BOHICA News!

An opportunity I take every so often to thank my wonderful supporters. You are modern day "Patrons of the Arts" and I appreciate you.

I'm going to try to introduce a few more new things over the course of the year (such that remains). I started doing the Star Wars Fanart stuff a few months ago and I enjoy it, so I am hoping to do more things like that, but not just with Star Wars. John Bandow already recommended throwing in more Empires-related materiel, which I have been slowly working towards, but I need to kick that into a higher state of priority.

I like to think that there's a lot to see here but I also realized, while I was in Kosovo, that I've kind of fallen into a formula or pattern, so I will try to bring in new stuff-- without cutting back on BOHICA Blues.

This year I didn't get a chance to work on a book due to the deployment, but I am going to put together a stand-alone book based solely on KFOR, and I will also change the format to a more manga-size or trade-paperback-size comic instead of the "magazine-size" format of 8.5x11 that I have been using.

I've gotten feedback in the past that the magazine-size format is kind of odd and atypical for a comic. My thought process was that the words would be shrunk down and hard to read in a smaller format, but I think I am just fooling myself. Magazine-size stuff doesn't do well. I will experiment with the TPB or Manga size for the KFOR book and if it works I will switch to that in the future.

OTHER NEWS & EVENTS

Meanwhile, over at Tapas, the user RED-VELVET-CUPCAKE offered to draw peoples' random characters, and I got this great interpretation of Sadie!
https://forums.tapas.io/t/id-like-to-draw-your-characters/88745/61

What else?

Right now, if everything goes according to plan, I will attend the Boise Comics Arts Festival in Boise on August 30th-31st (Saturday and Sunday).

https://www.boisepubliclibrary.org/using-the-library/boise-comic-arts-festival/

Because I wasn't able to get vendor registration in early enough, I didn't get a table, and as mentioned, I do not have a book ready this year anyway, so I will just be there as a random slackjawed mook attendee.

There is a slight possibility that I will be able to attend the following next year:

Rose City Comic Con: Portland, OR, dates for 2026 not selected yet but typically around September.

National Cartoonist's Society Reuben Awards, again, dates not nailed down yet but typically mid-August.

FurSquared: Wisconsin, February 5-8. Mostly to get in touch with some folks I knew from Back In The Day.

None of these are guaranteed, and with costs being what they are there is a good chance I may not be able to afford any of them. This is a very robust convention schedule and a lot depends on a number of moving parts falling into place like perfect Tetris.

OTHER EMPIRES-RELATED RELEASE NEWS:

Besides bringing more Empires-related art here to Patreon, I also plan to do a release of not just comics but a number of short stories and novellas that I have sitting on ice. These will probably all be released on Tapas, which holds print stories as well as comics. I want to do some timed releases of stories by chapter, and releases of short 1-to-2-page short stories. Ideally, they will run concurrently with the comic. The stories and characters will all be unrelated, just set in the same universe.

I recently finished posting the entirety of the BOHICA Blues Iraq Story arc over at Tapas:

https://tapas.io/series/BOHICA-Blues/info (742 pages-- whew!) --and I like letting someone else deal with the issues of running a website so I don't have to. The flipside being, of course, is that you run the risk of being totally lost in the vast firehose of manga-fantasy romances that flood the site.

That's about it for now. Contact me if there are any questions, comments, or whatever.