It feels so good to be posting stuff to Patreon again. Four pages went up this month, and a couple new pledges showed up as well. I should be making around $300-350 or so for drawing comics about cartoon animals in space this month. It ain’t paying anywhere near my rent, and probably won’t be any time soon – Parallax is a lot slower to draw than Rita was, what with being full color, having a lot more stuff to design (especially this early in the story), and regularly having two to three times as many panels per page (not counting that one climactic chapter of Rita with 3x-25x as many panels per page as the rest of the book) – but fuck yes I’m back on the path to making a modest living doing nothing but drawing the kind of comics I want to see in the world, on a schedule that’s not the wrist-ruining pace of cranking out part of an entire issue every month. I get to do all the art in my own idiosyncratic way instead of having to do just pencils, inks, colors, or lettering as part of the assembly line evolved back in the 1930s, and I don’t need to worry about some straight white boy from deepest darkest Trumpistania screaming that my queer ass is Ruining Comics Forever and trying to get me fired.

Hopefully drawing pages will get a bit faster, as I design more and more of the stuff Parallax needs, and start being able to just load up a set of styles to quickly turn a rough into final art, and maybe snag a background here and there to re-use. And hopefully I’ll also continue to see a slow growth of the Patreon like I was seeing when I was regularly doing Rita. I might start posting pages to the art sites I have a presence on as well as my own site; might even drop a few bucks on advertising here and there. Draw a bit faster, get more folks reading my stuff with some modest subset of them willing to drop a tiny amount in the tip jar, eventually it’s something like a career. (And as always, I’m pretty damn thankful to the people willing to support my stuff on Patreon.)

The Internet has brought us many things, good and bad. But it sure has made doing independent comics a hell of a lot more possible.

Well. That was a nice surprise.

Me and Nick have been talking about how we wanted to get a new bookshelf to give the overflow books a place to live, once this kitchen work is done. (The whole thing’s been ripped open to check for leaks. Which were not there. And we’re about to go into the third weekend with dust everywhere and no kitchen.) This morning we were discussing a few other things we need – a hand-held vacuum to help deal with sucking up all the dust from the kitchen not-remodelling, maybe an air purifier to deal with that as well. So there I was walking from my apartment to one of my regular breakfast haunts, contemplating how much all of this shit was gonna cost, and feeling grumpy about that…

…and then I came out of the alley and walked past the YMCA, and found some furniture by the curb with a sign reading FREE. And one of these pieces was a black Ikea BILLY shelf unit. Exactly what I still had a tab open in the browser for from looking last night.

I went home and grabbed Nick. He raised some possible objections about Bedbug Fear but some quick browsing of the net suggests that it’s really not likely to be a problem. We picked it up and hauled it the half-block home through the alley – my place is on the opposite side of the same block as the YMCA – and put it up. Lost one of the pegs along the way; it turned out to have fallen out when we picked the whole unit up, and I found that too.

So hey, that’s about a hundred bucks I don’t have to spend on buying shelves and having them shipped here, plus an hour or two of assembly saved. Thank you, universe! Maybe I’ll be getting that air purifier that looks like a space dragon’s egg after all.

Later, after breakfast: I spent about an hour putting books on the shelves, with no real order – just getting them off the floor was my main priority, though I did try to keep some series together. Especially the ones that were mostly in one clump already. The shelves are almost entirely full, and probably will be full once I get the last couple stacks of books from around the coffee table. This is, to be honest, about what I expected would happened. I’d measured the height of all the stacks last week when we started talking seriously about getting a new bookshelf, and calculated that we had around thirty shelf-feet of books without a shelf to go on…

click for an image just barely big enough to zoom in on and judge me and Nick for our book choices.

Hey. This is just a quick note to say something that I don’t say often enough – that most people don’t say often enough.

Thanks for listening to me out here on the Internet. Thanks for spreading the reach of my work with your links, if you’ve done that; thanks for supporting my work via Patreon, Kickstarter, or buying it in a comic shop, if you’ve done that. (And please don’t feel any new obligation to do these things if you haven’t.)

Thanks for all your favorites of my art on gallery sites; thanks for spending the past month or two putting me in a place where I get to have the privilege of grumbling about how much work doing a second edition of my Tarot deck is going to be.

And even if all you’ve done is to silently consume my work, without doing any of these other things – thank you for listening to my ramblings and looking at my drawings. I hope that their effect on your life has been generally for the better.

Anyway. It is a sunny day, and I am sitting outside of Peet’s flipping off a Google Maps car as it drives around Green Lake, and I should get to work on drawing my queer sci-fi comics. Thanks for giving me an audience. ❤?????

Shower thought: Nick and I are currently doing Parallax in the Reverse Marvel Method.

The Marvel Method works like this: SUE and JANE get together and come up with an idea for a plot. JANE goes off and draws it, doing her best to tell the story entirely in pictures. Then SUE writes captions and dialogue that expand on JANE’s drawings. Optionally, SUE will go on to take all the credit and financial reward for creating this stable of beloved characters.

The Marvel Method is in contrast to the script-first method, wherein SUE writes a script that lays out all of the dialogue and all of the panel transitions, hands it off to JANE, who pretty much follows all of SUE’s directions.

The Reverse Marvel Method, on the other hand? SUE and JANE get together and come up with an idea for a plot; SUE goes off and writes a script that’s got loose descriptions of the scenery and actions but leaves all the page and panel decisions out. JANE takes the script and draws it, making all the decisions about how to best break it up into pages and panels. Whether she will also go on to take all the credit and financial rewards is an open question; I’m hoping to avoid it.

There is a lot of trust involved in the Marvel Method and the Reverse Marvel Method that isn’t in the script-first method. SUE trusts JANE to tell the story in a series of pictures; JANE knows her stuff. But she can’t always be sure JANE’s going to be the one drawing her stuff in script-first; maybe JANE’s getting behind and JESSIE, the editor on the book, brings in STELLA to fill in for an issue, maybe JESSIE is juggling budget for ten books and decides to let FRANCESCA have her first try at graduating from being an intern on this one. SUE arguably has to lay everything out panel by panel to give the book a chance to not become a mess if FRANCESCA still has a lot to learn about telling a story in pictures.

This may have been more interesting in the shower; I dunno.