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I people like it, I’m gonna do a werewolf movie every full moon. This past Saturday, the discord watched American Werewolf in London. It’s overall considered the best werewolf movie and it definitely earns that title. It had been awhile since I last watched it. I feel like I always forget how much humor is American Werewolf. It really helps break the tension on some of the more intense horror bits. There are also a lot of good tiny details that add to the general feeling of isolation the main character is feeling while being far from home.
Other than hosting a movies on my discord, I’m mostly gonna have my nose to the grindstone. I’m gonna finish Murky Water this month. I got the script for the next City Between finished. But I got to think up a title for it. It’s going to be a little bit more experimental and will be about a vampire. I want to establish some stuff about how vampires work in The City Between but also push my art/storytelling abilities.
Speaking of pushing storytelling and art, I recently watched The Tragedy of Macbeth (the one from 2021). And I’m glad I did. Joel Coen directed it and he clearly took the fact that folks are familiar with Macbeth as an opportunity to push the artistic look of the movie. Most of the sets are kinda sparse and completely white. So when strong light sources are used, almost every frame because a very striking visual.
It’s got me really inspired and I want to go through and save some shots to use as reference for black and white art.
I’m also working on my story with Ryan North for Iron Circus’s Failure to Launch Anthology. Since I’m the editor on that one, I’m working on a script for the book’s promo video. There is a lot of great stuff in this book. It’s a exciting that folks will get to see it soon.
That’s all for this month. Other than the movie hangs in discord things are kinda business as usual, drawing comics for my site and patreon, edit some manga, streaming on twitch, and trying to find time to reorganize things.
Thanks everyone for your support! You all have a good month.
WOOO! Also the globe spins! You Died won best anthology and I’m the editor on it. So I get a this fabulous fidget spinner.
I survived San Diego Comic Con. Partly that is because they did a great job with covid safety rules. We have to get a wristband showing we were vaccinated, every couple of hours there was an announcement reminded folks that masks are required, and security told folks to fix their masks if someone had it under their chin or not covering their nose. Overall things went well.
July was overall super busy. Between getting ready for San Diego Comic Con and an up tick in work from Seven Seas, I didn’t have a lot of time to do my comic work. This also lined up with a scene in You are the Chosen One with 9million horses and me needing to work on a short comic that is due in a couple of months. Basically the past three pages of You are the Chosen One took three times the amount of time to finish as usual because they are a big crowd scene with a parade of horses, like this one. So my buffer for You are the Chosen One is pretty much used up. The next two updates on my patreon are gonna be pencils. Then I’m gonna take a month or 2 off to get back ahead. In the meantime, I’m going to post in progress work for a comic I’m drawing and Ryan North wrote. It’s for a non-fiction comic anthology called Failure to Launch. So instead of You are the Chosen One that will go up on Fridays for Patreon backers.
Anyway, this month other than working on Failure to Launch, I’m also going to Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle. I’ll have my usual table near the entrance. I haven’t made a little map yet but we’ll be at table 206. Then after the show I am gonna dig into writing Blue Moon, my future book with Meredith McClaren.
I hope your August is chiller than mine. But either way, I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for your support! Take care.
Hey all, I hope you are having a good summer! This month I’ll be at San Diego Comic Con from July 20th through July 24th. In the past I’ve been in the small press area, but folks always had a hard time finding my table because the small press section has a different way of numbering tables. So this year I’ll be joining Alina Pete and Sam Logan at table 1229. It’s right along one of the main rows, so it should be easy to find if you enter through the B1 doors. In other exciting news, the Seven Seas Union has been officially recognized. I’m very excited about this moving forward and seeing how negotiations go. At my SDCC table, I’ll have some free pins of both pirate cats for anyone that supports the union. In June I went to Minneapolis for a friend’s wedding. I spent an extra day or two looking around the city and took pictures of all the art deco looking buildings and walkways the city has. The City Between’s future city has an art decoy look, so I am always on the look out for unique looking art deco buildings. I also look pictures of friends pets. u_u As for this month, I’ll mostly be working on Murky Water and You are the Chosen One again. Ya know, the usual. If you’ve been watching my twitch streams, you’ve seen that You are the Chosen One is in the middle of scene with too many horses. I wanna be done drawing that scene before I leave for SDCC.
After SDCC is done though, I’m gonna take sometime to work on the script for Blue Moon. I need to finish that before the end of the year. So my plate is looking pretty full.
But Cautionary Fables South America is almost ready for it’s crowdfund to launch. It’s going live in August, so get ready for some news on that.
Hey all! Another month as come and gone. I’ve mostly had my nose to the grind stone on the usual comics, The City Between and You are the Chosen One. I did pop on to War Rocket Ajax to promote You are the Chosen One, since chapter 3 has gotten the ball rolling. We detour into talking about video games a bit, but I do talk about how I came up with the characters names. So give it a listen.
Because I’ve been on War Rocket Ajax a bunch of times the listener questions are werewolf focused. And after the show it lead to me talking to my pal Kevin about something I think is a common problem in werewolf related media. Basically, there is a show called Wolf like Me on peacock’s streaming service. It is about werewolves. You can tell it’s about werewolves because of the name of the show. The problem is that it wants to build up to the reveal of the werewolf. So for several episodes it is building tension/momentum by hinting that one character is a werewolf but because you know know the title of the show you already know the character is a werewolf. Instead of building interest in their reveal/mystery, they are mostly building: And it’s a problem I’ve seen in a lot of werewolf media. That desire for a slow burn is something I understand. The slow burn is something I love when pulled off well. But it’s at odds with the title/marketing/etc, wanting people to know here be werewolves. This sorta conflict is something I’ve been thinking about in regards to the werewolf comic I’m working on, Blue Moon. The shows/movies I’ve seen where the slow burn works usually have another plot going on and the slow reveal of the werewolf is a b-plot.
