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#gentlecomicshabit – 8 minute comic

The subject of this comic might be the antithesis of a “gentle” comics habit, but the moment I start making excuses, that’s where the slippery slope begins.

I chose not to count any of the hourly comics I drew yesterday as part of the #gentlecomicshabit, so by the letter of the concept, I skipped a day and therefore cannot miss a second day in a row. So even though I was excessively productive yesterday, and my body is sluggish from a large meal followed by exercise, I refuse to break the habit building this early in the game. We press on, in the name of bettering one’s self!

Hourly Comic Day 2025

Yesterday (Feb 1st) was Hourly Comic Day, an annual comics challenge of drawing a short comic for every hour that you are awake. Usually this isn’t practical for me to participate in, but this year it fell on a Saturday, giving me a lot more leeway in how I could structure my day.

I’m quite proud of the results, especially since this was my first time taking part, so here are all the strips that came out of this challenge:

Yes, 20 hours; that’s actually not too out of place for me these days, though admittedly this was a very active day, with all the cleaning we got done.

I don’t know if/when I’ll participate in this challenge in the future, but if it ever falls on a weekend again, I may just give it another go because this was fun.

Ciao for now.

Bottom of the Deck – 2025/02/01

It’s Saturday, let’s get back into the blogging habit.

Habit building is the name of the game around here lately; I’ve been sticking with the #gentlecomicshabit for a week now, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. It’s a neat little drawing exercise to follow up my daily physical exercise, of which I have started my second 30 Day Challenge of the year. Going strong on both fronts, I think I can manage a weekly blog post too (he says hopefully).

You may notice that there’s no #gentlecomicshabit post today, which is perfectly normal. The challenge itself allows for a missed day here and there due to extenuating circumstances, though preferably no two consecutive days. The reason for the skipped post today is that I’m working on a different comics challenge, namely the Hourly Comic Day challenge. This one challenges the participants to draw a small comic for every hour of the day that they are awake, optionally posting them throughout the day. This would basically amount to the equivalent of the daily habit building comic, just every hour of the day.

Fortunately, the rules for this challenge are flexible; the comics don’t have to be done every hour, on the hour, nor do they have to be uploaded as such either. People have busy days, we don’t have time to stop, draw and upload constantly throughout; it’s the reason that a lot of people don’t bother with this challenge, or citing that they don’t feel like chronicling what amounts to pretty mundane activities. While I can’t call my days particularly interesting either, to me it’s not about the content itself, only that it gets created; by the time I go to bed tonight, I can say that I created something, which I find myself wanting to proclaim a lot more these days.

As I haven’t gone to bed yet, the comics are still coming; I’ll likely upload them to Bluesky when I go to sleep tonight, or first thing tomorrow morning in a single thread. Despite the mundane nature of it all, I’ve managed to find the occasional bit of humour in a day filled with laundry and cleaning house, so I hope the end result will give you a chuckle or two.

To fill the rest of my time tonight, I’m going to be trying to line up some Magic Beans strips for the upcoming month; that’ll give me some “official” comics to upload at least once a week while I keep working on my mainline books. With a bit of luck (and a lot of coffee) I may have something ready to present to you all sometime in March; if I can get it done by my birthday at the latest, that would be great.

Anywho, I’d better get back to scribbling; will chat again to you properly next week. In the meantime, the habit comics will keep flowing, and you can expect the return of Magic Beans on Tuesday!

Ciao for now.

#gentlecomicshabit – 7 minute comic

Okay, this one has layers to it, with a bit of an in joke, I’ll describe it as best I can:

My exercise routines come in 30 Day Challenges, and the one I picked for January was called “Reboot.” It had nothing to do with the old CGI cartoon, but I still used that show’s logo as the figurative face of the challenge, to show that I had beaten it. Next month’s challenge is called “Shadebound,” and is fantasy-ninja themed.

Yeah, it’s going to destroy me; wish me luck!

#gentlecomicshabit – 3 Minute Comic

For those not in the know, I work for a printing company as my day job (now a different printing company than the previous one), and I was commissioned by my H.O.D. to design a print for a banner wall, one that we can use as a display sample; he said I could literally do anything, such as incorporate something with my comic style and characters.

My Bluesky followers will have seen some progress shots of what I’ve been working on: a splash image of 20 characters in a dynamic charging shot. This thing is going to be 3 x 2.25m in size; I might even ask if I can have a second print to keep, juuuuust in case I ever end up back in a convention booth…?

#gentlecomicshabit – 2 Minute Comic

If you’ve known me personally for any significant amount of time, or follow me on Bluesky, you are undoubtedly aware of how I handle the heat:

There’s an ancient Greek term: Kakotherēs; it literally means “bad at summer” or “unfit for summer.” I can imagine an ancient Greek hero with that name, whose weakness is temperatures above 26 degrees Celsius; he would look just like me.

#gentlecomicshabit – 1 Minute Comic

First blog post for the #gentlecomicshabit. The idea behind this daily exercise is to form the habit of creating comics at a set time each day, by creating said comics within a small time limit that gradually increases. This first one only took a minute (plus some minor formatting, but I’m primarily counting the drawing time), while the next one will be done in two minutes; the next will take three minutes and so on, until I’m sitting down to draw for up to an hour or beyond.

I’m slotting in my drawing sessions directly after my daily workouts, so that I can link the two habits together and build them simultaneously; that should explain the topic I chose for this first one:

As time goes on, I’ll increase the number of panels and broaden the subject matter, but I want to eventually use these daily habitual sessions to be drawing actual Fifth Ace Comics updates; it could be a month or two before I reach that stage, so enjoy these silly little doodles in the meantime.

Ciao for now.