OK, I think one of the things I’m gonna do as I post portraits for the character guide over the next couple weeks is also post the non-colored versions of the portraits, because I’m going to be moving the colored ones to an earlier place in the archives. Generally, I think I’m going to be moving the order of the comics in the archives on this website around to make them into a more cohesive reading experience, so if links go dead that might have something to do with it. I might also remove some of the older comics that I don’t like anymore, but I’ll try to resist that temptation.
I thought that, with the non-colored versions of the portraits, I could blog a bit about the projects I’m working on and things. In general, I’d like to start blogging more, and we’ll see how that goes.
So, Damaged Goods. I’m calling my next chunk of work that for several reasons, the main one being that it’s about coming to terms with your past so that you can move into the future. It will involve dating strips, and the rabbit looking back on past relationships and now seeing them from a new vantage point. It’ll also involve the origin story for Prester the bear, which fits with the title in its own way because he’s a teddy bear that didn’t quite come out right, and so he didn’t sell as fast as the other teddy bears, which is part of the reason for his misanthropic attitude about things. It seemed to apply, too, to my frustration over how hard it is to earn a living doing the things you actually want to do, which in my case is make comics, so the name Damaged Goods is also a bit of a joke on my comics, like the name A Waste of Time also is, because I guess from some point of view my attempt at a comics career could be seen as me trying to sell faulty goods.
So, to that end, Capitalist Pig is gonna be a big part of the upcoming storyline, and will hopefully provide a good sounding board for me to talk about issues like creator’s rights, and what our society does and doesn’t seem to think is valuable. The recent controversy over the Watchmen prequels has led me to have discussions with people in which I’ve been astonished to see how little some people can value the contribution of the people who actually make a work of art. Some people don’t really seem to get that the artist might be important to the production of art, they kind of seem to think it’s all fodder turned out by some mysterious machine for the purposes of their enjoyment.
I’ve been writing comics with Capitalist Pig for a while, but I haven’t used him all that much recently as I’ve been spending a lot of time telling dating stories and stories involving the relationship between Rickets and Prester, and things like that. When Capitalist Pig was last part of a major storyline in my comics, though, Rickets and Prester tried to murder him, and failed, so obviously there is some tension there that’s going to continue to play out, and I think it will fit in nicely with the current state of the relationship between them. It also seemed to fit in nicely with a lot of the current zeitgeist of the World, and things that are going on with Occupy, and my own personal struggles to make a living as an artist. The relationships between money and power seem to be on a lot of people’s minds, and mine very much so, so it’s all going to play into some big plotlines involving Capitalist Pig.
In general, the ideas about career will fit in with a lot of what I’ve wanted to talk about as far as figuring out what it is you want to do with your life. The rabbit trying to figure out what it is that will make him happy will also include him thinking about relationships, so there will still be lots of comics about dating and relationships including, eventually, comics about the happy relationship that I’m in at the moment :) The comics usually take much longer to draw than to write, so sometimes there’s a lag of a few months between how I’m showing my life in the comics I post to the website, and what’s actually going on in my life at the time.
There will still be plenty of comics about sex, too, and actually the other big ongoing project I’m going to start talking about soon will have sex as one of its major focuses, so, don’t worry, I’ll still be drawing plenty of smut.
