Tag: blog

Two weeks in a row with blog posts? Is this an indication of things returning to a proper status quo? I should hope so, there’s going to be a lot of regular posting happening soon, because the Fifth Ace Comics Ko-Fi tiers are now live!

Yes, it’s happening, and you can see it for yourself by clicking that brand spanking new link that says “Ko-Fi” right up there in the header bar! The Ko-Fi account is the place where you can see early and exclusive uploads of upcoming Fifth Ace Comics stories by throwing a few bucks my way every month. As I said last week, this means WIPs, first looks at new pages, and full issues available on the Ko-Fi store, even if you aren’t subscribed!

It’s a little bare bones at the moment, as there’s only so much up there right now, but once Exemplar #1 is completed, there’s going to be a veritable deluge of stuff being uploaded. Pages will begin uploading on this site at the old schedule of Mon/Wed/Fri, while uploads to the Ko-Fi will be happening every single day until the issue is completed, so if you’re subscribed, you’ll see the full thing before anyone else. Unless of course, you’re a fourth tier aka Spades aka $10 subscriber, in which case you’ll be able to read the full issue in pdf form; that tier will go live when said issue is done. PLUS, that full issue will contain an exclusive 4-page backup story that will not be readable anywhere else, so if you want to see every nook and cranny of this superhero universe, be ready to sign up when that tier becomes available.

So, when will that issue be complete and all this stuff will be kicking off? Official answer is… soon. Yes, I know that’s vague, it all depends how quickly I can get the artwork done, but I will say this: barring any mishaps or unforeseen pitfalls, I will have the artwork finished within the next two weeks. Exemplar #1 WILL drop this month, come hell or high water. I’ve been going all out on getting the final colour rendering finished, which is why you may have noticed a lack of Magic Beans this past week. Such may be the case next week too, but I am determined to get this comic done so that I finally have some more stuff to show you all again.

However, I should probably clean up the house a bit too… Let me get that sorted and I’ll be right back to the grindstone. Keep your eyes open, it’s all coming together!

Ciao for now.

Wait, it’s been how long since I did a proper blog post?

Unlike some previous instances, my lack of full-length blog posts has been something that just sort of evolved organically out of doing the #gentlecomicshabit posts; with me posting something almost daily, I kind of didn’t have much to talk about in one extensive post like this. It’s also why you may not have seen a #gentlecomicshabit post in a few days: I’m running out of stuff to talk about.

Aside from me losing my job, and indeed because of it, I don’t have a lot of stuff that goes on in my life. I don’t have the financial security to take exciting vacations, most media I consume is easily streamed directly to my computer or phone so I don’t need to leave the house for entertainment, and there haven’t been a lot of major conventions happening yet this year. As such, I’m at home keeping myself busy while casting out my line into the endless sea of the job market, and the fish aren’t exactly biting.

That said, as an introverted, undiagnosed-but-highly-likely neurodivergent individual, keeping myself busy/entertained has never been difficult. The #gentlecomicshabit, while having slowed down somewhat, has nonetheless gotten me back into the swing of drawing, which was always the intent behind it. Magic Beans has made a return with weekly updates, and the pages of the Fifth Ace superhero universe (I should come up with an easier name for that…) are chugging along; the first issue is fully scripted, thumbnailed and lettered, with nearly half the pages penciled and counting. I don’t know if I’ll have it finished before my birthday, but that is a goal to work towards.

In terms of other art, I’ve been keeping an eye on several accounts that I follow with regards to art challenges and throwing my hat in the ring on as many as I can handle, whether it’s for original characters, fan art, pose references, anything; a lot of people check out these things, so it’s good for exposure. For example, there’s a new March Amalgam challenge making the rounds on socials; I had a lot of fun with last year’s challenge and I’m already several pieces ahead on this one. By the end of the month, it’ll be one more box off my Art Bingo card for 2025.

On top of all that, combining my art with my income issues, I’m in the process of refining my Ko-Fi page; soon I’ll be doing a proper relaunch with subscription tiers, where I intend to have exclusive rewards for anyone willing to sign up. I should have everything in order closer to when the first issue of the Fifth Ace superhero ‘verse (seriously, it needs a better name…) is complete; I’m planning for WIP previews, bonus artwork and pinups, as well as discounts on the full issues when purchased through the Ko-Fi store. It’s going to be a lot of work, but again, it’s not like I’m going anywhere right now.

