I've never looked for gigs on Tumblr before, so let's try it!
Hi! My name is Andriy and Iâm a graphic designer & comics letterer from Ukraine. I've designed logotypes for comics, TTRPGs, music albums, action figures & many other things! I've also worked on various titles such as Dagger Dagger, Lower Your Sights & others as a letterer & won this year's Mad Cave's Talent Search.
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Illustrations in collaboration with @fate221 for an artbook Ukrainian Bestiary that focuses on creatures of Ukrainian mythology. We were working on Upyr (ŃĐşŃ. ŃпиŃ), it's something in between ghouls and vampires.
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Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Quality
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Today I remembered Mad Magic, and I made a LONG post about it.
MM ran from November 2017 to May 2020 for a total of nearly 200 pages, my longest comic yet, not only in terms of actual continuous posting, but in development, as I have sketches and art dating back from 2011. Almost ten years of planning and drawing resulted in me having a big burnout that lasted a year and a half. It wasnât MM fault that happened, and this post is sort of me coming to terms with what went wrong.
While the details and the higher concept shifted and changed multiple times, the heart of this comic always remained the same: thereâre two girls, theyâre roommates, and they live through a series of comedic horror adventures.Â
Around early 2017, I combined this first draft with many newer ideas about high concept parody/deconstructions of Harry Potter: âWhat if a teenage Chosen one enters their adulthood and realizes they canât top all the stuff they did as a kid?â and âWhat if one of those wallpaper background bullies that work as henchman for the main rival was the center of the narrative?â To be honest I was never a huge fan of Harry Potter, but still, I was in the right age group to see the movies as a kid, and read a few of the early books, so these concepts intrigued me.
Enter Mad Magic, the story of Joy Kaplan, former Demon Goat (thatâs your house Slytherin), who after getting kicked out of school, ends up living a life of expedients, together with sassy Alix Peck, a punk girl that appears normal but has actually a mysterious past.
You know how they tell you âdonât make your first comic your big end all epic magnum opusâ? Well, Mad Magic wasnât technically my first attempt at a webcomic, but it nailed the too big for its own good part. When I finished planning it, it was going to be 17 chapters long (40 to 80 pgs each), with dozens of characters, twists, turns, action scenes, magic, time travel, vampires, elves, doppelgangers, lovecraftian gods, crossovers with other stories of mine, long haul plans a la Once Piece where that one character introduced in one panel in page 4 of chapter 1 was supposed to become the main villain of the story arc of chapter 12âŚ
Considering the series ended after 4 chapters and a quarter, we know something broke down along the way. But what?
Well first off MM was a ton of work. I structured the pages in a large euro-comic style, with four rows of panels, that fluctuated between 10 to 20 each, all full color. With a day job, completing a full page could take a couple of days or even a full weekend. So that was tiring, maintaining the schedule ate up a lot of free time, and whenever I missed an update or decided to take a brief hiatus I always regretted it and felt like crap about it.
But the biggest problem was a lack of general fulfillment and this absence was caused by my perceived inability to âfind an audienceâ. Thereâre plenty of articles online explaining the causes of burnout, and one of the big ones is the problem with ârewardâ, when you donât feel like the effort you put into something is worth what youâre getting in return.
There were people reading Mad Magic, there were people that seemed to love Mad Magic, but in my eyes, they were never enough⌠but what wouldâve been âenoughâ anyway? What magic number would've made it worth it??? Ultimately, this junction between my inability to gather a larger interest, and the presence of this foggy, undescribed ânumberâ of people that wouldâve satisfied me caused the wheels to break down. I was letting things like subscriber counts, likes per page, pageviews and reblogs dictate how I perceived my own creation. If a page got fewer likes than average, I started wondering, obsessing what was wrong with it.Â
The point is, after nearly three years of working on Mad Magic, doing my damnest to put out pages weekly, I was seeing absolutely no growth in reach or audience and I didnât really know what I was doing wrong or if I was doing anything right in the first place. This stagnation led to stress, which led to losing pleasure in doing the comic in the first place, so that I was forcing myself to make pages, eventually leading to burnout and the complete loss in my desire to draw again. It took me a year and a half to get back into things, a period so nasty and bleak that even the idea of reading a comic made me queasy. The fact that this coincided with the global covid pandemic exacerbated the problems, but I think that even without that, it wouldâve simply taken a bit longer to reach the same point of no return.
I realize now this mentality was unfair towards the few readers I had, and to myself too. I try not to worry about the idea of âfinding an audienceâ anymore. I make the stuff I make because I want to, if I catch myself thinking âpeople wonât care about thisâ I nip it in the bud. Iâm lucky enough that I donât need to draw for a living, and considering artistâs spaces on the web seem to be constantly shrinking, the whole endeavor of finding a following online seems just a headache.
I also try not to be bothered by the concept of schedules and updates. Â I only draw when I want, when I feel like it, and it works. I look at stuff like Toxic Park, one of my current projects: in 2022, I produced around 80 pgs of story in two blocks, when the will and inspiration to do so hit me. Thatâs roughly the same amount of pages of Mad Magic I made in a similar period 2017/2018, by forcing myself to have at least one page ready every single week. So, the change in schedule or lack thereof, didnât result in a change in output. Not to mention, that in both cases, I tried to develop other ideas simultaneously, and while with MM coming out that felt like crunching, at my leisure carefree pace I also made a 20 pages historical comic, Theo the Lucky, and nine more shorter comics, which are all around two to three pages worth of story (and youâve seen posted on this blog). Simply put, I feel like I draw so much more now that I donât cage myself in a mentality where âI must get this done before this completely imaginary deadline hitsâ.
I still hold the Mad Magicâs cast dear to my heart, theyâre part of a ten year journey. I often try to think of ways of bringing it back, but continuing from the point where I left it off, where things were just starting to get interesting, doesnât feel right. I may follow Osamu Tezukaâs Star System, where the same characters in personality and design are recontextualized in completely different stories. Weâll see.
Mad Magic is still up on tumblr where it was originally posted! And looking back at it, I think it still holds up relatively well. I lost all passwords and emails relative to that account so I canât access it, but the entirety of the comic in its uncompleted state (I think some pages mightâve been weirdly flagged during the tumblr porn ban?) can still be read here:
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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