About Sheercore
Welcome to Sheercore, a web comic which chronicles the misadventures of a group of geeks. Sometimes with swords!
About the author
I’m your host, Matt Legend Gemmell, and I’m the strip’s author. I have a blog at mattgemmell.com if you’re interesting in knowing a bit more about me.
The events of Sheercore are based on my daily conversations with the people in my life, notably including my friends and colleagues from my university years (we’re mostly Computing Scientists). You can read about the strip’s regular cast of characters by visiting the cast page.
You can email me at matt at (this domain) if you like.
The Swords
If you’ve read the cast page, you’ll know that both Matt and Chris have swords. These aren’t just ordinary blades, either: they are none other than the fabled Interdimensional Swords, allowing their bearers to travel at will through time and space (and affording a great deal of freedom in writing the strips, I might add).
The origin of these blades is shrouded in mystery, and all will be revealed in due course.
Stick-figures?
As you’ve no doubt noticed, the visual “style” of the strip has two primary influences: the awesome xkcd, and the fact that I have no artistic talent whatsoever. On the up side, it’s easy to draw, caption, scan, process and upload a new strip within half an hour, so hurrah for stick figures!
Each strip is drawn on whatever is lying around on my desk using a Pentel 0.5mm mechanical pencil, scanned, then adjusted for brightness/contrast, cropped and scaled in Photoshop, and finally uploaded to the site.
Technical stuff
On the technical side, this comic is run by the spiffy WordPress blogging software, and uses a slightly customized (mainly just to support tooltips on the strips, a la Dinosaur Comics) version of the ComicPress theme to make my life considerably easier. Check them out if you’re interested in a low-rent way to get your own web comic up and running.
Each strip includes a full transcription (which is hidden when you view the site in a regular web-browser), so if you’re looking for a strip and you can’t remember when it was published or what it was called, you can just search for something one of the characters said, and the right strip should pop up.
The transcriptions also mean that people with visual impairments who use screen-reading software (or the hardcore few who are just using a text-based browser because they prefer it that way) can still understand what’s going on. High-fives all round!
Feedback
Feel free to post comments on individual strips or on the news articles if you want to get in touch or just share your thoughts. I use an automated spam-catching system, so it’s possible your comment might go into a moderation queue. If that happens, don’t panic: I’ll review your comment and approve it soon after, and it’ll appear on the site.
You can also just email me directly (see the “About the author” section above), or you can post on the forums.
Sharing these comics
If you’re interested in republishing any of the strips elsewhere, get in touch. Generally I’ll be happy to grant permission, as long as the strip is appropriately credited and the sheercore.com site is mentioned.
If you’d like to link to the site, feel free to use this button:
Here’s the code, if you want to just copy and paste it:
Thanks for reading!
