As you might have guessed from the card, I’m spending Christmas in Thailand this year. Last year I was up in the Norwegian mountains with my family in -25C, and now we’re down in Hua-Hin, in +30C. Both times I caught a cold.

I must admit it feels a bit strange spending Christmas in the sun, but I think I could definitely get used to it.

A big สุขสันต์วันคริสมาสต์ to you all.

(A small disclaimer: I wanted to do detailed shading to it, but just ran out of time, and I used photo-reference completely blatantly for that picture).

You may notice that underneath each page of my comics, there are a few icons. The first is for downloading the comic you’re reading as a .cbz file, the second gives you a thumbnail view of the comic plus a copy of the manuscript, the third is for sharing the comic with your friends through social media sites (please do), and the last one just sends you to the front page.

If you would rather read it on paper, it’s still avaible in print at a reduced price of only US$9.95 for the remainder of 2011. A big thank you to all you guys who bought my book so far.

Phrases like that are commonly heard when discussing gay characters in fiction, but what do they really mean?

On the surface they simply mean that the characters gayness is not important to the story, but if you dig a little deeper it has a more subtle and darker undertone. Many people, both gay and straight, attach negative connotations to gay themed comics, books and films, and by saying that the main character “just happens to be gay”, they are trying to distance the work from the feared “gay” label that might otherwise brand the story. But is it so bad for a book or film to be called gay, if it in fact is gay?

A straight co-worker of mine argued that the film “I Love You Phillip Morris” wasn’t really a gay movie, because it was entertaining for a straight audience. To me, “I Love You Phillip Morris” is most definitely a gay movie, it has a gay lead character who is out and proud, a coming-out story, a gay romance and gay sex, the only thing that sets it apart from most gay comedies is that it has famous lead actors and a big budget. Maybe “gay themed” has become synonymous with a low budget, low production values and limited talent.

It is understandable that major publishers and film studios avoid the gay label. They like to stick to tried and tested formulas that they know will sell. A gay lead character could easily scare away 90% of the straight audience, which would make them loose money on the project. Smaller specialized publishers, who have lower costs, can afford to cater to a niche audience.

A gay tale that is well told, should be able to find an audience based on it’s own merits. However this does not seem to be the case. The film studios may actually be right on this one. Once a story is labeled gay, most straight people, especially guys, will avoid it. They don’t want to see two guys kissing and they don’t want “the gay agenda” shoved down their throats. I guess it’s partially because people like stories they can easily relate to, and partially it’s good ol’ homophobia.

Maybe we haven’t come as far with gay rights as we think. We still find the need to mention that a character “happens to be gay”, somehow deflating his gayness and making him more acceptable to a straight audience, while you never hear anyone say that someone “just happens to be straight”. In fact a sentence like, “007 is a special agent for the MI5, who just happens to be straight”, sounds palpably absurd.

If you don’t like shopping on-line, the book is available through bookstores too. Just ask for the title, and they will most likely be able to order it for you through Ingram. If I’m lucky, they may even buy a few extra copies to stock on their shelves.

Finally, if you happen to live in Oslo, Norway, you can find the book in the comic book store Outland at the train station (Østbanehallen) and in Tronsmo. I also donated a copy to the comics library, Serieteket, which you can borrow if you would rather not spend money on the book or are short on cash.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I’m going to give you a quick overview of some of the free open-source tools I use to make comics, software that you can download and try out for yourself.

First of, if you’re running a Linux operating system, like Ubuntu or Fedora, most of these programs will be available at the click of a button (yum, apt-get, Ubuntu Software Center etc.), but that doesn’t mean you must switch to a Linux operating system just to use these programs. One of the side effects of being open-source, is that the software tends to get ported to many platforms. Most of the tools mentioned here are available for Linux, Windows, OSX and more.

GIMP

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), is a great piece of software that rivals Photoshop. I drew the cover of my latest book in GIMP, and both Gawkers and Religious Nuts are done entirely with the GIMP. It can be used for anything from digital painting and drawing, to editing your holiday photos. Since it’s a relatively big piece of software, it takes a little while to learn, but once you get the hang of it you can do great things with it. It has support for layers, lots of filters, a variety of brushes and much more.

InkScape

InkScape is a vector based drawing software. Unlike GIMP, which uses bitmaps, InkScape uses curves that you can draw with or manipulate into different shapes. If GIMP is the open-source counter part to Photoshop, then InkScape is the same to Illustrator. The advantage of vectors over bitmaps is that they are resolution independent. In InkScape you can zoom in as far as you want, and the image will never turn into jagged staircase pixels or a blurry mess. It also means you can move a line you’ve already drawn, simply by manipulating it’s control points. In general programs like InkScape and Illustrator are used for clean designs, such as logos and technical drawings, but it can also been used for things like making nice looking flow charts and schematics. I’ve used it to create two maps for Hedgewars and a number of icons and logos among other things. I also used it to put together the cover of “The Raft and Other Stories” and adding text on top. Even though InkScape is still only at version 0.48.1 at the time of this writing, it’s very feature rich and extremely stable.

Blender 3D

The third way, after bitmaps and vectors, to create digital images is by using 3D.  Doing graphics in 3D is more like sculpting, or working with puppets, than drawing. You build your models in 3D, texture them (you can use GIMP for this), pose them, place cameras and lights, and render them out. Blender is one of the fastest developing open-source packages around, and has a feature set rivaling and sometimes exceeding many of the high-end (and extremely expensive) commercial software on the market, such as Maya, XSI and 3D Studio Max. Like all 3D software, Blender has a steep learning curve, and is quite technical to use, but the end results can look amazing. Among the features you find in Blender, are cloth, hair and fluid simulation, sculpting, retopo, animation, compositing, film editing and many more. Blender can be used to create full blown animated films and visual effects, but can also be used for simpler things, such as these autostereograms I made a while back, or simply as an aid with complex perspectives when drawing.

MyPaint

MyPaint is a natural media painting software. What this means is that it tries to emulate things like pencils, crayons, acrylics and so on. MyPaint is focused on drawing and painting, with a  easy to use interface so you can start drawing straight away. It’s a great companion software to the GIMP.

Scribus

Unlike the software mentioned so far, Scribus is not made for creating graphics and images. It’s a desktop publishing software, and can be used for doing the layout of books, magazine and brochures. In fact, I used Scribus to do the layout of my comic book. When I started I had never touched Scribus before, and was a bit unsure of how well it could handle 150 pages of high resolution images. As it turned out, it handled it without any problems at all.

That pretty much covers the programs I use regularly, but there are a few others I use from time to time, and are definitely worth a mention. These are:

• Krita – A lot like GIMP, but actually has high bit depth support.
• ImageMagick – This is a command line tool for manipulating images. Hard for non-programmers to use, but very powerful.
• Pencil – Easy to use 2D animation software.
• Synfig Studio – Vector based 2D animation program that is still in early development, but shows a lot of promise.
• LuxRender – This is a 3D render that can be used with Blender for creating photo-realistic images.
• Wings3D – Polygon based 3D modeler.
• Font Forge – For making your own fonts. I used this to create the font used for the queertales logo and the top menus.

Of course, there are lots more, so feel free to add your favorite ones in the comments below, but hopefully this will give you some idea of what is available out there, and what open-source software really is capable of.