That about sums everything up so far, I’m going to get some food.

Ciao for now.

Anyone who saw my #gentlecomicshabit post yesterday will know what the big event of the week is; for those who didn’t, there’s no beating around the bush:

I’m unemployed again.

My probationary period with the company came to an end, and they decided that the position they had tried to carve out for me wasn’t a good fit with the organization as a whole, and as a result there was no longer a place for me there. While they acknowledged my talent in some areas and pointed out my difference in tastes elsewhere, it didn’t matter in the end because there just wasn’t enough for me to do that could justify my continued employment.

I’m not going to lie: this sucks. I don’t know if the full weight of it hasn’t hit yet, or if I’m just numb to the idea of being let go at this point, but I’m just feeling adrift at the moment. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, got up with a raging headache and was generally out of sorts all morning; thankfully some food, some meds and a nap helped with that by the end of the day, plus my workout involved a lot of shadowboxing in order for me to relieve some stress. No comic upload alongside this blog, call it a skip day, I’ll have something new tomorrow.

On Monday, I’ll be going into the office one more time, just to fill out all the necessary paperwork, and then it’s back into the job market for me. I already have a few ideas where to start, as well as some friends and family that can hopefully point me in the right direction to find something new. On the other hand, since I’ll be at home all day, it’ll be a good opportunity to keep building my portfolio; I doubled down on writing the last time, now I’ve go no excuse not to go all out on art.

To that end, I want to start frequenting my local library at least a few times a week. As much as I enjoy being at home with the cats and having the fridge almost within arms reach, such things are a major distraction, and I think I could get a lot done by spending three or four hours in a quiet, office-like environment instead.

No time to sit on my laurels like before; three months of employment is nowhere near as exhausting as four years without a significant break, so this weekend will be my only grace period. Come Monday, the real work begins.

Ciao for now.

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.

It has been… a very long hiatus, longer than I had thought, so this will be making up for lost time, strap in.

A lot has happened between the last blog post and this one, a whole eight months worth of stuff, and yet it seems like not that much has changed on the surface of it all. I mean, there haven’t been any comics updated on this site in a literal year, for a start. Chalk it up to the usual excuses; if the lack of energy and time wasn’t the issue, I can instead pin a lot of it on demoralization.

I once again lost my job in September last year, practically two years to the day since the previous time I lost it, from the same company, for the same reasons. To say I was surprised would be a lie, but I was still disappointed; you’d think they would have learned their lesson since the last time, but nope, the axe was dropped. When they came back to me a month later, just like the previous occasion, this time I said no, and not just because they offered me a bum deal that would have seen me working in those toxic conditions for even LESS money. Fool me once, and all that.

In the month or so that followed my retrenchment, I focused in on writing a lot more. Just because the comics haven’t been flowing doesn’t mean that they haven’t been on my mind; I threw myself into script outlines and plotting the overall arch of my continuity. Certain characters took greater prominence, new ones were inserted unexpectedly, and priorities shifted to form a more cohesive narrative. The outlines are all in various stages of completion, but I now have a total of 42 issues of my ongoing universe plotted out, with the aim to continue on afterwards. Just when I thought was going to be the next Jim Shooter and rival the Valiant Comics blueprint for levels of ambition, that’s when I got a new job in November.

It’s pretty much the same as my old job, but with better people, a nicer environment, a shorter commute and, most importantly, a higher salary. I’m grateful for the opportunity presented and I come home less exhausted than I did before (an hour earlier, too), but you’ll notice that there’s still not a lot of comics happening. Much as how I’ve been plotting out the continuity of my stories, I’ve also been plotting out how to encourage myself to keep working on the artwork in the face of a day job.

To this end, I discovered an art challenge on socials called the Gentle Comics Habit, a small, gradually escalating daily comics exercise that I plan to utilize and get myself back into the habit of drawing stuff in the evenings. Alongside my restarted exercise plan (yes, I’m trying again, give me a little credit for the effort), I’m hoping that this form of habit building will blossom into full pages eventually be drawn every night. Eventually being the operative word.

