I have bad news and good news about working on my self-published comics.
Some bad news is that I changed my mind about making The Pizza Man a book. Good news is: I’m going to put The Pizza Man, Shirley’s Day and Incident at the Game Store, in one bigger book!
I made several proofs, and I was just about to go forward on buying prints, but I realized that instead of sitting on many floppy comics that don’t sell that much, I’d make a big trade paperback containing not just my comics work so far, but behind the scenes stuff like my original pencil art and inks! I can even include other illustrations and sketches in the book to show off more of my artwork!
I’m still rocking my Pumpkin Cat Stickers for the month of October! I’m keeping these up for the month, so if it sells out, I won’t be making more until next October.
I’ll likely do other holidays, I’m interested in a Christmas and Valentine’s Day stickers. So hopefully I’ll press forward with that, plus alternate ideas that can be interesting as stickers.
Some other things that’s happening to me is that I got 800 Followers on Twitter! This isn’t too bad for being there for 12 years or so.
I was reminded of an old comic idea about a fantasy society with an eye based hierarchy. The more eyes one had, the higher in social class you were. The idea is of a Cyclops having a romance with a Blind Girl. The Cyclops also having a friendship with a man who also lost his eye.
This never went past the “cool idea” phase, but it’s in my back burner of project. This also extended into some sloppy paintings I did when still learning to paint digitally.
Here’s an old marker sketch for a silly idea about a prison full of kidnapped princesses running on no-holds bared prison rules. At first this was an idea for Blackmask, but I think I’ll expand this to monster girl princesses in general.
Here’s some other marker drawings of some wolf fighters. I’m designing them in a simple enough way that I could draw packs of them raiding castles and stuff.
At first, I had a Large Wolf Empire comprised all Dogs and Wolves together as a ruling empire. But, I decided to make the Dogs as the “civil” nation, and the Wolves the various nomadic and barbarian tribes sprinkled around the world of Blackmask.
Sketches of the Wolf Emperor and Empress respectively. I might keep the designs, as a subtle nod to the fact that despite Dogs and Wolves being enemies they’re not so different.
I have a Magma Mastiff character whose master fire wizard with skills in literal land development! He spends his days as a hermit on a mysterious burning isle. Only the most determined can have an audience with him and learn his secrets!
There’s more copic marker drawings inspired by the dogs I find online. I want to do more with these characters when I can and make up stories for a few of them.
That’s most of the stuff I’ve been doing for the past week or so. I should be done with my work on Flawless Extra-Ordinary Super Heroes after the next week or two. After that, I can finally dive more into Blackmask focus more on my dream project!