busybee comics

Yep, I’ve fallen behind on comics right now. Here’s the deal with what’s going on:

• Work has me crazy busy (and tired), and I’m changing teams soon so this is probably not going to let up in the immediate future.
• Book 2 is nearly ready to print — all that’s left is proofing and the resulting color correction — but in the meantime my usual printer has up and disappeared from the face of the planet so I’m scrambling to find another printer that can handle the job. If anyone knows of a short-run printer that can do custom trim sizes (or at least 8"x9" as a standard size), perfect binding, CMYK printing, and runs of 200 or less for around $6/copy, please let me know. (The book is 154 pages, of which 100 are in color.)
• I have a bunch of comic ideas (including a new series) but no time to work on them. Also, my Wacom tablet stopped working so I’m limping along with my UC Logic one (which is very fiddly and has a very different feel) and I also finally got around to upgrading to the latest version of Photoshop (from CS4) so there’s a bunch of relearning and tuning I have to do, since a lot has changed in the meantime. Fortunately, both tool changes seem to be going okay.

So, yeah, if you know of a short-run printer who can do what I need, please let me know. For those who have already preordered through Amazon, the ship date is very somewhat likely to change, but don’t worry, your credit card won’t be charged until the shipment actually happens.

So, today’s picture isn’t a comic per se, but the most recent reason why book 2 has been delayed for a few more weeks. The printer had trouble with my PDF, and thanks to a series of miscommunications they ended up converting it to a bunch of RGB images to print out instead of trying to fix the PDF structure (or get a better structured PDF from me). The end result is that the text is all speckled and fuzzy and it’s definitely not to my standards (it basically looks like it was printed out on a cheap inkjet printer).

Part of this is my fault for using LaTeX for my book production process; it’s known to generate sub-optimal PDFs, and last time around I think Ken had used Acrobat’s optimizer to work around the issues (but this time that knowledge wasn’t transferred on to the person doing the actual printing — the business has gotten a lot larger and as a result, Ken has had to delegate a lot of stuff to less-knowledgeable employees). Also, Ken’s been completely professional and way more patient with me than I deserve through all this, so don’t take any of this as a mark against Keness.

In any case, my timetable was somewhat optimistic before and was based on them being able to stick to their schedule and us only having to go through one full proofing cycle; now it’ll take a minimum of two but I’ll probably need to do three.

The end result is that book 2 won’t be coming out until sometime in December at least. Sorry about that.

As always, if you’ve preordered through Amazon, your credit card won’t be charged until it actually ships. (And this is why I’m still happy about my decision to not do a Kickstarter this time around.)

Note that after preorders ship I will be setting up my own web store and handling fulfillment myself due to some inefficiencies with Amazon fulfillment that I’d rather not get into a rant about at this time but suffice it to say that unless you sell a few copies per week you’re better off just doing your own PayPal cart or whatever.

Anyway, now that that unpleasantness is out of the way, the other unpleasantness is that I’m not really into doing comics for now. I’ve taken on a lot more responsibility at work lately, which is good for my career but not so good for my free time. I’ve also been filling up what free time I have with working on music, both doing soundtrack work for others and working on a third Sockpuppet album. So, my attention is diverted elsewhere and I’m just not really in a comic-making mood these days.

I’m feeling depressed again and Good Things just isn’t doing it for me, so I thought I’d try something different.

I got the third proof of book 2 today, and it’s fantastic! Time to print this mother-lover.

You should preorder it. Preorder the heck out of it.

This is when everyone buys everything, right? How about a couple of books?

Copies of Book 2 are finally en route to me. It’s been a frustrating experience with way more delays than should have happened, and I’m sorry that it’s unlikely that preorders will get to people by Christmas, but at least they’ll be arriving soon.

I neglected to mention earlier but the books finally came from the printer, and the preorder batch is en route to Amazon right now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like people will be receiving it until after Christmas (since it won’t reach the warehouse until the 24th), so if you were planning on getting it for that purpose, I apologize. But considering that pretty much everything that could go wrong did, I’m just happy to have actually gotten the book out this year (primarily for tax reasons).

