#stephen garza

Quick postmortem on this and a little about my last comic.

I had done a short comic with Costa Koutsoutis titled "The Doom of the Moors"  Check out his prose work as well, it's really good!

Just looking at it as a finished product, I'm quite fond of it but it unfortunately came during a really bad time in my life. 

It was my first comic with someone else, was super excited to do something different. Unfortunately, it was started in a the beginning of a severe depression. 

Long story short. I've struggled with depression all my life. Had a lot of unfortunate events happen over the years and I thought I was dealing with them well and then my body decided I was completely wrong about this!  

I've been in and out of doctors ever since, this lead to outrageous medical bills that we're still paying off, my wife also took ill for a year. We're in a better place now, but it was a nightmare that we're still taking care of to this day. 

So something that should have been quick and fun became tangled up in this to the point where a project that realistically should have taken me two months, took around three years to come to completion. 

Costa was super understanding and was more then a great guy during this whole time. We're even planning on doing another comic later in the year, but that's for another day.

A little bit after "Doom" was finally posted, Sven Straatveit  (check out his work too! ) approached me about doing a short comic with him inspired by old horror movie hosts and thus "Mysterious Crocodile" was born. 

Again this one had some personal bumps from multiple angles, but it came out during February 2015 after I had to stall it from a proposed October 2014 launch. 

A lot of the problem was that I was/am trying to learn Manga Studio 5. I've never learned how to use Photoshop as it was always too expensive for me, so other then some brief dabbles with the previous versions of MS, I'd never done anything digital. 

And it shows!

Most professional artist will tell you never say something isn't your "best work". And I agree. You stand by what you've done and do your best and try to better next time. 

That said, I almost wish I didn't do this digitally as I think I could have done better if I just used paper and pen. BUT I also really want to learn how to do art digitally, so I stuck with it. I wish there were better tutorials on line for beginners, because even the better ones assume you've used Photoshop for years and base their tutorials on that. So more or less, I was trying to learn a program from day one, learning how to draw with a tablet all this new stuff that I sort of understand now, but put a bit of a monkey wrench in the works from the get go. Oops!

There is a lot in this comic that I'm super proud of and I think the finished comic is a super fun. I just tend to look at everything that I did wrong and obsess over it. (ah! depression is fun.)

The idea was to make it look sort of like an the house style of "Archie Comics".I used to want to submit stuff to Archie when I was younger and used to draw in that style quit a bit...20 years ago. I was really out of practice and I should have done more detailed model sheets. (something that I'm trying to do on the next one) 

Also since I'm such a novice at Manga Studio, there are a few panels where you can tell I tried to run before I learned to crawl. Trying to be ambitious was sort of a problem that I will have to work on in the future. But over all, I like the way the character look and the over all tone of the comic.

I made it black and white and grey because I wanted it to feel like something you'd have watched on an old crappy tv in the attic on Saturday night years ago. And I think that works well here. when I finally have time to do another chapter with Sven I'm not sure if I will do that again, but it felt right for this.

But that's the short long story about how things went down. I hope you had fun reading it and it's not announced yet, but I think a friend is doing the next M.Croc adventure and I can;t wait to see what he'll do with it.  Hopefully I'll be back to it down the road but I have a lot of work to do between now ant then.

But thanks for reading and for reblogging. It warms my heart and I appreciate very much. 

See ya in the funny pages!

Sketching while watching Let's Plays! Can you guess what I was watching?

Today's practice: Generic cartoon girl and comedian Larry Willmore. ...I am an artist of fine taste! 

Was with the last one over a year and he wasn't bad for the most part, but between me being really uncomfortable around him and him sort of just running with ideas even when I was quite firm about "no, that's not  why (insert subject) bothers me", it seemed like a good idea to stop for awhile and then start fresh with someone else.

Also didn't help that he was sort of hinting I was a hypochondriac because I was having random shooting lower back pain the last time he saw me and since I wasn't having them at THAT VERY MOMENT, I was exaggerating about how bad it was affecting me that week.

Also thought I was lying about my psychologist who was in the office, but didn't show up even though he called me the day before and said I'll see you both tomorrow, was supposed to talk to us about changing my meds because the ones I was on caused me to have a really nasty breakdown.

The psychologist never even called to apologized for not showing. REALLY frustrating last session being treated like an exaggerating lair.

At least got my meds changed two weeks later, and at least am not crying/getting angry randomly like I was on the last set, but still feel "off."

Again for those who are new, sorry if the therapist and psychologist stuff is off putting. I don't talk about it super often, but I'm pretty open about it.

I know a lot of people that are on the fence about seeking help and I always suggest if you think you need it that you should get checked. 

That said, even if you have the insurance, the means and the doctors, it's still a long, LONG process to get well sometimes. Some meds stop working, some don't work at all, some make things even worse. It is a very scary process. I just try to let people know from time to time that this is normal and part of the process. But it is extra stress on you. 

Also if you ever start acting irrational on your meds, CALL YOUR DOCTOR IMMEDATELY.

My stuff was bad, but I've known people that's meds made them want to or try to hurt themselves.

Don't play around with it or put it off. Don't stop taking something cold turkey either as that can make things worse. Call your doctor, they will usually ween you off before trying something new, but I'm not a doctor, so CALL YOUR DOCTOR.

I want too, but time, commitments and raging depression makes fools of me often. (Believe me, I'm trying to work on all of that.)  At least on this, since the actual anniversary of the release date is in November, I can worry about the if and when later.

I need to get work done on comics stuff I'm doing and ...actually getting better at, especially digital, art in general. 

I'm going to try and work in a looser style with hopes of getting stuff done quicker(ish) but we'll have to see how it goes. 

That's the suck part of having to stop drawing in my twenties and then and wanting to do character designs before then. I've got a LOT of catching up to do.

I didn't really do backgrounds or vehicles or props, so I'm learning sort of late in the game. Even when I did some storyboarding in the past, since it was more character driven pieces, I could sort of fake may way through it. Also storyboarding and getting used to framing without worrying about word balloons also isn't helping my brain wrap around comic storytelling.