Category: Bottom of the Deck

Anyone who saw my #gentlecomicshabit post yesterday will know what the big event of the week is; for those who didn’t, there’s no beating around the bush:

I’m unemployed again.

My probationary period with the company came to an end, and they decided that the position they had tried to carve out for me wasn’t a good fit with the organization as a whole, and as a result there was no longer a place for me there. While they acknowledged my talent in some areas and pointed out my difference in tastes elsewhere, it didn’t matter in the end because there just wasn’t enough for me to do that could justify my continued employment.

I’m not going to lie: this sucks. I don’t know if the full weight of it hasn’t hit yet, or if I’m just numb to the idea of being let go at this point, but I’m just feeling adrift at the moment. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, got up with a raging headache and was generally out of sorts all morning; thankfully some food, some meds and a nap helped with that by the end of the day, plus my workout involved a lot of shadowboxing in order for me to relieve some stress. No comic upload alongside this blog, call it a skip day, I’ll have something new tomorrow.

On Monday, I’ll be going into the office one more time, just to fill out all the necessary paperwork, and then it’s back into the job market for me. I already have a few ideas where to start, as well as some friends and family that can hopefully point me in the right direction to find something new. On the other hand, since I’ll be at home all day, it’ll be a good opportunity to keep building my portfolio; I doubled down on writing the last time, now I’ve go no excuse not to go all out on art.

To that end, I want to start frequenting my local library at least a few times a week. As much as I enjoy being at home with the cats and having the fridge almost within arms reach, such things are a major distraction, and I think I could get a lot done by spending three or four hours in a quiet, office-like environment instead.

No time to sit on my laurels like before; three months of employment is nowhere near as exhausting as four years without a significant break, so this weekend will be my only grace period. Come Monday, the real work begins.

Ciao for now.

It’s Saturday, let’s get back into the blogging habit.

Habit building is the name of the game around here lately; I’ve been sticking with the #gentlecomicshabit for a week now, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. It’s a neat little drawing exercise to follow up my daily physical exercise, of which I have started my second 30 Day Challenge of the year. Going strong on both fronts, I think I can manage a weekly blog post too (he says hopefully).

You may notice that there’s no #gentlecomicshabit post today, which is perfectly normal. The challenge itself allows for a missed day here and there due to extenuating circumstances, though preferably no two consecutive days. The reason for the skipped post today is that I’m working on a different comics challenge, namely the Hourly Comic Day challenge. This one challenges the participants to draw a small comic for every hour of the day that they are awake, optionally posting them throughout the day. This would basically amount to the equivalent of the daily habit building comic, just every hour of the day.

Fortunately, the rules for this challenge are flexible; the comics don’t have to be done every hour, on the hour, nor do they have to be uploaded as such either. People have busy days, we don’t have time to stop, draw and upload constantly throughout; it’s the reason that a lot of people don’t bother with this challenge, or citing that they don’t feel like chronicling what amounts to pretty mundane activities. While I can’t call my days particularly interesting either, to me it’s not about the content itself, only that it gets created; by the time I go to bed tonight, I can say that I created something, which I find myself wanting to proclaim a lot more these days.

As I haven’t gone to bed yet, the comics are still coming; I’ll likely upload them to Bluesky when I go to sleep tonight, or first thing tomorrow morning in a single thread. Despite the mundane nature of it all, I’ve managed to find the occasional bit of humour in a day filled with laundry and cleaning house, so I hope the end result will give you a chuckle or two.

To fill the rest of my time tonight, I’m going to be trying to line up some Magic Beans strips for the upcoming month; that’ll give me some “official” comics to upload at least once a week while I keep working on my mainline books. With a bit of luck (and a lot of coffee) I may have something ready to present to you all sometime in March; if I can get it done by my birthday at the latest, that would be great.

Anywho, I’d better get back to scribbling; will chat again to you properly next week. In the meantime, the habit comics will keep flowing, and you can expect the return of Magic Beans on Tuesday!

Ciao for now.

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.

Two months since there has been any activity on this site; one would almost think I’d dropped off the face of the Earth again. Not happening, people; I aten’t dead.