When I get back to Seattle I can also start doing direct sales to people, which I think works out better for everyone. I can also start on the ebook version, which I will probably sell via my Gumroad store, perhaps with an ebook+physical copy bundle option if Gumroad supports that.

As of a few days ago, Amazon is actually shipping out the books. So, if you were waiting for it to be really real before buying it, you can do so.

Sorry for not posting any comics in a while. Real life and other hobbies have been keeping me busy. I do have a pretty thorough outline of the third (and final!) book of Unity but I’m afraid to start drawing it because holy cow is it ambitious.

But I’m looking forward to doing it all the same.

I went and finally made it so that I can put high-resolution (aka HiDPI or retina-ready) graphics on this site. So far I’ve only updated the images for the various Unity series and for a selection of other recent comics.

The way it’s implemented is, as is always the case with these things, a little bit hackish, so if you’re noticing anything particularly weird (like images being doubled, extra stuff being downloaded, or high-resolution images being loaded on normal-DPI screens), please let me know!

So far I haven’t replaced any of the site graphics themselves; that will have to come later, because I actually don’t have high-resolution versions of those assets, so I’ll have to recreate them (or use this as an excuse to make better ones or whatever). But in any case, now comics look a lot better on my Retina MacBookPro and on my iPad.

(Of course this does complicate my publishing workflow so I’ll have to figure out how I want to handle that going forward… bleah.)

Also, this is only on the site itself for now, because I can’t figure out a good way of doing this that’s RSS-compatible. I put in support for the HTML5 draft specification but most browsers don’t support it just yet.

UPDATE: If you would like HiDPI images in the RSS feed, just subscribe to http://beesbuzz.biz/d/rss.php?hidpi=force instead.

So, there’s this thing called Patreon where you can send a few bucks the way of your favorite creators. A few folks have asked me why I don’t have one, so now now I do.

The way it works is that you pledge a certain amount of money for a certain amount of creative output (in my case, every time I post a comic or a song or whatever), and you can set a monthly limit and so on.

To sweeten the deal, Patreon backers will often get stuff before everyone else; for example, when I’m working on music, Patreon gets the tracks first! And, if I ever get in a spot where I actually have a buffer of comics again, Patreon backers will get to see them before they go live on the site. I’ll also eventually set up rewards for the bigger backers, if I can figure out what those rewards should be in the first place.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to start charging for my content or anything. This is just a way for people to send me money for the things I’m already doing anyway, and it is totally optional (and completely understandable if you don’t chip in).

• Busy with work
• Having wrist problems
• Having absolutely no inspiration or motivation to work on comics
• Depressed about all the above

Hopefully things will be changing soon but in the meantime, if you’re still checking my site manually, I highly recommend you get set up with an RSS reader or use the LiveJournal feed or whatever, because otherwise you’ll be checking for nothing.

my wrists are pissing me off

my (soon to be former) employer is pissing me off

photoshop is pissing me off

my webhost is pissing me off

spammers are pissing me off

being pissed at everything is pissing me off

i need a nap

Ugh, I am so out of practice with making comics. But I wrote a bunch of journal comics while I was traveling, so hopefully I can get back in the swing of things.

So, the transcription queue has gotten pretty long. There are two big benefits to clearing it out:

• Having a full set of transcripts on my site drives more search engine traffic here, which in turn gives me more readers which makes me happier as a creator
• Spammers keep on trying to spam me via empty transcription slots for some reason even though their spam will never, ever make it onto the site and even if it does their HTML wouldn’t get rendered right anyway so I don’t see why they keep on bothering and I wish they’d cut it out but they are really, really dumb apparently so in any case if there’s no pending transcriptions I get less spammers making my life miserable

So, please help out by helping out. Thanks!

You’re a deer.

