Two quick points:

Point a: I did a brain dump / cleanout of my bookmarks for comic production and stuck everything in the new “tools for drawing” tools for comics page you see over there to the right left. Take a gander if you’re interested. I’ll probably add to it regularly because even right now I know there’s stuff I forgot to put on there.

Point b: Comic art quality’s about to take a drop again. Remember back in March when I’d just finished the Longest Night of the Summer strips and I announced an art shift because it was just taking too damn long to make each strip? Well, I’m at that point again — I need to build the buffer back up, and not just with IoI comics. So in order to produce comics slightly faster we’re going to take a planned quality hit.

Someday when I’m rich and famous I’ll go back and redraw them to look nicer. Don’t hold your breath until that occurs.

Thanks to Jzimbert for pointing out I don’t know my right from my left after midnight

It goes by so fast…

Apologies for the radio silence, folks. It’s been a bit of a crazy week.

Wednesday evening I went out for celebratory “We did it!” drinks and snacks with a classmate. Had a good time but got home fairly late, and still had to work a bit on the comic for Saturday, which I can just about guarantee won’t be up on time.

Thursday night I went over to Mike & Steen’s to visit with them and Justin and Ginia. Justin and Ginia (who you might know from the forum as jzimbert and vjinton) were up visiting both friends and family all over Pennsylvania all this week – their first trip north from Georgia in five years. We had a great time, dinner and card games until late into the evening.

Today we took the day off from work to visit some more – took a trip out to Reading to a Dave & Busters-like arcade called The Works, where we also had a lot of fun, and some good food. But J&G need to be in Nashville by Saturday noon, so we couldn’t exactly make a weekend out of it.

And this evening, after returning from The Works, Nighthawk and I drove over to my parents with the pudge-dog, ate pie, checked out my sister’s schedule of classes for high school, and celebrated my brother’s birthday. We only arrived home here at about 11:00pm. (Did I mention the comic? It’ll be late.)

Lots of highs and lows – a rollercoaster’s the best way to describe the week. Everyone and everything is busy, busy, busy, and has been since I graduated. I feel like I’ve barely gotten my feet under me. I wouldn’t trade the time I spent with J&G for anything, because it’s been way too long, but it also felt way too short, and I miss them now more than I have for a long time. I can only imagine how their minds have been reeling from a one-week tour of the places and people and things that had once defined their lives. If the “up” of seeing them is tempered by the “down” of watching them leave for me, it can only be that much harder for them. Still, they’re doing well in Georgia, and I’m glad to see them happy and healthy and able to visit.

It doesn’t feel like 5 years since Ginia and I were roommates in college. It doesn’t feel like 13 years since I entered 11th grade. It all goes by so fast.

Bonus goofiness

So I’m in a training class for Visio today… I’ve learned a lot, but any time you’re learning computer stuff as a group, it’s a slow process. Which means lots of down-time, mostly in 30-second intervals.

So that means I’ve been hanging out on the forum, of course, and Jzimbert dared me to make a comic in Visio while I was at it… which of course I had to do.

Now the king of shape-based art IMHO is Paul Gadzikowski, who draws Arthur, King of Time and Space (in the much more challenging-to-use MS Paint, no less) where the comic character King Arthur draws his own comic, which is shape-based.

So you can count this as a tribute to AKOTAS as well as a “Ha! I can do that!” to the forum crowd ;)


visio comic

Cheesecake!

nighthawk


it occurred to me about two hours ago that there’s no way I’m making tonight’s deadline, so in the tradition of great sequential artists everywhere, I offer cheesecake instead.

The classic definition of cheesecake involves pin-up girls, but I’m right out. What I do have is pictures of the best looking man I know, and the inspiration for Cole, Lila’s husband, who’s actually going to appear in an upcoming strip after a long hiatus. So today, the cheesecake is for the ladies.

So that I can get a bit of a head start on the buffer again, we’ll see more cheesecake shortly…. but probably not of Cole.

Update: Jzimbert informs me (rather awkwardly, I might add) that the technical term for male cheesecake is beefcake. But that sounds too much like meatloaf to me, so I’m sticking with “male cheesecake” for now.