Some updates on things I’m doing, plus some self-indulgent process rambling, if you’re into that sort of thing:

I’ve started contributing articles to Gamervescent occasionally, run by Bethany Bryan and my friend Jennifer Culp. Not that I wrote much about videogames here on this blog outside of any time a new game from Suda51 came out, but it was always something I wanted to do more of and Gamervescent is, to me at least, the place to do it. The gaming industry, community, fandom, whatever, can be a pretty ugly place, full of horrific people, a fact that has been made even more glaringly apparent thanks to this recent Gamergate nonsense. Gamervescent is, in their own words, “totes feminist,” free of misogynist idiots, the kind of place I want to associate with.

I’ve written three articles for them so far, with more to come:

Mushroom Demons - In which I figure out why Super Mario and Dark Souls are so similar.
Girls, Girls, (I like to play as) Girls! - In which I attempt to clarify why I prefer to create female characters and complain about how all male protagonists are the same these days. I'm especially proud of this one.
The Music Just Turns Me On - A love letter to Jet Set Radio and dancing.

Eryk Donovan is no longer drawing the Super Mario Bros webcomic, sadly. He’s working on a bunch of things at once, including the horror comic Memetic which comes out this month from Boom, and something had to give. I think he’s on the verge of blowing up and becoming super popular soon, and that’ll be cool to watch when it happens. The new replacement artist is Luisa Russo, and I’m looking forward to coloring her work soon!

…Or well, soon-ISH. My worst nightmare came true and I lost the stylus to my VisTablet earlier this week, thus crippling my abilities to color comics. I can do some basic stuff with a mouse, but it takes longer and coloring with a mouse makes you start to seriously consider giving up on everything in life. So I ordered a new stylus on Tuesday, it’s shipped, and now I’m just waiting for it to arrive so we can get back to work.

And I was getting back in control of things with Cannonball Fist, too. I was building up a decent lead. I HOPE I don’t fall so far behind that I have to miss some updates, and that probably won’t be the case, but you know, I’m worried about that anyways. Arg. The third chapter just started, and I’m so happy with how it’s coming out that to stop or stall would just be terrible.

With all the work I’ve been doing on these bright, colorful, fun comics, I’ve been getting the itch to do a new black and white comic that’s grimy and bleak, especially since I started playing Silent Hill recently. Vague ideas have been gestating in my head for a while, but this week, for lack of any color work to do, I’ve been able to really sit down and work out a story and some characters. It’ll be quite a while before you get to see this,  but I’ve got an idea of how it’ll look and where and how I’ll release it. It’s probably going to move at a glacial pace and no one will want to read it, but that’s okay.

One weird, neat aspect of it: I’m planning on including one of the characters from my weird short student film Black Hole Ghost in it. Doing so means going back and figuring out stuff that I left blank when I first worked on that thing back in 2010. There’s so much that I just didn’t explain, or left vague, partially to keep it all mysterious and partially because I didn’t really know what I was doing. It’s just full of holes. To include this character, and set the comic some years after the events of the short film, means to have to fill in a lot of those holes in order to bridge the two things together. I’d like to think I’m a better writer now than I was then, so it’s an interesting and fun challenge to do this. And I like having this impression of a shared universe between different works I’ve done.

Don’t worry, you won’t have to watch it to understand the character. Heck, I can’t bring myself to watch it anymore. It’s just something that makes the character more interesting, gives them more depth, and just a chance to explore what happens after the events of the film in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. I’m doing it more for myself than for any audience.
I’m also taking part in Inktober this year. The Bill Counts October Game is still happening, but I’m not a part of it. It’s just too demanding for me to try and juggle so many projects at once AND do a finished work of art every day of the month. Inktober is a bit more reasonable: just a finished ink drawing everyday. No color or anything. And since I never really get to do it most of the time, I decided I’d draw mainly fanart. So far I’ve done Judge Dredd and Jet Set Radio protagonist Beat, and I’ve got a decent list of other characters I want to draw. It’s more of a fun warm-up exercise than anything else, really, and I don’t feel like it’ll be as big a deal if I miss a day or screw up, unlike the October Game where I put maybe way too much pressure on myself. 

October 25^th is the milestone 30^th anniversary sale at Mountain Empire Comics here in Bristol, and if all goes well, I’ll be there selling my work and doing sketches. I think there’s a zombie walk afterwards? Maybe? Not sure. And then Halloween night will be this year’s final meeting of the Secrets Society at the Willow Tree Café in Johnson City. I’ll be performing again, drawing some poor volunteer’s mutant portrait live onstage while telling jokes, and I’ll have a table set up selling my stuff too.

And I think that does it. Back to waiting on my stylus!