The queue only appeared empty. OhNoRobot was giving Jukka a break, but now it’s started to point out a bunch of comics that are still untranscribed. The horrors!

Everyone, help SuperDeer Jukka me out and get the remaining comics transcribed! The future of the world depends upon it!

I’ve been too busy with my new job and too wrist-sore to work on comics. But it’d been well over a month since the last one so I figured I owed you folks one at least. September 2014 is the first time I’ve missed a month in the archives in a long time and I feel bad about that for some reason.

After going through another round of dissatisfaction with Photoshop I came back around and decided it’s still the least-bad software for my work style. One result of this is that I decided to increase my work resolution again, and also adjusted my templates to try to maximize space and clarity, as well as widening the aspect ratio a little bit. Hopefully these slight adjustments will improve the look and feel of new comics going forward.

I’ve also been experimenting with some different art techniques. Nothing’s really stood out to me as an improvement over what I’ve been doing, but having more tools in my proverbial belt isn’t a bad thing.

I still want to get back to Unity at some point, and I’m quite excited about what I have planned for book 3, but I just don’t have it physically in me to do things right now.

Hi, it’s been a while. I suck, I know, I’m sorry.

I still have a lot of comic-making that I want to do but I’ve been pretty well engaged in my day job and so I haven’t had as much of a drive to work on stuff that isn’t my day job.

Also, all of the stuff I want to do comic-wise is feeling too forced right now, and I just can’t work very well when it isn’t coming naturally. I want to do the best job possible for book 3 of Unity, and that paradoxically makes it difficult for me to do any job at all.

I should at least start posting sketchbook pages again though, since I’m generating a lot of those (at my Thursday drawing group meetings). What do people think about regular sketchdumps? I never like doing those because they just feel like filler to me but maybe that’s something other people actually like seeing. I dunno.

So, nobody objected to the idea of sketchbook dumps, so from now on Sunday will be where I display backlogs of sketchbooks. These are at the very least an easy way to keep my buffer with stuff in them. I have a bunch of weekly posts scheduled until mid-January, and hopefully by the time mid-January rolls around I’ll have drawn in my sketchbooks more.

Even more hopefully, I’ll have actual comics to add in the midst of all this too!

Update: This stuff is now in the sketchbook section

I figured I should start another new series so that I can get tired of it and go back to Unity.

Or maybe I’ll enjoy doing this one for a while.

Pretty Cool Webcomics was nice enough to review me. I do wish that they’d chosen a newer Unity strip to headline with, but oh well. I like that reviewers like this exist and aren’t afraid to actually say nice things.

Anyway, I’ve found a whole bunch of other great webcomics I didn’t know about through that blog, so definitely check them out!

Not that there’s anything “official” about my posting schedule by any means, but this weekend I’m participating in a game jam and probably won’t have time to work on comics. If you’re local to Seattle and like working on games, you could always sign up and be a part of this!

I’ll probably be focusing on music, and I’ll probably bring my cello. Because there’s always room for cello.

I’ve been a bit under the weather and having wrist problems again, so I’m not sure if I’ll manage to get two comics out this week. I hope I do because the sketchbook page scheduled for next Sunday depends quite a lot on this week’s strips (which is sort of a coincidence, mostly since I didn’t expect this week’s strips to take so long to get to), but you know what they say; All toasters toast toast.

I’m going to take a short break to plan out what happens in chapter 2. I have a bunch of story fragments but it’ll take some planning to put them together, and also my wrists could use a break.

Feel free to submit guest art in the interim!

My wrists are doing better now, although I’m going to take it easy on the art quality for a while all the same (like anyone can really tell anyway).

Anyway, welcome to chapter 2.

As usual, my wrists are still sucking so I might need to take it easy a bit? I don’t know. BUT ALSO: Emerald City ComiCon is coming up! Come find me this weekend!

(I will also be at the drink-and-draw Thursday night, on behalf of both of the local cartooning meetup groups I’m a member of.)