After my birthday in March, things just started happening that were too fast to keep up with, but in hindsight not worth dwelling on, so I didn’t bother to record anything for blog posts. I fell back into routine, just keeping my head down while still trying to keep it above water. I’ve been brainstorming, doodling, jotting down notes and concepts, but not a lot has manifested in the way I want it to, and despite the vitamin supplements I haven’t felt the right energy to create intensively. This wasn’t helped by the changing of the seasons and the workload at the day job playing up my anxieties. That being said, it’s not like I’ve been doing nothing at all.

The 30 Day JLX Amalgam Challenge during March was completed successfully; I was immensely proud of myself for finally finishing a month-long art challenge, having failed several times in the past. Here’s the full compilation of art pieces, stylized as trading cards and a fold-out poster; this was a very 90’s sort of challenge, so I went with the trends of the times:

It felt good to check off the first block of my Art Bingo card for the year. I also hopped onto the 100 Original Characters Challenge; that one’s taking a bit longer, but I’m 66 characters in and spacing them out so that they aren’t overwhelming me.

March in that regard was super productive. April… ugh, where to start with April… I think this is why I didn’t want to blog so much; April was when stuff started to go wrong. My car needed some major repair work, I had to take several days off work to accommodate it, and I cringed every time I looked at my credit balance. My saving grace is that with the end of the month came ComicCon Cape Town. While I was there primarily in a supportive capacity once again, and the stresses of making the convention work were relentless, it sorted itself out in the end, and the profits are going a long way to clearing our debts. Like I said, I didn’t want to dwell on it so much, but I inevitably did, and I think that contributed to my low-power, safe mode-bootup existence for the past few weeks. Prime example: last Saturday I napped from 9am to 1pm with a cat on my lap, then spent the afternoon painting miniatures and binge-watching X-Men ‘97, my brain effectively running on background power.

Through it all, my ambitions have only increased, and I may be making myself unnecessarily depressed by not being able to do all of the things, not having the time or the energy to create everything that passes through my head (and there’s a lot; I must have conceived another six different stories in the past month). In my mind, I feel like I could churn out so many comics if they were my full time job, if I could work from home all day, if I had a fancy Cintiq tablet to make the drawing more natural, if I wasn’t shackled by the constraints of the day-to-day, if if if if if if IF. All of the “ifs,” the “ands,” the “buts,” rattling around in my head and telling me that there’s no way I can do what I want, because that’s just the way things are. Well, in the words of a surprisingly eloquent duck: ““The way things are” stinks!” To change that, I’m going to have to make it happen; I can’t do it alone, but I’m going to have to be the one to take the first step. Once more unto the starting blocks, dear friends, once more; time to get a real routine going again.

First priority: clear the debt; that should be sorted come next month, but I think it might be time to open up commissions again. Any little extra income is going to help; I’m going to have to self-promote like never before, as well as set up a proper payment system. If you came here from Bluesky, my DMs are open; I’ll be posting a commission pricing sheet sometime in the next week.

Second priority: new day job; I’ve set up an account with a recruitment agency, so it’s time to follow up on every recommendation they send my way. Anything that I can find that is closer to home (or better yet, remote work) and can improve my net income for the month will be a welcome relief.

Third priority: get the comics flowing; I’ve been able to squeeze pages out in the past despite everything, so there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to now. Even if I only get two pages out a week instead of three, or heck even just one, I need to start getting the stories out of my noggin and online.

Everything else is more long term; by the end of the year, it would be nice to buy something like a Cintiq tablet to make the work easier, or a Nintendo Switch to have something to play more casual games on in my downtime, but those are non-essentials. I can still do what I need to do with the equipment already at my disposal, so no excuses on that front.

Maybe one day I’ll have the time, energy and freedom to become the comic producing juggernaut that I’ve always wanted to be; if Jack Kirby could churn out six pages a day, why shouldn’t I be able to eventually as well? Until that day comes, the marathon continues; I needed to sit and rest for a while, but now I’m back at the line, waiting for the starting gun to fire. 

BANG.

Posting rather late tonight, it’s been a bit of a full day; the less said about the day job the better, but all I’ll say is that I only managed to squeeze in one character portrait, so you know it was packed.

