From The Top!

I’m back on WordPress again. I experimented with some other services, and none of them really proved to be any better. I want a place to post my comics, writings, videos and other forms of art, without having to subscribe to a dozen different services.

I have scaled back on my social media, and I don’t plan on posting any of my older work here. Going forward, I’ll just be posting the new stuff, so this is like starting over for me. I have almost twenty years of content on hard-drives, maybe an eighth of that content is good. I consider the rest to be my first 10,000 hours of learning storytelling, so I really don’t feel too bad about starting over.

I’m setting all this up now, because in about two weeks, our second child will be born. This means, I will not have uninterrupted time to work on stuff like web-design until sometime around 2027. Maybe 2028. Either way, the precious time I have to myself will be spent working on personal projects.

I’m using a webcomic template for this site, because I want to serialize my comics and be able to post my latest page/strip here as they go up. I don’t want to have to redirect everyone to Webtoon, Substack, Patreon, Tumblr, Reddit or wherever people are posting their comics these days. I’d like this site to be the one stop for my content.

I do still use social media sites, but right now I’m limiting myself to:

1. BlueSky <– My main social media account.
2. TikTok <– I’m posting most of my video content here now. Lots of engagement.
3. YouTube <– I still post here from time to time.
4. Instagram <– I’ll likely walk away from this one day
5. Tumblr <– I’m not entirely sure what is going on here
6. Substack <– Newsletter & Notes
7. Webtoon <– Webcomics
8. Patreon <– Premium version of everything

I don’t think I’d consider all eight to be actual social media services. I could see myself dropping everything but #’s 1, 2 & 8 before the year is over. Five of those eight just aren’t that useful to me, which is why I feel it’s important I start posting more to my own website. If any of those companies go under, there goes whatever following I may have. But as long as I have my own site, people will know where to go for as long as I’m paying to keep it online.

A couple of weeks ago, in my newsletter I wrote that I had two comic projects I wanted to work on:

• A fantasy story inspired by my old D&D characters. They’ll be an unlikely group of assholes, and I think it would be fun to write and draw. Especially if I do it in the style of the image above. 
• The other is an anti-super hero comic. Not as gritty and violent as Kick Ass, but a little more absurd, yet self-aware. I’ve always been afraid to work on superhero comics, but thinking about comics like DeadPool and The Tick have really triggered some inspiration. I look forward to plotting it out while I’m up all night waiting for the baby to finish his bottle and go back to sleep.

These will be my project for the remainder of 2023 and pretty much all of 2024. The anti-super hero comic will be 100% digital, just to make my life a little easier. Also, because I use Clip Studio, I can use my iPad Pro or my MacBook Air, which allows me to work on it anywhere and anytime. The fantasy comic will be hand drawn, and coloured with watercolour pencils and paints on watercolour paper. Both projects will be fun to do, and hopefully give me enough content to publish two small books by early 2025.

I may attempt Inktober (or one of the variants) this year just to force myself to practise inking with a nib pen and brushes. I have gotten too comfortable with micron pens, and I really need to get outside my comfort zone.

That’s all for now. This post went on a little longer than I planned, but I will hopefully have something else to post in a couple of days.