Category: Miscellaneous Oddities

…And that’s it for 30 Days of Comics. Pushing myself to draw every evening seems to have gotten my comics back on track, or at least close enough to the track that no one is wondering how the hell a train ended up on an aircraft carrier in the arctic circle. In December I hope to reactivate my blog as well, although I have no plans to post something there every day. Every week may be enough of a challenge.

The next comic will go up on Monday. After that, I plan to return to my old, irregular schedule of one to three comics a week, depending on my time and the comics’ size.

I may end up giving these birds, based on a design I used a few years ago for “Phoenix,” their own category. I started using them because they made it easy to crank out a strip in an evening, but they’ve turned out to work very well for gags that don’t call for easily differentiated characters.

He makes his own numbing ennui.

This is another one I drew relatively quickly. I guess the two panels to the right might have been better if I had, as usual, done two or three drafts, but I still kind of like how it turned out.

Every so often I feel like I’ve forgotten how to color a comic in such a way that it doesn’t look like a box of crayons melted on it. At least the last panel is okay.

It’s amazing the faith some people put in the concept that skill in one area can be transferred to entirely different tasks.

This will be important at Thanksgiving.

I know I said on Wednesday that the rest of the week would be single panels, but that’s because for some reason I thought it was Thursday. And then this thing popped into my head.

I’ll be finishing the week with a couple of single-panel cartoons.

This is taken from something I had written and perfunctorily drawn in a sketchbook, presumably while I was half asleep. After I started drawing I realized there was some kind of story there.

I tried inking this with a Pentel Tradio plastic fountain pen. Nice line variation, but it tends to spatter if you don’t hold it at just the right angle. (I still miss the Fountain Pentel. Still, I’m probably better off using real metal nib pens.)

You may have noticed, if you’re still reading this at all, that the comics have come very slowly lately. I’ve also been less than satisfied with the quality of my recent work, which only ground my enthusiasm down further.

In an effort to get my work back on track, I’ve decided to try the “30 Days of Comics” project conceived by Derik Badman at Madinkbeard: for the month of November, I’m going to try to post some kind of comic every day. Most will be on the sketchy side. Few will be in color. I have no idea whether I’ll be able to keep to this schedule, but I’m going to give it my best shot in the hope that practice will get me back in artistic shape.