Probably a good time for me to take another week off. Also I have recently acquired a Surface Pro 3. I’ll write up a thorough review at some point but in the meantime, the summary is that I like it but with a few reservations (mostly in that the stylus accuracy could be better and Windows 8.1 still has a lot of rough edges, especially with how Photoshop works in it).

As far as why I went with the Surface Pro 3 instead of the Cintiq Companion 2, this is why. Basically I really wish Wacom made a Cintiq in the same size as the Intuos Pro Large. 13" is too small, 22" is too huge. I’d actually have gone with the Cintiq Companion 2 if it weren’t for it having such a stupidly gigantic bezel and relatively tiny screen, not to mention the fact there’s nowhere I can find in Seattle where I could try one out in person first. But if I can try a Cintiq Companion 2 out I might end up switching to that anyway (since there’s enough moderate annoyances with the Surface that I’m not particularly enamored with it).

My wrists are even more terrible than usual lately, but I’m still drawing simple things (obviously). I have an appointment with an orthopedist on Friday who will hopefully have some ideas about what to do, and if I just need to take a leave of absence from my day job that’s doable. Of course that means not being able to work on Lewi, either, which is frustrating for me because I really want to work on it. Argh.

Meanwhile, I ended up not liking the Surface Pro 3 after all (contrary to my previous news post), and ordered a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2. Hopefully that’ll work out a lot better.

As always I’m accepting guest art and guest strips and so on, and I have stuff for sale. Please check it out!

I need at least another week before I can start drawing again. Sorry.

My wrists still aren’t at 100% (not even close actually) but I’m starting physical therapy soon. I’ll probably still be doing a reduced update schedule for a while. Also, my parents are going to be visiting next weekend, which cuts into my comic-making time of course.

So, as usual, I recommend that you subscribe via RSS or Comic Rocket or the like. (Or you can follow on Tumblr or Tapastic or whatever but those tend to fall behind.)

Physical therapy: helpful

Working 100+ hours a week (due to the album): less helpful

But hey the album is done and (still) available for preorder and it’ll drop on June 14, which as long-time readers should know is my birthday, and it is my gift to you. Well, if getting a gift normally means having to pay $7 for it. Whatever.

so out of practice

Sorry about my continued slow pace of updates. My wrists are still problematic, and my day job is taking a lot more of my energy than usual lately.

If you’re in the Portland area (Oregon, not Maine), this weekend is a good time to meet up with me, as I’ll be performing at the annual Song Fight! Live! show (Friday the 14th and Saturday the 15th), as well as going to a webcomics mini-meetup (Sunday the 16th).

And if you’re in the Seattle area, pretty much any time is a good time to meet up with me. No occasion, I just live here.

My current list of excuses for not posting anything:

• Usual wrist stuff
• Bronchitis that got really bad for a bit and is still lingeringAnxiety and depression because of a bunch of stuff (mostly due to the above)Was busy with a relationship that was taking up a lot of my spare time (but it’s over now)I keep getting too distracted by talking about making comics to actually make comicsBeen writing a lot of spare-time code too (including trying to finally write a CMS that works the way I want it to since I’m sick of hacking on Movable Type but everything else out there is markedly worse)Playing, obsessing over, and completely picking apart the game data of Undertale which is my favorite game since Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Also I’ll be cosplaying Frisk (portrayed above) at GeekGirlCon 2015, which will also be my first time ever cosplaying. The game is that good.

I’m going to try to draw at least one picture a day in October, because that seems like a good way to get out of my doldrums. Obviously I’m running a bit behind but I’ll try to catch up.

Of course it turns out that Inktober is supposed to be about drawing in ink. Go figure. So uh. I’m really far behind.

Update: The Inktober content has moved

Yadda yadda sorry for not updating yadda yadda yadda

my art tag on Tumblr has some new stuff (mostly Undertale fanart these days) but mostly I’ve been busy wallowing in a desire to work on comics but no ability to. Current excuse list:

• Changed teams at work and am trying to ramp up on a project
• [insert usual thing about wrists]
• Holidays, seasonal depression, etc. all upon me

Someday.