The JLX Amalgam challenge is going great; of the 40 character designs due by the end of the month, I’ve gotten through 21, with the first 15 already uploaded. I’m having a blast drawing these things, and thanks to the layout that I’m using, they remind me a lot of the trading card collections of the 90s, which is very thematic with the era the characters hearken from. I mean, see for yourself:

Aren’t you lucky, getting to see the next six characters in advance? This is the quality content you come here for; I really should start that Patreon sometime, creative juggernaut that I am /end sarcasm.

Aside from that, I’m approximately a third of the way through the 100 OC challenge, the portraits of which I will begin uploading soon; I’ll probably wait until April rolls around so that I’m not clashing with the other art challenge, though if I feel that I can’t wait any longer, I’ll start uploading after my birthday next week. Oh yeah, that…

As of next Sunday, I’ll have spent 35 years existing, which I’m sure you’ll agree is a decently substantial amount of time to have been doing a single thing. I still don’t think I’m particularly good at it, but I’m continuously breaking my record for how long I’ve done it, pretty much on a daily basis as it happens, so that’s something. As I continue to exist, I also continue to have mixed feelings about my birthday, particularly as I’m now approaching middle age, numerically speaking. I tend to keep the occasion as simple as possible, usually just a casual meet up with friends or family, primarily the ones who won’t stoop to singing that bloody song at me, and I don’t encourage gift giving; I always feel bad that I don’t have the capability to reciprocate gifts on other people’s birthdays, so it feels wrong for anyone to spend money on mine. Give me a cake and a day where I don’t have to do anything, and that’s enough for me. I intend to keep this attitude until I turn 73, and that’s when the big party will be; the reasons are too complex to explain right now.

That’s pretty much it for this week; I’ve had a few new/old/revised story ideas knocking around in my head today, so I might see about jotting down a few notes for them this weekend since I’m ahead on character portraits. I’d also better haul out my D&D notes again; I’m returning to a game tomorrow night that has been on hold for most of a year, so who knows if any of the people involved are going to remember anything.

Ciao for now.

Okay, I’m not quite as buzzed this week; still productive, but not manic, so let’s actually talk about something this time.

I mentioned a couple weeks back about how I’d been watching some documentaries about comic books, specifically some of the creators widely regarded as the greats; some stuff I already knew, other bits were revelatory to learn, and all of it was majorly inspiring. I knew that Jack “The King” Kirby was a creative machine who could churn out a mountain of content, but I had no idea it was because he worked anywhere up to 16 hours a day; his creativity just couldn’t be stopped. I knew of Todd McFarlane’s decision to found Image Comics with several of his ex-Marvel colleagues in the name of creative freedom and intellectual property rights, but was blown away by just how fervently he believes in carving out a niche for oneself when the existing infrastructure doesn’t work the way you want. I learned, and was inspired by all these and more, but this morning, the news of another comic legend’s passing overshadows them all.

It was announced today that one week ago, respected manga creator Akira Toriyama passed away from an acute subdural hematoma, at the age of 68. Primarily a comedic creator, Toriyama was most well known for his distinctive art style that captured the hearts of a generation in the video games Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger, and the powerhouse manga/anime series Dragon Ball and its sequels. To say that Dragon Ball Z was an influence on my childhood would be an understatement; the latest episode appearing on TV would be the highlight of my weekday afternoon, a microcosm of levity at the end of a long school day. The characters were well defined, fantastically detailed and unique in their presentation, and were outspoken in their message of becoming stronger to protect the ones they loved. Everyone in my school wanted to be Son Goku; the show was the ultimate unifier amongst nerds and jocks, preps and bullies, because there was no way you could bash someone for liking Dragon Ball Z. 

