I thought that I promised last time to make a sketch dump for the first part of January for organization’s sake, then found that I went ahead and posted everything anyway? Well, while I’m logged in…
As you can see, I’ve gone back and inked/colored some old sketches as a sort of practice- I’d like to put out more completed works this year and maybe, actually, truly write some comics again. I’ve got to where I feel like something is missing in my day and the cycle really was pretty fun of working and posting them, especially the Eishi&Dixie stuff I could just write whenever without a set format or schedule.
I went through a little bit of nostalgia for Revolver a week or two ago and tried to sort of bait people into reading it in a sort of “oh nooo~ I left the door open to this thing, I hope nobody looks~” way only to find that the archive was kind of broken- Kind of inevitable honestly. It ran on a webcomic plugin that’s been long deprecated and apparently stopped functioning entirely at some point. It has now been updated to a generic but modern WordPress theme and is readable again, though the order is reversed (hit ‘next’ to go ‘back,’ etc.) I’ve seen enough cases of people’s old work being dredged up that I feel a weird obligation to not hide it, but not really actively promote it, either. It’s embarassing in a lot of ways, but it is still my history and a project I put a good amount of time into. I could double down on being self deprecating but I have been legitimately blindsided a couple times by people remembering it, including a girl I was dating who I didn’t even think would actually *read* it after I offhand mentioned it and said congratulations on its conclusion.
Revolver Knight is very much the product of me throwing as many things I thought were cool into a pot and flavoring it with anime cliches out the wazoo. I honestly still kind of like some of the early stuff, but the darker stuff comes off like forced EDGE and the ‘globetrotting’ arc is the real downhill trend of the whole thing. Among the ‘things I thought were cool’ at the time was the idea that Alterra could be like a big-deal setting for all sorts of adventures and spinoffs and I dunno, RPG sourcebooks or something and I really wanted to show off different regions while also not really having the patience to develop them very well. It really all would have been better served if I kept it small scale and within the wasteland like a sci fi/fantasy/western romp- there was really no *reason* to go to Mostly Japan But Some Chinese Influences Land Because The Author Is An Idiot 20something Westerner beyond “the green haired girl was a ninja thief.”
Also, artistically, it gets *lazier and lazier* as it goes on with abuse of photoshop fills and a lot of the coloring was done when I, like most digital artists I imagine, was in the phase where they realized “hey, the dodge and burn tools are great for shading!” Ironically, the final page in the archive actually does feature someone suffering from severe sunburn.
For a while, I thought about doing a reboot series taking a lot of these things into consideration along with details I’d gotten to like from having extended roleplay sessions within both the old and revised versions of the world. Ultimately, though, since those sessions did both drag on and eventually end for personal reasons, revisiting them is kind of bittersweet. Going straight into an Epic Adventure Story for a first webcomic project was probably a bad idea, but I was sort of inspired to go for it by the 2000s webcomic boom where all kinds of comics were taking off all over the place and usually started off rough to begin with. I did waffle around starting it for too long to really get in, and I’m not the greatest marketing mind of course.
While I’m on the subject, I had a lot of fun writing gaming comics with the girls, but mainly stopped, ironically, because people actually reading them got me into a perfectionist streak where I would agonize over the jokes, page layouts, and making the artwork as ‘clean’ as possible for that legit webtoon look. It’s kind of stupid in retrospect, because the first comics were literally drawn in Sharpie with mixed media ‘teaser’ images thrown in and people liked those just fine. Some of the jokes make me go “???” Re-reading them and the art is all over the place but I mind it less since I feel like there’s a general trend of improvement throughout. Their ending was also the beginning of my ‘sketch a day’ year which, in a way, I never really got over just drawing random stuff on impulse. Maybe a bit of direction is in order, again.