I know you’re sick of hearing this but I’m sick of having to write this. Ugh. I just want to make comics.

So, wow, a lot’s been going on in my life.

I’ve finally come out at large about my gender stuff and am properly, publicly transitioning. This has had the interesting side effect of greatly reducing (although not eliminating) my wrist pain — turns out a lot of it was just due to my constant internal tension! Same with my anxiety! GO FIGURE!

I’m also really busy at work, both with a bunch of stuff regarding transition and with my actual day job. And I’m feeling great.

I also have so many other projects that take precedence over comics right now. Which sucks because I still really want to get back to comics (especially Lewi!) but at least it’s sucking for a generally positive reason now.

Thank you everyone who’s still holding on and checking for updates. (I assume you are just still subscribed to my RSS feed or something.)

(Oh also you can feel free to read an article about my medical transition, if you like.)

But I think it’s more important for my mental health that I work on comics instead of simply lamenting the fact I’m not working on comics.

Hopefully Friday will be the last strip of chapter 3, and then I’ll take another little break before starting on chapter 4. That’s where stuff starts to get pretty intense.

Originally this strip (which seems to have turned into a page) was going to be the end of chapter 3, but then I decided that the few strips after it make for a better end-of-chapter story beat. Which is how I’d originally planned it, really, so it’s less a change in plans and more a reversion. Hopefully this means chapter 3 will be done by the end of next week instead.

Also! My Patreon is pretty lonely right now. Feel free to give it some hugs and attention if you like.

Lewi #42 ends chapter 3 (for reals this time). I need to take another break from cartooning because of wrists. But at least this leaves the story not hanging in the middle of a story beat.

there’s so much iw ant to work on but i just can’t do it right now

my wrists hurt and my body hurts and if eel like i’m falling apart and i’m so tired and

i’m sorry

The problem I always seem to run into when I’m making comics is I get it in my brain that I need to finish a comic the same night I start it, so with my wrist issues I always set myself up for failure already. What I keep on telling myself and others is that if you spend only an hour or two a day working on a comic, even if you don’t finish it, that’s one or two hours more than you’d spent previously.

So, I’m taking my own advice, and spending one or two hours on comics every day. And it’s certainly changed my process a lot already — I’m thinking further ahead on the story and not worrying about getting a comic out the door right away, and for once I actually have a strip-by-strip breakdown script (although that’s more a result of how when I was first drawing #43 I recognized a story inconsistency due to my usual seat-of-the-pants story editing, and then realized I could rearrange some stuff to make certain things much more impactful and I wanted to figure out where what was #43 would now go in the story sooner rather than later).

Anyway! This is as good a time as any to plug my Patreon again, because patrons pledging $3 or more get to see the progress on comics as I complete a daily chunk of work! So, if you like seeing process and/or progress, that’s a good way to get at least a rough idea. And sometimes I post my breakdown scripts there, as I did for chapter 4!

I’m doing Inktober again, and this year I’m going to probably use the official prompts to design new species until I end up just doing more Undertale fanart.

I’m also going to keep on working on Lewi, of course; when a Lewi comic is ready it’ll preempt a post of Inktober, and I’ll just have to double Inktober posts up or something. Or maybe I could just post multiple things for a single day; technically my CMS supports it, but the results are kind of inelegant. Wait no, my CMS only supports it on archive pages and the RSS feed, it won’t work on the front page. Wellp.

Or, judging by how it went last year, I’ll only remember to post like three of them here and the rest will just have to be seen on my Tumblr.

(I swear I’m going to get around to making a better CMS for my site someday!)

Update: Inktober stuff now lives in the inktober section

Wrists are hurting as usual but I’m working on rearranging some lifestyle stuff to make it work out. Follow my Patreon if you want to know more!

