Hi friends followers and subscribers, I hope this finds you as well as can be expected and that you have a wonderful winter solstice and holiday season.
The last year for me on the personal front was about work, watching the world go through some shit, and rediscovering my personal creative motivations. That's been the case for me for the last 4 yrs really!
Art creation outside of my day job as an animation designer has been minimal. I have done a ton of writing but a lot of it isn't for Comics at all.
I was even approached by a friend on social media who's putting together a political publication and wanted me to write it based on all of that! Truly flattering but not a direction I wanted to go in right now, it felt like it would split my energies exactly the wrong way for what I need.
Some of the essays that I've posted on my Facebook page might become the source for material later on, I've definitely been considering that. But this isn't a door I want to race through right now.
I didn't have a lot of drive or desire to be working on Comics the last year so I kind of let that cruise and just occasionally made some art when the urge struck me. Those pieces have been a joy to produce.
A lot of my drawing energy was going into the day job, but I think I would have been able to do more personal things, if I had found a stronger focus and that's what I needed to zero in on.
It had a lot to do with figuring out what I wanted to be saying as an author. And it had a lot to do with how I wanted to do it.
Process-wise this is led me to turning away from digital drawing a great deal. Partially because I am doing it so much at the day job and it's nice to get break away from that and have a clear distinct change of process between work, and essentially play. Serious play but play nonetheless.
As a result of that I made the decision to take the first 10 pages of 'Nuts', Dream Life Book 2, which were totally finished and lettered even in Clip Studio and PS, and treat all of that is just very tight pencils that I print out blue lines of an ink the same way I did the first book. Pens and pocket brushes on Bristol.
ED: Here’s the first two pages [0-1] of that, married the new inks to the already done lettering I had for the CS version. Very satisfying.
I'm eventually going to add tones as well when I collect it but for now I've decided that I'm going to do the majority of all my narrative comics work in crisp black and white with no tones. Just brush and pens. Get back to my roots!
This is really purely a practical matter because I've got limited time to play with and I can go twice as fast or more if I'm not getting bogged down with thinking about values and adding more steps to finishing a page.
But I also just love the simplicity of black and white too.
I’ve mentioned it here before but all this will be going into ‘Mind Engine - Ignition Sequence’.
In adition to the first instalment of 'Nuts', I'm also going to try to get 'The Box' wrapped up for that as a done in one.
It's been going nicely art wise if slowly, but I also have been doing some drastic editing to cut down the length of the story and make it more feasible.
It was in danger of outgrowing itself in the attempt to stay more loyal to the source material, but that's not the kind of project I wanted to make it into. And I think I found a fun way to reduce its length dramatically.
And there’s some other bits going in ‘Ignition Sequence’ for sure but the rest will be up to the final round of curation after a self imposed cut-off in late March.
The last couple years leading up to all of this I see as an incubation period right now. Necessary to make that the most fruitful, I have to set a deadline for myself. So that’s what I did starting about a month ago.
I've booked a table for FBDM//MCAF in late May, and applied for a couple other key spring festivals and Canadian comics. Still contemplating others as well. Not really looking to do a tone but a few key ones would be nice.
This will be the launch deadline for 'Mind Engine - Ignition Sequence'!
I've Set myself a fairly snug deadline of doing as much as I can and the next essentially 3 months worth of time before the last week of March, at which point I'll have to put together what I've got finish any lettering and editing and considerations about what else will go in the volume and do all the prepress for the book.
I'm still debating how I'm going to print them. For now I've continued to use KDP publishing and print on demand services to supply the books that I set up there when it was still CreateSpace. I didn't have a particularly pleasant experience getting Revolver Zero out though after Amazon folded it into Kindle.
That messed up both Dracula: Son of the Dragon's print edition delaying it for a year, and gave me a huge headache getting really basic non-actual errors past the automated prepress system for Revolver Zero.
I haven't totally made up my mind never to use them again but I'm not feeling like I want to rush into finding out if they fixed all of that; I don't like the parent companies ethics AT ALL, on so many fronts. And I want to higher level of finish for the first editions anyway.
So I'm leaning towards just self funding a short run of maybe 200-300 First Editions for the festivals. I'll have to look at how much that costs but possibly doable.
And then depending on the reception of that I'll look at other things.
I'll also offer it as a digital book via Gumroad too of course.
I think that’s it for this update!
Probably not going to post too frequently on here between now and May, but thinking I will endeavor to update about once a month at least to let you know how progress is going, as a self accountability mechanism!
Again, Happy Holidays, may you have the best possible New Year, Free Palestine, Tikkun olam, with a side of l’Chaim!
-max 12/23/24
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