Anyway, besides thinking about werewolves I watched a lot of Our Flag Means Death. If you don’t know, Our Flag Means Death is the new pirate comedy starring Rhys Darby and Taika Waititi. They play Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard. It’s a show that is very funny. It takes a little bit to gain steam but once Taika’s Blackbeard shows up, the show hits high points and keeps out doing itself. Stede and Blackbeard grow closer every episode and the two have a romantic arc. It’s one that I appreciate is text rather than subtext. I also got very invested in the non-binary pirate Jim’s story of getting torn between wanting vengeance and staying with the crew. I definitely hope it gets a season 2.
Anyway, this month I’m going to keep working on The City Between and You are the Chosen One. In the meantime, I did my taxes a few weeks ago and found out I owe the government more money than I expected. So I’m having a 20% off sale in my store with the coupon code: taxes
That sale will last until April 15th. So if you’ve been thinking about getting any of my books, now is a good time to grab some.
Anyway, enjoy your month and thank you all for your support.
February has come and gone. Spring is right around the corner.
I spent the month working on the new chapter of You are the Chosen One. I took a chunk of February off of it, so that I could do some concept art before diving into all the pages. But now it’s ready to get the ball rolling. When I’m working on Chosen One stuff, I have the whole thing written as a script. Then I go through and mark what are new areas and characters that need to be designed. This time around I sat down to make sure the characters had more than one outfit. There are only a few new locations in this chapter, so switching to that now seemed like a good idea. Like I always say, it’s available to read for anyone who backs my patreon.
Speaking of my patreon, I’ve been considering making a discord server for Patreon backers. Is that something that you all would be interested in? It’s something a lot of the patreons I back have. They are nice. I might use them to do movie nights once a month or something. Maybe a monthly q&a? Anyway, chime in if this appeals to you.
While working on all these new pages, I’ve done a good job stay ahead by doing art streams with Alina Pete and Jose Pimienta. It has been a pretty fun time. I put Alina and I’s streams together on a youtube playlist. So if you want to check it out, you can watch archives of Alina and I chatting here.
We mostly talk about what we have been reading and watching. Alina is in the middle of playing Cyberpunk 2077. I talk about whatever I’ve been watching or reading that week. We also go off on a lot tangents about whatever comes up, whether that be furries, opinions about different writers, and anything really.
One of the things I mention is a novelle Psalm of the Wild Built by Becky Chambers. It’s about a world where AI was created and when the robots rebelled they didn’t kill all the humans. They simply stopped doing their assigned buts and ventured off into the wilderness to find their own meaning. Now centuries later the monk main character is traveling to an abandoned temple to find the reason for her unhappiness. She runs into a robot and the two travel together and learn about each other. It was very quiet and introspective. The bulk of the book is the two leads on a road trip through the woods. They trade assumptions humans and robots have about each other. There is discussion about finding purpose in life, burn out, and taking care of yourself. It’s kinda short which I think helps the pacing. It’s long enough to really dig into its themes but if it was longer it could easily ended up dragging. I found it because I was looking for some books exploring Solarpunk, a more hopeful and pro-environmentally friendly view of the future and sci-fi worlds (in contrast to the bleakness to cyberpunk dystopias)
I’ve also been getting into Mythic Quest, a comedy on Apple TV that is about a game studio. It’s really funny. But I especially like that both seasons so far have an episode in the middle which is a self contained story that is only tangentially related to the rest of the season. But it is tied to it thematically. Like in season 1 you get an episode that follows the rise and fall of an indie game studio in the 90s. You see it through the eyes of a couple that made a successful game together, but when they try to make a sequel there is a clear clash of art vs commerce. That is spilling into the couple’s romantic relationship. It’s very bittersweet and connects thematically to the clash between the creative director of Mythic Quest and it’s head coder. It was a nice poignant story that added some more emotional depth to what is at stake for the employees of Mythic Quest.
Then the second season has its own one off episode. It follows the early career of an old fantasy writer who writes the lore of the Mythic Quest game. He’s trying to break into scifi and fantasy writing in the 70s, but his talents aren’t suited for prose. In the episode, his short story is critiqued by two other newbie authors. He takes their criticism badly and spirals. However, after drunkenly seeing pong in a store window, he has an epiphany about the future of writing. When he tries to explain he basically explains open world games and games with variant endings.
The thing that I appreciated (and maybe it’s something I picked up because I write) is that the criticism he gets makes it clear that he’s a writer that is frequently distracted by making things different with his world and explaining why. And because he is so caught up explaining why the world developed a certain way, he is forgetting to make the reader invested in the plot and characters. That’s bad for prose, but is well suited for an open world game where the gameplay is more the focus than the backstory. The player’s investment is in their character because they made themself. Then they can engage in world lore as much or as little as they want.
Anyway, I’m gonna keep my nose to the grid stone in March. The City Between and You are the Chosen One are staying on track with their weekly updates. But I also have a graphic novel to write. Blue Moon by me and Meredith McClarren is go. So I’m sitting down to write a bunch for that.
That’s all for this month. Thanks for your support! Please back my patreon or get something from my store if you can. Have good month!