As you might guess from today’s guest comic, I participated in the Web Comic Secret Santa Exchange this year. You can see my contribution over at TRU-Life Adventures by Andrew Rothery.

Also! I haven’t had much chance to work on comics lately but soon I’m going to have plenty of time to do so. More news to follow!

So, today’s comic ends chapter 4 of Lewi. But as chapter 5 starts, I’m also beginning another sort of chapter: I’ve left my job to work on my creative pursuits full-time! You can read about it over on my Patreon.

And on that note, now would be a really good time to consider backing me on Patreon.

10 years ago today I posted the first Unity comic. Why not read it from the start?

Or, better yet, buy it in paperback or PDF. Don’t worry, I have many many copies left…

Anyway, book 1 was the first time I’d managed to make an entire comic series from beginning to end without losing interest or giving up. I learned a lot about my creative process from it, and got a lot better at managing my attention and plotting. Book 1 was incredibly rough in places and there were a lot of dangling plot hooks that never went anywhere or got resolved in a weird way, but that was part of my ongoing learning experience with not simply making everything up as I went along. Most of my comics since then have been at least somewhat plotted out in advance (but not so closely as to make it impossible to improvise as I go).

I also learned a lot about myself along the way and of course used this as a framework for exploring aspects of my identity. My own gender stuff is always at least in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of these comics, and later on (especially in book 2) I started to explore the dichotomy between my scientific rationality with my latent spirituality. (This is, of course, a much more prominent theme in Lewi, but I digress.) And now in the year 2017 I can say that I’m… still transgender (and my genitals are finally configured correctly, although still a bit sore), and I’m also finally working towards embracing at least the ethnic side of my heritage.

Who knows, maybe in another 10 years I’ll have finally started drawing book 3!

(Any day, now…)

First I had surgery in late January.

Then that got infected.

Then the antibiotics for the infection knocked out my intestinal flora.

Then the recovery from that left my immune system vulnerable and I got a cold that lasted about a month (although to be fair apparently everyone on the entire left coast has been laid waste by this).

Then the latest Zelda game came out.

So really, it’s amazing I’ve gotten any comics done at all.

A helpful reader emailed me to point out that the comment system was subtly broken, and rather than try to fix a miasma of duct tape and paperclips once again I decided to switch to Disqus.

Currently the legacy comment system isn’t visible but don’t worry, the comments still exist! I’m working on writing an importer to get the old comments over to the new system. The comments have all been imported. It isn’t great but they’re there.

Meanwhile, Disqus gives a few advantages. It has pretty decent spam filtering, anyone can upvote/downvote comments, and you can stalk follow fellow commenters on other Disqus-enabled sites! (If you do not want to be followed in this way it is easy enough to disable your public profile on your Disqus settings.) There’s also some nice comment reply notification stuff that lets you know about goings-on across whatever sites you use that also use Disqus.

I’m not a huge fan of handing all this data over to third parties, but keep in mind that all the comments were being indexed/stored by Google et al anyway, and Disqus has been around for a while and has shown themselves to be at least reasonably trustworthy as far as pervasive Internet things go. The only thing I really dislike is the requirement to use Javascript and that’s kind of unavoidable these days.

Anyway, the other option was to remove comments entirely and I figure that’s a last-resort measure.

Act 1 of Lewi will end with strip 73, which is essentially four strips' worth of content (72 is double-sized). After that I’m going to assemble Act 1’s strips into a small book for the purpose of getting it printed. After that I’ll either go right into Act 2 of Lewi (which I have vaguely plotted out but I need to spend a lot more time fleshing out the story arc) or maybe I’ll finally start drawing Book 3 of Unity. Who knows!

In addition to comics stuff I’m also trying to get going on some music things, and also on some modern art things. If you want to keep up with all of it, my Patreon is a pretty good place to do it.

This comic is the last one for Act 1 of Lewi. I’m going to spend some time trying to put together a book of it, and work on a few other projects for a while. If you want to keep up with what I’m working on, feel free to subscribe to my Patreon.

