thepenmonster

An old friend was cleaning up his basement and in a dusty corner he found a folder. Inside was an assortment of art from the 1990s.



This guy is the only half original one of the character designs I'm about to share. I did a romance comic and he was the supporting character/ enabler. He was the only person in the comic with a remotely stable adult relationship.

The rest of these were all drawn n a haze of geeky fandom. Derivative. I spent decades trying to put comfortable distance between myself and these retreads of other people's ideas.



So we were ripping off Dragonball Z back in the 1990s. It's part of the reason why I lack interest in just about every action anime & manga folks go nutty for these days. Been there, done that.

Or maybe I just grew out of it?



No memory of these. I assume they were TTRPG characters I drew for other people but they could be anything.

Ooo! A giant sword. How original! Even 30 years ago that was played out.


I still write comic scripts this way. It works for me but it means a lot of wasted paper when I decide it needs a rewrite... or binning.

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Looking at these I will say that I feel energised to finish up the ll digital comic I'm currently drawing an get back to ink on paper.

I'm running a webcomic right now. I'm doing it because I needed to stay busy as I lived off of my life savings seeking medical help for my chronic back pain. Also to prove to myself that I could still make a comic despite a decade and a half of not doing so.

I've proven that I can still make a comic. That was great. Not so great: The Nova Scotian healthcare system has basically told me to fuck off and come back when my back is injured enough to put me in the hospital. I guess I'm supposed to self-medicate too? What a failure of a system.

As our political parties intended. Gotta make sure that tax money goes to our precious oligopolies and monopolies.

Complaints about the gutting of the Canadian social safety net aside... Every day I come into the den, grunt in pain as I sit down at the Wacom tablet, and open Clip Studio Paint. Digital comics for the ease of colouring. For the ease of adding dialog. For the ease of fixing mistakes. Ease. Easy.

It's not as satisfying as getting it done on a piece of paper.

The comic I'm running will end in about ten installments. Once it's done I plan to abandon both a regular update schedule and Clip Studio Paint. There's no point in tap dancing for an audience that vastly prefers the types of comics that I don't make anyway. The only logical path is to work for my own satisfaction.

Right now that satisfaction is on paper and shared whenever it's done.
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This will probably change after the fifth time I spill ink on my page.