I would probably be more comfortable in this heat if I shaved, but there’s an issue I have when I go beardless:
Hopefully that will be less of an issue once I start losing some weight. I should still trim, though…
#gentlecomicshabit – 4 Minute Comic
Month: January 2025
#gentlecomicshabit – 3 Minute Comic
For those not in the know, I work for a printing company as my day job (now a different printing company than the previous one), and I was commissioned by my H.O.D. to design a print for a banner wall, one that we can use as a display sample; he said I could literally do anything, such as incorporate something with my comic style and characters.
My Bluesky followers will have seen some progress shots of what I’ve been working on: a splash image of 20 characters in a dynamic charging shot. This thing is going to be 3 x 2.25m in size; I might even ask if I can have a second print to keep, juuuuust in case I ever end up back in a convention booth…?
#gentlecomicshabit – 2 Minute Comic
If you’ve known me personally for any significant amount of time, or follow me on Bluesky, you are undoubtedly aware of how I handle the heat:
There’s an ancient Greek term: Kakotherēs; it literally means “bad at summer” or “unfit for summer.” I can imagine an ancient Greek hero with that name, whose weakness is temperatures above 26 degrees Celsius; he would look just like me.
#gentlecomicshabit – 1 Minute Comic
First blog post for the #gentlecomicshabit. The idea behind this daily exercise is to form the habit of creating comics at a set time each day, by creating said comics within a small time limit that gradually increases. This first one only took a minute (plus some minor formatting, but I’m primarily counting the drawing time), while the next one will be done in two minutes; the next will take three minutes and so on, until I’m sitting down to draw for up to an hour or beyond.
I’m slotting in my drawing sessions directly after my daily workouts, so that I can link the two habits together and build them simultaneously; that should explain the topic I chose for this first one:
As time goes on, I’ll increase the number of panels and broaden the subject matter, but I want to eventually use these daily habitual sessions to be drawing actual Fifth Ace Comics updates; it could be a month or two before I reach that stage, so enjoy these silly little doodles in the meantime.
Ciao for now.
Bottom of the Deck – 2025/01/24
It has been… a very long hiatus, longer than I had thought, so this will be making up for lost time, strap in.
A lot has happened between the last blog post and this one, a whole eight months worth of stuff, and yet it seems like not that much has changed on the surface of it all. I mean, there haven’t been any comics updated on this site in a literal year, for a start. Chalk it up to the usual excuses; if the lack of energy and time wasn’t the issue, I can instead pin a lot of it on demoralization.
I once again lost my job in September last year, practically two years to the day since the previous time I lost it, from the same company, for the same reasons. To say I was surprised would be a lie, but I was still disappointed; you’d think they would have learned their lesson since the last time, but nope, the axe was dropped. When they came back to me a month later, just like the previous occasion, this time I said no, and not just because they offered me a bum deal that would have seen me working in those toxic conditions for even LESS money. Fool me once, and all that.
In the month or so that followed my retrenchment, I focused in on writing a lot more. Just because the comics haven’t been flowing doesn’t mean that they haven’t been on my mind; I threw myself into script outlines and plotting the overall arch of my continuity. Certain characters took greater prominence, new ones were inserted unexpectedly, and priorities shifted to form a more cohesive narrative. The outlines are all in various stages of completion, but I now have a total of 42 issues of my ongoing universe plotted out, with the aim to continue on afterwards. Just when I thought was going to be the next Jim Shooter and rival the Valiant Comics blueprint for levels of ambition, that’s when I got a new job in November.
It’s pretty much the same as my old job, but with better people, a nicer environment, a shorter commute and, most importantly, a higher salary. I’m grateful for the opportunity presented and I come home less exhausted than I did before (an hour earlier, too), but you’ll notice that there’s still not a lot of comics happening. Much as how I’ve been plotting out the continuity of my stories, I’ve also been plotting out how to encourage myself to keep working on the artwork in the face of a day job.
To this end, I discovered an art challenge on socials called the Gentle Comics Habit, a small, gradually escalating daily comics exercise that I plan to utilize and get myself back into the habit of drawing stuff in the evenings. Alongside my restarted exercise plan (yes, I’m trying again, give me a little credit for the effort), I’m hoping that this form of habit building will blossom into full pages eventually be drawn every night. Eventually being the operative word.
What does this mean for the release schedule? Well, Issue #0 of the Fifth Ace Showcase has been incomplete for too long, so I’m going to finish that off first, and I’ll be capping it at a grand total of… 10 pages. It was initially planned to be a lot longer, presenting a lot more characters, but through the process of my script outlines, I realised how much the characters were changing as I wrote them, and any further pages in Issue #0 would quickly become outdated or inaccurate. So in the interest of cohesiveness, I’ll be releasing what pages I already have completed next week, Mon/Wed/Friday and call that issue done and dusted.
I’ll also be uploading the results of the Gentle Comics Habit, in the form of blog posts rather than an archive of strips, just to ensure that I’m also getting in the habit of putting stuff online. Those should start trickling in from tomorrow, maybe with a day missing here or there at most, fingers crossed.
As for the comics I’ve been writing, I’m looking into ways to release those in a more structured way, preferably after they are complete; I don’t want to be soliciting anything that I can’t present to you, so I’m not going to talk too much about that. However, I’m hoping to have some kind of plan in place by the end of March at the latest, again fingers crossed.
In the meantime, starting next month, I want to have something happening on the comics side of things here, so I’ll be bringing back a weekly upload of Magic Beans! I sort of left it hanging after I went into it half-cocked, but I’ve been doing some plotting for that now as well; combined with the building of habits, there’s a good chance I can be a bit more consistent with the uploads, cross those fingers a third time.
That was a lot, unsurprisingly, so I’m going to call it here. Incidentally, if you came to this post from Facebook, don’t hold your breath when it comes to seeing more posts there; the whole Meta situation has got me avoiding that website like the plague, so consider this the one and only breach of quarantine. For more consistent notifications on what I’m up to, either check back here daily, or follow me on Bluesky.
Ciao for now.
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