Your Questions Answered About Doctor Fun

This is a variation on the FAQ I recently posted to Usenet. I will be linking some images to this page in the future and probably adding some more goodies - I mean, important information..

What is Doctor Fun?

Doctor Fun is a single-panel cartoon distributed every weekday over the Internet. Although the cartoons are dated by weekday, I generally update them the evening before the date that appears on the cartoon, and Monday's cartoon is usually on-line sometime Friday evening. Doctor Fun has been in production since September 24, 1993.

How can I get Doctor Fun?

At the moment, there are four ways to access Doctor Fun. Probably the best way is via World Wide Web. The URL is:

You can FTP Doctor Fun from sunsite.unc.edu in the directory:

Sunsite.unc.edu is also a gopher server.

Doctor Fun is also available via Usenet in

Who are you, anyway?

I get mail from people who want to know who actually draws Doctor Fun, so I guess it isn't being too obvious to state that I'm the author. I've worked for several years doing pretty much anything that has to do with microcomputers as a "real" job while I've drawn cartoons. I've had some stuff in Spy, Punch and Campus Life, and have done some work for King Features and Recycled Paper Products. I also do some ghost-writing for a strip currently in syndication (-you- figure out which one.) None of my cartooning has so far resulted in money raining out of the sky, and so I've kept my day job doing general computer stuff for the University of Chicago Library (a nice place to work.) Doctor Fun started out as something I would do on the side in addition to my other cartooning work, but it's grown into an all-consuming thing, which is ok - I'm curious to see where it goes. The Doctor Fun page originally started from the University of Chicago (thanks to Keith Waclena) and then moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (thanks to Jonathan Magid.) I'm 30. married, and live in Hyde Park, Chicago. My one foray into higher education got me a BA in music, which prepared me wonderfully for debugging TCP/IP connections and drawing funny pictures.

Isn't Doctor Fun made public domain if you put it on the Internet?

I hope I'm not the one who ultimately has to pursue that question to the bitter end, but in my opinion, no, it isn't. I've tried to come up with a common sense copyright for distributing Doctor Fun that goes like this: as long as the cartoons propagate through what a reasonable person would agree is part of the Internet, everything is fine. My goal is to get people to read Doctor Fun, so go ahead and print them out if you want to stick them on your door or fax them to somebody. I've tried to be generous about letting people use the cartoons for not-for-profit newsletters and stuff; basically, all you have to do is ask. Also - feel free to archive or mirror Doctor Fun on your own site if you'd like. Tell me about your mirror, and I'll even add it to the web page. My copyright restriction is really aimed at for-profit, non-Internet related reproduction, which would include stuff like books, magazines, t-shirts, mugs, inflatable dolls, etc.

Why are some of the cartoons copyrighted 1993, if it's now 1994?

I started drawing Doctor Fun several months before I launched it on the net, in order to give myself some breathing space. I was putting the copyright on the cartoons as I drew them, which turned out to be kind of a stupid idea once the year changed. I didn't think it made a big difference, since the Usenet header, and Gopher and Web text files have the correct date, but I've gotten so much e-mail about it that I've now started editing the old cartoons before I post them.

Is Doctor Fun available in print?

No - not yet. Doctor Fun is strictly a one-man operation, and there was no real long-range planning before I started it, other than to draw a bunch of cartoons in advance. I'd like to run it for at least one year before I start poking publications houses and such, for no other reason than I think projects like this ought to have time to grow without getting hyped up. I put out a couple feelers before I started Doctor Fun, but had difficulty explaining exactly what I was going to do to the publishing people I approached, mostly because none of them had any direct experience with the Internet.

How do you draw Doctor Fun?