What does this mean for the release schedule? Well, Issue #0 of the Fifth Ace Showcase has been incomplete for too long, so I’m going to finish that off first, and I’ll be capping it at a grand total of… 10 pages. It was initially planned to be a lot longer, presenting a lot more characters, but through the process of my script outlines, I realised how much the characters were changing as I wrote them, and any further pages in Issue #0 would quickly become outdated or inaccurate. So in the interest of cohesiveness, I’ll be releasing what pages I already have completed next week, Mon/Wed/Friday and call that issue done and dusted.

I’ll also be uploading the results of the Gentle Comics Habit, in the form of blog posts rather than an archive of strips, just to ensure that I’m also getting in the habit of putting stuff online. Those should start trickling in from tomorrow, maybe with a day missing here or there at most, fingers crossed.

As for the comics I’ve been writing, I’m looking into ways to release those in a more structured way, preferably after they are complete; I don’t want to be soliciting anything that I can’t present to you, so I’m not going to talk too much about that. However, I’m hoping to have some kind of plan in place by the end of March at the latest, again fingers crossed.

In the meantime, starting next month, I want to have something happening on the comics side of things here, so I’ll be bringing back a weekly upload of Magic Beans! I sort of left it hanging after I went into it half-cocked, but I’ve been doing some plotting for that now as well; combined with the building of habits, there’s a good chance I can be a bit more consistent with the uploads, cross those fingers a third time.

That was a lot, unsurprisingly, so I’m going to call it here. Incidentally, if you came to this post from Facebook, don’t hold your breath when it comes to seeing more posts there; the whole Meta situation has got me avoiding that website like the plague, so consider this the one and only breach of quarantine. For more consistent notifications on what I’m up to, either check back here daily, or follow me on Bluesky.

Ciao for now.

Two months since there has been any activity on this site; one would almost think I’d dropped off the face of the Earth again. Not happening, people; I aten’t dead.

After my birthday in March, things just started happening that were too fast to keep up with, but in hindsight not worth dwelling on, so I didn’t bother to record anything for blog posts. I fell back into routine, just keeping my head down while still trying to keep it above water. I’ve been brainstorming, doodling, jotting down notes and concepts, but not a lot has manifested in the way I want it to, and despite the vitamin supplements I haven’t felt the right energy to create intensively. This wasn’t helped by the changing of the seasons and the workload at the day job playing up my anxieties. That being said, it’s not like I’ve been doing nothing at all.

The 30 Day JLX Amalgam Challenge during March was completed successfully; I was immensely proud of myself for finally finishing a month-long art challenge, having failed several times in the past. Here’s the full compilation of art pieces, stylized as trading cards and a fold-out poster; this was a very 90’s sort of challenge, so I went with the trends of the times:

It felt good to check off the first block of my Art Bingo card for the year. I also hopped onto the 100 Original Characters Challenge; that one’s taking a bit longer, but I’m 66 characters in and spacing them out so that they aren’t overwhelming me.

March in that regard was super productive. April… ugh, where to start with April… I think this is why I didn’t want to blog so much; April was when stuff started to go wrong. My car needed some major repair work, I had to take several days off work to accommodate it, and I cringed every time I looked at my credit balance. My saving grace is that with the end of the month came ComicCon Cape Town. While I was there primarily in a supportive capacity once again, and the stresses of making the convention work were relentless, it sorted itself out in the end, and the profits are going a long way to clearing our debts. Like I said, I didn’t want to dwell on it so much, but I inevitably did, and I think that contributed to my low-power, safe mode-bootup existence for the past few weeks. Prime example: last Saturday I napped from 9am to 1pm with a cat on my lap, then spent the afternoon painting miniatures and binge-watching X-Men ‘97, my brain effectively running on background power.