The proof came back all nice and good, and so I’ve opened up preorders. If you want a physical copy, now’s the time to get one!

I’m mailing out orders for Lewi: Act 1 as they come in. Stock is going! Don’t delay in ordering!

It’s October. Well, it’s been October for a few days, but between being busy at GeekGirlCon and getting sick once again, I’m pretty far behind. Oh well.

Update: It’s over yonder.

It’s amazing how busy one can get when one is starting a new business, making a lot of music, and working on a bunch of games.

I do want to get back to both Lewi and Unity at some point though! Your patience is appreciated.

The best ways to follow for updates include (but are not limited to):

• Subscribing via RSS reader
• Subscribing via Patreon
• Subscribing via Comic Rocket
• Following on twitter or Facebook if you don’t mind missing every update because of the infrequency of the posts relative to the firehose of chatter on those sites

Between working on like three games at the same time, having to support some folks on long-running projects, and working on reviewing, modifying and enhancing my keyboard, not to mention having way too many music projects that I’m Not Getting Done, I’m kiiiiinda too busy to work on comics. I do, however, have a 6-page manga-style zine comic that I did for my drawing group; I can’t post it publicly yet but rumor has it that patrons might have early access to it…

Oh also! My games and I will be at Emerald City Comicon 2018 at the Indie Games Showcase! It is on the second floor North gallery. If you’re going to be at ECCC, stop on by! My current scheduled booth times are:

• Thursday, March 1, 2—8 PM
• Friday, March 2, 5—8 PM
• Saturday, March 3, 8—11 PM

Anyway! Sorry for the lack of updates, but it’s all for good reasons, I promise.

Oops, it’s been a while since I’ve posted a comic. Sorry about that. I’ve been pretty busy with lots of things.

For a few examples:

• I’ve been doing a lot of work with the augmented reality startup
• I’ve been working on a new website CMS (that I hope to move my website over to soon! because holy cow do I hate dealing with Movable Type anymore)
• Been doing some game development (I don’t think I mentioned CATcher here yet, that one’s a lot of fun)

In any case, I really appreciate your ongoing support. Even if you can’t help fund my Patreon or buy my items for sale, just knowing that there are people out there who are interested in my work does a lot to keep me going. Spreading the word would mean so much to me.

Things look different around here, don’t they?

This website is now powered by Publ, a CMS I’ve been building specifically to suit my needs for content management. There’s still a lot to do on the other site sections, but the comics section is pretty complete! Feel free to poke around and enjoy the hopefully more-intuitive multi-series navigation and the cleaner look to everything.

Oh yeah, my new CMS means I can post newsposts without needing an accompanying comic now! I don’t need to be beholden to bad habits caused by my old site’s limitations!

Okay, so, I was doing really well with actually getting comics made, and then as always happens whenever I say something silly like “I seem to be getting back in the groove of making comics” my body decides to remind me that I can’t have nice things. For now I’m just focusing on things that will potentially lead to actual income, namely the startup and on music, in particular working on a few video game OSTs. Since that stuff is paid work you’ll need to follow my Patreon (generally at the $3 level) to get previews of that stuff before it goes public. And I feel like I’m making some pretty good stuff!

I absolutely do want to be working on comics as well but it’s just not in the cards at the moment. But I’m feeling okay about that for now, because I have enough good stuff going on even if I’m not able to work on all the things I want to work on.

Fortunately, I have friends who are taking the time to remind me that my comics can wait and that I do so many things as it is.

That said: If there are any folks out there who want to work with me on my comics (Lewi, in particular), please get in touch! I have a lot of plot planned out and at least the next few strips' worth of scripts written, and while I can’t actually pay anything it’d be cool to work in collaboration with someone for a while.

Anyway! Hopefully I can get back to this when I’m ready to, because I am still really excited about these stories, and I hope other people are too.

(For what it’s worth, on the Mankoski pain scale I’m currently floating between 6 and 7.)

