Try Your Luck

Hey folks!

I wanted to do a year-end retrospective and a mental roadmap for the future.

The Past

This has been one helluva year. Started off with my mom passing away, which came as a relief. She was pretty far gone in her dementia and it took a lot to be her live-in caregiver. I think my fondest memories of her are when we watched James Bond marathons on A&E. So I did up a Casino Royale Alice in homage to that memory. ☝️

After my mom passed, I ended up buying my first home. I'm really liking the stability it brings, knowing that I won't need to move again. And I have a lot more energy now to focus on my hobbies - my comics included.

I've also stabilized my art. What I mean is that I'm no longer trying to reinvent the wheel and am very happy with my style and workflow. I've read that this is a state a lot of artists like to get to, as you're no longer looking at your previous works as "inferior" somehow. I'm now just using what I know to produce the best scenes possible, with some refinement here and there.

The Future

In other news, I put in my notice at work. Full blown retirement. I had a pretty good career but I'm now looking to do other things with my time. As you get older, you start finding that time becomes the more precious commodity.

Working a full-time job while doing my art was really burning me out. Now I'm looking forward to having that extra bandwidth to really brainstorm better stories.

Speaking of which - I'm finally going to hunker down and reboot TTLG. Alice is my favorite girl and I don't think I was really ready for her in my early iterations. After cutting my teeth on some challenging projects these past couple of years, it's time I really gave this atomic blonde her due. 😎

More on that in a future post.

The Present

Finally, I'm going to talk about where I'm weakest. The best decision I ever made was not going into making VNs or some other massive commitment. I like how I'm able to jump between girls month-to-month. I always work on whichever project interests me the most.

I'm trying very hard to push my major titles along so that my works aren't a mile wide and an inch deep. Power Girl is a perfect example of a job well done, both in scale and quality. I'm trying to catch lightning in a bottle with King's Quest IV right now. Along the way, I'm happy to do one-shots like Resident Evil and The Last of Us.

My greatest weakness has been struggling to stay on task on certain projects. Batgirl is the most glaring example. The work that comic requires is miles above my standard fare. The reasons are largely technical, but the end result is that the render work becomes a slog.

I know that a lot of you guys are fans of that serial, so I will try to find the time and motivation to get back to it soon. In the meantime, I can promise you that whatever you guys get from me every month is what I'm able to produce with max passion.

And with that, all that's left to say is Merry Xmas and Happy Holidays! Stay tuned for some more KQIV updates and the chapter release on 31 December! 🎄

Also, I'm cooking up something really hot for January. Will post some sneaks of that soon! 😉

Cheers, folks!