitions. Each day, I read through the submitted punchlines and pick the best ones to post on the Best Entries Page. I often receive complaints about someone's punchlines never being chosen. You must understand that I get literally thousands of punchlines each week (if you don't believe me, you can read the file that records every single submitted punchline). I recommend you look at that file - it might put it all in perspective. I must also stress that I select the punchlines that I find personally funny. Sense of humour is a very subjective thing so what you might consider funny, I might not. Unfortunately, this is the inevitable consequence of having a single person select the best punchlines. An ideal system would be similar to Dilbert's website where readers rate each punchline. As I convert my site to database driven, this system might be possible for the sev comps too - time will tell. In the meantime, please be patient with my fallible sense of humour! Why was my punchline deleted? When I move the funniest punchlines from the Best Entries Page to the Archives, I cull the punchlines down. Then when I put them on the Finalists Page, I cull them again to maybe 20 or so. Finally on Friday each week, I do a final cull to half a dozen punchlines to be judged at the Judging Session. So you punchline could get culled at any of these points (kinda like Pop Stars or similar elimination shows). At the final culling, I consider more carefully if the punchline will work in the strip. Not only funniness is an issue but also length (will it fit in the space available - a crucial issue with Pits especially as it's so tight for space which is why the punchlines tend to be shorter than the other comps). Another issue which may surprise you is if the last word of the punchline is long or short. A long last word tends to get judged harsher as due to the shape of the speech bubble, it's hard to fit longer words in the bubble. So there are a lot of reasons why a punchline might get culled at this point. But in the end, it comes down to my sense of humor and even my mood and situation at that moment in time which is very subjective too and that's always gonna differ from what other people think. So apologies if your punchline got culled but remember all the factors to be considered in this process! The IRC Judges choose lame punchlines! Okay, it's not a question but I do get told from time to time that the winning punchline chosen by the IRC Judges are a bad choice. While it brings up issues like humor can't be written by committee, etc, I have really one answer to this objection. You don't like the winning punchlines? Come to the judging session and choose them yourself! :-) When will you change Gainweight's hair? There seems to be a real fixation with Gainweight's hair - ever since Janeway changed her hairstyle, everyone keeps asking me when I'm going to redraw her hairstyle (I suppose I encourage this by making such a big deal out of Gainweight's hair). My answer is I'm a bit annoyed she got her hair cut as I really enjoyed doing the big bun hairstyle (notice how her hair is getting bigger and bigger each time I draw her!). Anyway, I have drawn Gainweight with the new hairstyle in Sev Trek 171 but afterwards, I went back to the bun hairstyle I know and love, and I'm sticking with it! How can I pay for Sev Trek merchandise? This seems to come up a bit (particularly from readers not in Australia) so I created a Sev Trek Ordering FAQ which lists all the ways you can pay for Sev Trek merchandise. What does the "Four Lights" joke mean? This is the episode "Chain of Command" where Picard gets kidnapped by Cardassians, and it is based on a concept from the "1984" novel. Basically Picard undergoes various physical and psychological tortures, including an ongoing issue in which the Cardassian leader is tells Picard that if he will state there are only three (or five?) lights in front of him, then he can walk away free (there are, in reality, exactly four lights in front of him). Picard is just near the point of breaking when he is rescued. There is a hint that he might have been about to state that there were three or five lights. But he is rescued, and then in a dramatic moment, the physically and mentally exhausted Picard turns back to the Cardassian leader and stammers out "THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS" And then he collapses into someone's arms, if I recall correctly... The reason the joke's been used in the X-Gen Christmas Card and the Garage Comic Strip is because it's probably my favourite Trek scene of all time. :-) Thanks to Christopher Kovacs and Guy Ben Ami for providing this info. What did you originally expect from Sev Trek? OK, this isn't a Frequently asked question, but someone on the Sev Trek Discussion Board asked me the following question and my answer went on for so long I thought I should put it up somewhere: Just out of curiosity, you have mentioned that Sev Trek has grown larger than you expected. The question is, what did you expect for it? Like how overgrown has it become from your original expectations? That's a good question - it sounds like the kind of thing an interviewer would ask and I have to respond by saying "well, Ken, I'm glad you asked me that..." My original expectations were nothing much, to be truthful. I have a notebook where I jot miscellaneous ideas that come to me. Most of them were Pits ideas but being a huge Star Trek fan, occasionally I got Star Trek cartoon ideas. Actually the first Star trek ideas I got were about Riker growing a zit that became sentient. I think the pious seriousness of TNG irritated me a little and I wanted to bring them down to our level. I doodled idle sketches over a couple of years. At the beginning I did it mostly for my own enjoyment - I couldn't see any practical way I could publish the cartoons. At the time my cartoons were only being published in newspapers and Sev Trek was a little too special interest to be used by them. But when I started the web site, suddenly there was the opportunity to publish any comics I'd like so I thought I might turn the zit story into a cartoon. Thus was born Pus in Boots. And that was all I had in mind for Sev Trek - the Pus story. I never dreamed that it would quickly become the most popular cartoon on the site but considering the demographics of the Internet (high Trekkie concentration), I should've realised. Soon I had started the Pits Competition and soon after, the Twist competition. They were going well, so at that point, I decided to start a Sev Trek competition. Once the Sev Trek comic strip got started, I opened up the comic strip for use on other people's web sites (a way to market Sev Trek on the web). That was when Sev Trek really exploded - kind of the Sev Trek equivalent of Zefram Cochrane inventing the warp drive. Suddenly a lot more people were visiting the site and with them, a lot of suggestions were pouring in. Basically from there, rather than being the captain of my ship, I've pretty much ridden the wave that Sevilians have generated - if there's something you all really wanted to see, I've tried to do it (when I had the time, of course). Some of the things have been my idea but most of the things are either suggestions from Sevilians or ideas sparked from things you've said. For example, stuff like the Discussion Board is something I've always wanted to do from early on - because I was getting lots of emails from Sevilians talking about other Sevilian's names they'd see in the Entries page. I thought wouldn't it be great to get them all talking directly with each other - build a community interacting with each other rather than just a passive audience reading some cartoons. Since the Discussion Board started, it's been a real revelation - some really good ideas have come from there. Heaps of cartoon ideas and sevnames, the idea of a doing a Sev Trek web ring (it's in development as we speak) and heaps of other stuff I can't quite recall right now. So if I could sum it all up in one idea, I think the way Sev Trek has gone beyond what I originally expected, it would be that it has gone from being a static cartoon that one person publishes for a bunch of people who passively read it to become a kind of online community where we're all interacting with each other, collaborating, arguing (flaming)... a really dynamic thing. This is all brand new - I don't know of any other cartoon that is doing something quite like this and I'm really making this all up as I go along (with everyone's help). So even now, I don't know what to expect from the future. New ideas and options are popping up every week so we truly are boldly going where no Sevilian has gone before! :-) | ||
| |||
Sev Wide Web | Index | Toon Zone | Sev Shop | What's New | Contact Us
Sev Trek Comp | Scifi Comp | Pits Comp | Twist Comp | Sunday Comp
Sev Trek | Sev Files | Sevgate | Fraud of the Rings | Bluffy | Sev Wars | Sevylon 5 | Pits | Twist | Sevloid Chronicles
Sev Trek Movie | Sev Wars 3D Trailer | The Vault | Discussion Board | Ideas Board | Sevilian Board | Privacy Policys
The Sev Wide Web and all content within are © Copyright 2000 by John Cook.
None of my material can be used on any other site without prior permission from the author.
However, feel free to link to my site from yours.