Through it all, my ambitions have only increased, and I may be making myself unnecessarily depressed by not being able to do all of the things, not having the time or the energy to create everything that passes through my head (and there’s a lot; I must have conceived another six different stories in the past month). In my mind, I feel like I could churn out so many comics if they were my full time job, if I could work from home all day, if I had a fancy Cintiq tablet to make the drawing more natural, if I wasn’t shackled by the constraints of the day-to-day, if if if if if if IF. All of the “ifs,” the “ands,” the “buts,” rattling around in my head and telling me that there’s no way I can do what I want, because that’s just the way things are. Well, in the words of a surprisingly eloquent duck: ““The way things are” stinks!” To change that, I’m going to have to make it happen; I can’t do it alone, but I’m going to have to be the one to take the first step. Once more unto the starting blocks, dear friends, once more; time to get a real routine going again.

First priority: clear the debt; that should be sorted come next month, but I think it might be time to open up commissions again. Any little extra income is going to help; I’m going to have to self-promote like never before, as well as set up a proper payment system. If you came here from Bluesky, my DMs are open; I’ll be posting a commission pricing sheet sometime in the next week.

Second priority: new day job; I’ve set up an account with a recruitment agency, so it’s time to follow up on every recommendation they send my way. Anything that I can find that is closer to home (or better yet, remote work) and can improve my net income for the month will be a welcome relief.

Third priority: get the comics flowing; I’ve been able to squeeze pages out in the past despite everything, so there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to now. Even if I only get two pages out a week instead of three, or heck even just one, I need to start getting the stories out of my noggin and online.

Everything else is more long term; by the end of the year, it would be nice to buy something like a Cintiq tablet to make the work easier, or a Nintendo Switch to have something to play more casual games on in my downtime, but those are non-essentials. I can still do what I need to do with the equipment already at my disposal, so no excuses on that front.

Maybe one day I’ll have the time, energy and freedom to become the comic producing juggernaut that I’ve always wanted to be; if Jack Kirby could churn out six pages a day, why shouldn’t I be able to eventually as well? Until that day comes, the marathon continues; I needed to sit and rest for a while, but now I’m back at the line, waiting for the starting gun to fire. 

BANG.

Posting rather late tonight, it’s been a bit of a full day; the less said about the day job the better, but all I’ll say is that I only managed to squeeze in one character portrait, so you know it was packed.

The JLX Amalgam challenge is going great; of the 40 character designs due by the end of the month, I’ve gotten through 21, with the first 15 already uploaded. I’m having a blast drawing these things, and thanks to the layout that I’m using, they remind me a lot of the trading card collections of the 90s, which is very thematic with the era the characters hearken from. I mean, see for yourself:

Aren’t you lucky, getting to see the next six characters in advance? This is the quality content you come here for; I really should start that Patreon sometime, creative juggernaut that I am /end sarcasm.

Aside from that, I’m approximately a third of the way through the 100 OC challenge, the portraits of which I will begin uploading soon; I’ll probably wait until April rolls around so that I’m not clashing with the other art challenge, though if I feel that I can’t wait any longer, I’ll start uploading after my birthday next week. Oh yeah, that…

As of next Sunday, I’ll have spent 35 years existing, which I’m sure you’ll agree is a decently substantial amount of time to have been doing a single thing. I still don’t think I’m particularly good at it, but I’m continuously breaking my record for how long I’ve done it, pretty much on a daily basis as it happens, so that’s something. As I continue to exist, I also continue to have mixed feelings about my birthday, particularly as I’m now approaching middle age, numerically speaking. I tend to keep the occasion as simple as possible, usually just a casual meet up with friends or family, primarily the ones who won’t stoop to singing that bloody song at me, and I don’t encourage gift giving; I always feel bad that I don’t have the capability to reciprocate gifts on other people’s birthdays, so it feels wrong for anyone to spend money on mine. Give me a cake and a day where I don’t have to do anything, and that’s enough for me. I intend to keep this attitude until I turn 73, and that’s when the big party will be; the reasons are too complex to explain right now.

That’s pretty much it for this week; I’ve had a few new/old/revised story ideas knocking around in my head today, so I might see about jotting down a few notes for them this weekend since I’m ahead on character portraits. I’d also better haul out my D&D notes again; I’m returning to a game tomorrow night that has been on hold for most of a year, so who knows if any of the people involved are going to remember anything.

Ciao for now.