Toriyama had a reputation for being a “pantser” when it came to writing; he rarely, if ever, plotted out a full storyline in advance, preferring to throw characters into a situation and let them just keep going until they hit the few beats he had in mind. He also had a whimsy when it came to character design; characters could be anthropomorphic animals, hideous monsters, or sometimes just a dude with three eyes, and none of this was ever regarded as particularly odd in the world that he had created; it was just widely accepted that his worldbuilding ran on two rules: Weird and Cool, and Weird more often than not overrode Cool. Reportedly, this drove his editors nuts; they would instruct Toriyama towards certain character designs and plotlines, and he would turn around and just do whatever he thought would be fun instead (e.g. the God of Destruction Beerus was designed both visually and personality-wise on his own Cornish Rex cat, instead of the lizard-like beast design that had been lined up). Rather infamously, Toriyama had a tendency to forget a lot of his established lore, because he often didn’t think beyond what the next chapter would be; he took the resulting inconsistencies and rolled with them, so any continuity snarls that arose would just become terrifying new twist characters that broke the rules and were all the more popular for it. Despite it all, his storylines always found their way back to themselves, tying up loose ends and bringing the tale full circle; he was a true master of discovery writing.

Still writing and drawing up to the day he died, Akira Toriyama will be forever remembered as a creative mind and whimsical soul, and his work as a tour de force in the manga industry, instrumental as a forerunner in bringing the medium into the western public eye. Without Dragon Ball Z inflating the anime boom of the 90s, there’s no telling how different the landscape of comics, cartoons and social consciousness in general would look on a world-wide scale; it influenced a whole new generation of creators across the globe and is one of the defining stars of the shōnen genre to this day. On a more personal level, if not for Akira Toriyama, my childhood would have been a little less colourful, and a lot more boring; because of his work, I made new friends, I was inspired to create, and I can’t imagine how I would have turned out without it.

Thank you for the memories, Toriyama-sensei.

R.I.P.

I’m going to make this one quick, I’m having too much of a blast to slow down right now.

For the month of March, I’m going to be attempting to cross a box off my 2024 Art Bingo card by completing a 30 Day Art Challenge; I know my previous attempts at such things have failed, but considering how many character portraits I’ve been pumping out lately (I swear I have, you’ll see them soon enough!), I think I may just stand a chance this time. The challenge is the JLX Unlimited Amalgam Character Challenge, i.e. a mouthful; every day sees a member/enemy of the Justice League being melded with one from the X-Men, creating a series of amalgamated characters. I’ve already leapt into the challenge, intent on getting my weekend uploads ready in advance, and maybe even get a head start on some for next week. For those of you who take the time to actually read my blog, congrats! You get to see Saturday and Sunday’s entries in advance, as well as the first one today; check ‘em out:

I swear, those vitamin supplements must be doing wonders for me, I haven’t felt this motivated in ages. Once I’ve gotten another character or two out of my system tonight, I can use tomorrow to finally start catching up on Showcase pages again.

That’s all I’m going to say this time, too much stuff I want to get done. Have a great weekend!

Ciao for now.

Yes, I’m still alive, believe it or not; I just didn’t really have anything much to say last week, and inadvertently forgot to mention it.

I may have been somewhat distracted; I’ve lost count of how many times I watched this trailer:

Honestly, I was sold the moment this was announced; this series (and theme song) were an integral part of my childhood and elevated my love of superheroes from a very young age. Fingers crossed that this means we can get a revival of the 90’s Spider-Man cartoon as well; it was meant to have a dimension-hopping storyline for its final season, and the Spider-Verse is pretty much a proven concept at this point, so…? Maybe? Please?

While actual comic art has been a bit of a non-starter at the moment, I have been busy with a project that I’ve been sitting on for a while; in my spare moments, I’ve been creating character portraits as part of a 100 Original Characters challenge. It’s essentially a basic, yet expanded version of what Fifth Ace Showcase #0 is meant to be: a collection of all the characters I have plotted out to join my comic universe at one stage or another. I had selected the most prominent ones to have bios and backstories written up for the comic issue, but the 100 OCs challenge is just about getting their look down and catalogued; I’ve had the list prepped for almost a year at this point, but I never dug in my heels and started for a number of reasons. At this point, I just said “to hell with it” and hopped to it.