I’ve really gotten out of the groove of drawing. Fortunately, Inktober is about to happen! I no longer post that on my comic section, though, as there’s a specific gallery for that now. If you’re subscribed just to my comics feed, consider subscribing to my whole-site feed instead!

Anyway, hopefully this year I’ll get more done than last year. We’ll see!

This is possibly the longest comics break I’ve taken? The annoying thing is I’ve had the next several sketched out for a while but I just kind of hit a wall, and right now I’m not fond of what I’d written so I’m probably gonna go back and rewrite it or something.

Of course the weird paradoxical thing about having a new full-time job is that I’ll probably spend more time working on this than when I was trying to make this my full-time job. That’s burnout for you!

Who cares about Black Friday? Not me!

Let’s have a Plaid Friday sale instead. 25% off all physical books until Monday, with promo code plaidfriday. Or for direct links:

• Unity book 1
• Unity book 2
• Lewi book 1

While we’re at it, discount code plaidfriday is also good for 25% off at my Bandcamp, for those who enjoy my music.

Oops, I wanted to get this done by the start of the new year as is somewhat-traditional, but I was having some technical difficulties. And of course my day job has me pretty busy too. But I’ll try to do more comics this year! It’s at least in my plans, although we all know how those have a tendency to go…

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to really work on comics, between a bunch of software problems and my usual health problems. I’ve missed making comics though, but I’m just so tired all the time, and when I’m not tired I’m in pain and/or busy with stuff.

On the plus side, one of the things I’m busy with is getting ready for GeekGirlCon ‘19 – because I got a vendor table! See me at table 101 (hopefully I’ll have a map soon!) and buy my books and prints and enamel pins and stuff. Or poke me with a stick if I’ve fallen asleep!

Wow, I had a feeling that people would either really get or really not get this latest comic, but I had no idea how distinct the division would be.

I guess it really is true that there are two kinds of computer users…

It’s been a while since I’ve regularly done Good Things comics, or comics in general. I’m feeling generally better enough now that maybe this is something I can do.

I just need to remember that daily comics don’t need to be spectacularly-drawn, they just need to be drawn. And it’s okay to miss a day now and then.

And maybe I’ll get back into drawing Lewi and even Unity, both of which I really want to work on quite a lot.

I am filled with so many emotions right now and the deep-seated need to get this angry comic out of my system just barely overrode the excruciating pain I’m in right now, so you get shitty stick figures.

Wow, around two years since the last time I posted a Lewi comic. I finally got the itch again.

Wow it’s been way too long since I’ve worked on comics, and I seem to have forgotten how to draw. Today’s Lewi is something I’d actually drawn something like a year ago, and had about 95% finished for around 7 months. And this is a big turning point in the story.

I’m in pretty big amounts of pain right now though and I find it very difficult to focus on drawing things. I want to get back to drawing. But I just physically can’t, right now.

If any artists out there want to help out, maybe we could collaborate on getting this going at a better pace? I dunno. Right now it feels like even getting organized and writing stuff out for others to be able to work on is more than I can handle.

Fibromyalgia sucks, y'all.

I have just not had the determination to draw in a while and there’s a number of reasons for it. I thought this would feel good to get something done but it doesn’t look even remotely like how I wanted it to and I’m just so tired.

Mostly I miss using Photoshop, but Photoshop’s gotten pretty awful lately. I drew this in Clip Studio Paint which is good for some things but some of the tools are just so fussy. Maybe I need to bring it back to basics.

EDIT: Before recommending programs to me, please read these detailed blog posts I wrote:

• Drawing apps, still meh
• More rants about art programs
• My dream art program

In particular, please don’t recommend Krita or GIMP. I know a lot of people love those. I have very completely ruled them out for my needs.

It’s been too long since I’ve been able to make comics. I’m not happy with this one, either. I’m so out of practice, and I have no energy.

I want to be able to do this stuff again. I’m not sure how to get there from here.