People who are zealots about any particular OS or platform should probably stop reading right now, but if not, you have been warned. Doctor Fun is produced on 486 running DOS/Windows. Several people have asked for details on the hardware; I use a 486/66DX with 32 megs of RAM and a Maxtor 540 meg hardrive. My video card is an Orchid Kelvin 64 with 2 megs of DRAM - basically the cheapest LocalBus card I could get when I upgraded my system - I just wish they made a model with more memory. I use a Seiko CM1450 monitor (purchased off the net) and have a Fargo Primera color printer mostly used to print dye sub comps. I use a Wacom ArtPad with a pressure pen and an Epson ES-800C for scanning. My only gripe with this setup is that some vague, known problem with my motherboard apparently keeps me from running Fractal Design Painter. As this is the third machine I've had that couldn't run Painter because of some hardware problem, I'm a little down on the FDP guys. Given an unlimited budget, I would probably be using some other platform. Given a moderate budget, I would probably have to decide between improving what I have or moving to a similar setup on a different platform. What I have works well for what I do - although it now seems hopelessly slow on filtering effects compared to the Pentiums and PowerPC Macs I've tried out lately. Now for the more interesting stuff: Doctor Fun cartoons start out as black and white pen and ink drawings that I do with the pens I've been using for years (a Kuretake brush pen for drawing, Rapidographs for cross-hatching, and Rotring sketch pens for lettering.) I've never been a big fan of drawing freehand on the screen and probably won't change over completely until I have a portable hi-res display I can draw on directly - but what are scanners for, anyway? The drawings are scanned into Aldus PhotoStyler, converted and reduced in size to nicely anti-aliased greyscale images which are approximately the size of the final on-screen drawing. I make a 24-bit color copy of the greyscale image and color over it, pretty much destroying the black and white image in the process. For basic colors, I use the "Crayola Crayon " color set that I snagged out of Freehand originally, but now actually comes as an option with PhotoStyler. Depending on what kind of effect I'm trying for, I may end up making several masks and copies of the color image as I go along and combine them all into one image at the end. The greyscale image is then merged into the color image somewhat like an animation cel to produce the final image. The drawings are then inserted into a frame, and the caption, and copyright are added. I keep a final copy of the images in 24-bit TIFF format, but the copies that go out onto the net are in 24-bit JPEG, with low compression, to save bandwidth. I use the PBM toolkit to produce the thumbnails. Currently, the entire coloring process takes place in Aldus PhotoStyler 2.0, using Aldus' Gallery Effects to create some of the texturized backgrounds (I lean heavily on the "Texturizer" tool from Gallery Effects 2.) I've experimented with other drawing programs, Fractal Design Painter X2, Fauve Matisse, and Adobe Photoshop, but have found that PhotoStyler works best for what I do. (To be fair, I should point out that some of the problems I've had with the other programs have been with my Opti MonaLisa video card, but it's also something of a matter of personal taste - I would obviously have to pick something else if I switched platforms.)

Isn't GIF a more appropriate file format for cartoons than JPEG?

GIF is appropriate for images that have a color depth of 8 bits per pixel or less. I suspect that the majority of people viewing Doctor Fun at the moment are probably using 8-bit pixel depth (256 color) displays, and a smaller number are using something above that - up to 24-bits pixel depth. Everything that takes place after the original drawings are scanned in takes place in 24-bit color and I keep a final copy for myself in 24-bit PC TIFF format. At the moment, the two universally accepted formats for distributing pictures over the Internet are JPEG and GIF. Since GIF is used only for images up to 8-bits color pixel depth, I had to decide whether to chop the images down from 24-bit color and distribute as 8-bit GIF images, or keep them in 24-bit color and allow for some degradation in the JPEG compression. In experimenting around, I found that saving the images in JPEG format, using a low compression factor resulted in an image compression ration of 5-7/1 with no visible degradation on-screen when decoded to 8-bits or higher. By contrast, saving the images as GIFs only resulted in a compression ratio of about 1/2 (using LZW) and hacked the color depth from 24 to 8 bits. JPEG thus seemed to be the obvious choice; it saves some bandwidth and gives people using 16 or 24 bit color displays something extra. Ideally, of course, there would be no bandwidth, format or disk space considerations, and you would be served whatever you requested on the fly; be it GIFs, TIFFs, JPEGs, or whatever. We don't live in that world yet. A minor detail - viewed at 96 dpi on screen, the cartoons are approximately the same size as the original pen and ink drawings.

Why are the logos in GIF format?

The logos were designed to go on the World Wide Web Doctor Fun home page as in-line images. I change them every two weeks. Most web viewers at this time do not support anything other than the GIF and XBM graphics format for in-line images.

What's that animal on the logos?

I thought it was obvious when I started that the animal was a dog, since it was loosely based on the family dog, Charlie, but readers have pegged it as a variety of creatures, including an aardvark and a rat, so I'll waffle, and simply say it's a charlie.

Why do some of the cartoons have lots of texture and others don't?

Sometimes I don't think they need it, but in most cases, the older cartoons are simpler because I was adding to my technique (such as it is) as I went along. I made an effort to finally get rid the entire pool of early stuff in January, which is why there's more older material there (we're only really talking about a gap of two or three months, though, for the "older" material.) I am not posting the cartoons in the order I draw them, although the first cartoon (Clothes make the Spam) actually happens to be the first one I did.

What happened to the "Greatest Hits" page?

It will return. I haven't decided whether to use the big thumbnails and rotate cartoons in and out every now and then, or make up another set of tiny thumbnails just for the "Greatest Hits" page.

Thanks for reading Doctor Fun.

Pictures Page 1

Pictures Page 2

Pictures Page 3

Pictures Page 4

Pictures Page 5

David Farley (dgf1@midway.uchicago.edu)