I’ll share a few of the pictures when I’m comfortable that I’ve got enough in the bag to confirm that I’m not going to abandon the project part-way through; I’m having a lot of fun with it, as I’m getting to draw a bunch of characters with unique designs that I would otherwise be sitting on for ages until they appear in stories. It’s also allowing me to explore the characters a little more intimately; most of them were just one-line descriptions that I intended to flesh out later, but just the process of drawing them makes me think of details that hadn’t yet occurred to me to include in their characterisation. Hopefully this will motivate me to get back to the comic pages soon too.

I don’t know if me making progress on this project is a result of that new-start energy that might burn out really quick, but it might also be due to the vitamin supplements that I was recommended this weekend past; I certainly feel like I have more energy, though it could be a placebo effect for all I know. Whatever the cause, I’m feeling more productive than I have in a while; let’s hope that I can maintain it for a while longer.

I’ll leave it there for this one; I had a whole other spiel about some of the comic book documentaries I’ve been listening to lately, but I’ll save that for another slow week. Right now I want to get back to drawing; I’ve got a lot of social interaction and meal prep to do this weekend, so I’ve got to take advantage of every moment that I can.

Ciao for now.

Maybe I should just make Fridays my blogging days at this rate, huh?

Artwork is crawling along; I’ve been doing a lot of doodling in my brief moments of spare time, trying to get back into the groove once more; I think it’s working, but only time will tell. Exercises are still being maintained, regardless of screaming underused muscle groups. There’s still a roof over our heads, there’s still food on the table, and Sparrow only seems to lose his collar once per week on average. All in all, life goes on.

I had a whole rant about social media that I was going to post with this, but having typed it out, I’m not in the mood to rile up anyone about anything, least of all myself; social media is already stressful enough without inviting more stress, so I’m just going to leave it unsaid to the world at large. That’s what my journal is for: ranting about my opinions where they can’t be used to bother anyone.

I’m going to try and get some more artwork done and listen to the new episode of The Magnus Protocol, so have a good weekend everybody; I want to keep mine as uneventful as possible.

Ciao for now.

The fact that this is a day late should already give you some idea of how this past week has been, but I’m gonna splurge some more of it at you for a bit, anyway.

I still haven’t found the energy or motivation to get anything done around here, and it’s down to the usual suspects; the mounting workload at the day job means I have had no free time to get comic art done during the day. The massive burst of productivity that I was riding at the beginning of the year no longer has room to expand in the ever-growing deluge of “real” work that I have to do to keep the roof over our heads. I have to make do with the little nuggets of writing that I can squeeze in when I’m at least 20% sure that an email isn’t about to land in my inbox within the next three minutes; that is literally how I’m typing this up right now. So let’s just consider any future comic updates as TBD and “when they get there,” yeah?

At least I can say that I’m keeping up with my exercises; I got through the first 30 day workout program and am three days into the next one. The first month was more about settling into the routine of getting up at a certain time and doing something first thing in the morning, ideally before it gets too warm; this next month is about cranking up the intensity a little. It’s still nothing huge, but the fact that Day 1 left me gasping for air in a shower-worthy sweat means that I’m definitely on the next rung up the ladder now; the residual ache in certain muscles is another indicator that I’ve come to appreciate as a physical feeling of progress. I’m making it a point to not check my weight, as I know these minor exercises are not going to move the needle very much; any real change is likely only going to happen around the fifth or sixth month mark, if anything. At this point, I’d settle for getting more energy out of it; if fitness is directly proportional to energy levels, and I increase my fitness, then I should have more energy to get other stuff done, in theory. 

What I’m saying is that I want to get fit so that I have more energy to actually do what I want to do i.e. write and draw more comics; I don’t know if that kind of energy can translate into creativity, but it would still be nice not to be completely burnt out by the time I get home in the evening, so I’m doing what I can. I guess running would probably be the ideal thing, but I don’t care how many joggers I see going past the house in the morning: I am not going outside before the sun comes up where people can see me; say what you like, but I do NOT look good in running shorts, and I haven’t shed enough of my dysmorphia to not care about that. Hopefully that can start to change with enough exercise as well.

Anyway, back to the grindstone; going to drown out what passes for “music” on the radio with the new episodes of The Magnus Protocol and some YouTube video essays while I get through whatever happens to ooze into my inbox for the rest of the day.

Ciao for now.