A year ago, when I wrote my 2018 in Review post, I said, “In terms of my art and comics, 2018 was mixed. I wasn’t as productive as I had hoped I would be.” I’m happy to report that I’m feeling better about what I got done in 2019 than 2018, and I feel ready to draw a lot in 2020!
The big reason I was feeling down on 2018 was because I intended to self-publish a mini-comic that year, but didn’t get it done; however, in Spring 2019, the long-gestating Urscape #1 finally saw the light of day. It got some positive reviews and is still available for y’all to purchase from my shop. I’ve got some ideas and sketches for a sequel but I’m putting it on the back burner for now while I work on some other projects.
Urscape #1 interior photo.
Another exciting event in 2019 was when I presented on Constructing Pyschedelic Narratives in Comics to my friend Tim Brown’s college class, Special Topics: Narrative and Comics in Art. We recorded a video but I haven’t gotten around to editing it down yet; sorry Tim, Jason, and anyone else who wanted to see it.
One thing I can share is the jam comic I drew with ideas from the class, based on a Jim Starlin comics layout for depicting a psychedelic mind battle:
And here’s the layout I used for that comic, with some Santoro-style arrows on it, from Captain Marvel #28 by Jim Starlin, Dan Green, and Tom Orzechowski.
I tabled at three shows this year, which was fun, and I sold my last contributor copy of Warmer, a poetry comics anthology about climate change. If you missed snagging a physical copy, you can buy a digital one for $5 from one of the editors, Andrew White. All proceeds from those sales will go to The Climate Mobilization.
Photo of me at my table at KC Zine Con 5. I was selling some Retrofit comics in addition to my own stuff.
In the summer, I finished drawing a short humor comic written by Mark Peters and posted it on this site. It’s called Nothing, you can read all four pages here.
Nothing page 3.
In the fall, the first part of the video game I helped Zach Taylor with, Meanderthal #1, came out! We’re already brainstorming more characters and plots for #2. You can still download #1 for free from Zach’s itch.io page.
Screenshot of The Meanderthal #1. You can see how Zach incorporates his comic panels in the gameplay.
And I had two pages in Universal Slime #7, a comics anthology edited by fellow Missourian John Malta which debuted at Comic Arts Brooklyn.
Screenshot of the slime box from John’s instagram.
A big comics project I made some good progress on in 2019 is a continuation of a story in Tales from the Hyperverse #1 that’ll eventually go into a hypothetical Tales from the Hyperverse #2 or come out on its own, depending on how long it ends up being (I don’t do a lot of outlining in advance for my comics). The comic is called A Reluctant Oracle. It’s about a rainbow robot named Mim. Their head was stranded on a rat world in Tales from the Hyperverse #1. In the sequel, Mim is rescued by the Floating Crystal Witch, who builds them a new body. The two pages from Tales from the Hyperverse #1 that introduce Mim will be a prologue to A Reluctant Oracle but I made some edits to that older comic to bulk up Mim’s backstory.
Here’s an edited version of a page from Tales from the Hyperverse #1:
Here’s a couple pages from A Reluctant Oracle:
