Low Effort Comics

Panel 1: “From the top down it looks like the eye of a storm—a black hole so supermassive that it spans the width of eternity.” Panel 2: “Around the hole, ghosts scream. They claw at the dying borders of their dreams with fingernail-chipping desperation. They whip together like the wind, trailing the mutilated streaks of their hypothetical futures with them.” Panel 3: “You’ve been dreaming in anime again. And you have no idea what it could mean.” Directly inspired by the Homestuck epilogues. Tried to ape the HS style for a couple panels!

Friday... thing? It’s not a comic, admittedly, but it’s what I’ve been working on. See, the reason I keep this account is because it’s motivation to keep drawing, practice and improve- I need to get something done at least once a week. Usually that’s a comic! But sometimes the format I use (no shading, three panels, semi-funny dialogue) is a little restrictive. I usually try to draw something new each week (a weird position, or maybe an artstyle shift as a gag, or even just a really detailed background), but there’s only so much to do there and still have it be funny. To that end, this is what I’ve been improving on this week. I never really use Photoshop to its full potential, so that’s what I tried out. I wanted to toy around with lighting effects, larger objects, perspective and even a comic book or graphic-novel kind of format. And I wanted to try out getting more detailed with just shit in general. I have to say I like the results. It took about four times the time I would normally take to draw a comic, and obviously there’s no dialogue or humor, but it was worth it. I might draw more pages, I might not, but these couple of pages are how I did my best to improve as an artist this week.

Friday comic slightly late! I went out to a shuffleboard bar with some friends on Saturday (the reason it’s late is cause, well, I didn’t know what the background would look like). I swore, up and down, that if a single fucking person asked me if I needed a lesson I’d flip my shit.

This is very loosely based off an experience I once had with this. At one point, I had a FWB sending me absolutely vile things about what I should do with her. However, I was in a Dota match, and, frankly, didn’t want to hear it. It was my day off; I didn’t want ANY human contact. So I can’t respond and I don’t want to respond. What do I do? I text her back and told her she wasn’t allowed to finish herself off for the next twenty minutes and that I would set a timer (which I did). She loved it, was going practically nuts as she told me afterward. Meanwhile, I turned off my phone and finished my Dota match. Best idea I’ve ever had.

Happy Friday! The context here is, simply, Apex Legends. I made another version with explanatory text, but when it was removed, the whole thing became much more vile and hilarious. I’m a Caustic main, and his whole deal is that he goes around and sprays gas at people. Naturally, my first thought was to call this my “fart gas”, and everything went downhill from there. This is what, in my perfect world, all of Caustic’s finishing effects would look (and sound) like.

This has some basis in reality. My college requires me to get a parking pass in order to park my car on-campus, near the apartment where I live. I never actually bought one. So far, nobody has noticed, or even written me a ticket, or shot me an email telling me to move my damn car, or anything. Until that happens I’m not buying the pass.

Comic Friday! This is what nobody ever warned me about. “The long dark tea-time of the soul” that Douglas Adams spoke of is a real thing, and it is vicious.

Happy Friday! I’ve always wondered if there’s someone out there who uses bad movies as BDSM punishment. Imagine: A door opens, casting sharp, glaring light onto a basement. Within is a man, bound and gagged, sitting in front of a darkened television screen. A woman in high heels clicks her way into the room, turns on the TV, rips off the man’s blindfold. He gasps. This is the first time he’s been allowed to see in days. His eyes drink in what’s playing for him... ...and it’s the Star Wars Holiday Special. The woman leaves, with screams echoing from behind her.

Happy Friday! Here’s a comic! This is based on a real interaction with my friend Chris. We were playing with some low ranked players and at one point Chris said something along the lines of “Let’s smoke. Smoke? You guys wanna smoke? Smoke up? Nice, great job. Let’s go.” and it occurred to me that he was talking exactly like he was talking to a fucking dog. I tried it in my own solo queue matches shortly after and I just kept winning. It was nuts, really. I took the month of December and did nothing interesting during it, including drawing comics. I have no regrets. We’re back on schedule now, though.

It was fucking hideous. Ever since, it’s been a running joke that he could kill someone with nothing but his jaw. Madman.

Happy Friday! Incoming fire! Yeah, this one happened - with comedic license, of course. Dude would not shut up with the questions about a girl I knew. I felt violated and I wasn’t even the one being stalked.

Happy Friday! Time for a comic. My favorite Baltimore fact is always the fact that they have weekends specifically dedicated to not killing people (look it up, it’s called the Baltimore Ceasefire) on which people usually just get killed anyway. Like, for most cities, it’s not necessary to tell everyone “Hey, can you try not to kill each other so much?” But not Baltimore. As my friend who lives in Baltimore (god help him) once said, “You drive through and you’re fine. But you stop even once and your car stereo is forfeit.”

Friday is for comics! Shuffleboard really is the leisure sport of kings. I have a group that I regularly play with. You can have a beer in one hand and fire off a sick shot that ricochets from disc to disc with the other hand -- it’s great. Plus it forces you to use those physics skills that you swore you’d never use - to calculate angles and force and the like. Or, you know, you can just nuke anything that comes onto the board and send it flying into the street two blocks down. Whatever works for you.

Friday! Comics! Based on a real life experience.

Friday! Do you want to know?

Friday! I’m somewhat of an introvert. This is how I feel much of the time. It’s not that I don’t want to hang out; it’s that I really need to go home and stare at a wall for a bit.

This is a pet peeve that has always bugged me: when an author / creator of some sort puts in a really obvious BAD ZONE near the beginning of a book, then, later, for no good reason, the characters are forced into the BAD ZONE of BAD THINGS! It’s a trope present in a lot of shitty fantasy, and I hate it.