What’s Going On This Last Week?

All the exciting things have been happening!

COMICS!

Validation is still going strong! Thank you everybody for your support!
Mini-Comic Theater started a new short story, “Strike!” You can start reading it here.
Johnson & Sir updated yesterday! Unfortunately the plans to get the website for it up and running have been set back a smidge. Because 1) Technical difficulties, and 2) I got a new freelance gig, and as awesome as that is, it took some of my free time from me.
So hopefully Johnson & Sir will be getting their website by the end of this next week. We’ll see.
And The Legend of Jamie Roberts is now up to page 401! I’m super excited to be doing some more writing for this (mostly because now I’m jumping out of chronological events).
DEVIANTART!

Got a new promo piece up for Validation! It was a lot of fun to draw. It’s not everyday you draw somebody dreaming of riding a dinosaur off to battle.
ETSY AND REDBUBBLE!

Nothing new on RedBubble.
But I DID put up something different in my Etsy store: a charcoal illustration of Batman. This is the only one of its kind I’ve ever made, so when you buy it, it’s gone.
TUMBLR!

I shared a couple of older sketches, including Nizhoni and Lokis and this one that doesn’t have a name yet (and isn’t even finished).
FRIENDS!

If you are on Tumblr, follow my old friend Maquel, aka kimbrynrae, because her art is FABULOUS (and she has a fun sense of humor).
Casey drew her half of the trade we did together. She drew Lord Ranki and he looks wonderful!
Christian’s back in town! We’ll be working on Validation’s next batch of strips, so be prepared for awesomeness.
If you haven’t seen Steve Yurko yet, go to his Storenvy and buy something from him. RIGHT NOW. His stuff is fun and wonderfully cool.
And Jeff’s got some fun character designs and comic pages on his Tumblr, so go check it out!
That’s all for this week. Thanks for your support and remembering to always be awesome :D

Updates for the Week Ending 7/21

Ho man have things been busy here!

COMICS!

Validation updated twice this week. And expect a new poster to come soon! (Design and sketches will be posted here and on the Tumblr).

Johnson & Sir are off-hiatus! See the newest strip over at the tumblr.
Also, Johnson & Sir will be moving over to their own website soon! Expect to see something new next Saturday. :D
“But wait! The tumblr! What about that? What will you do with it?”
It’ll become an ask blog for Johnson and Sir, where you can ask the characters anything you like.

And Mini-Comic Theater has concluded the first short story, “Shadow.” Check it out from the beginning! (I also took the time to redesign the site for it. Now it looks and works MUCH better). The next upcoming short story comic is “Strike”!

Bonus! Right now, The Legend of Jamie Roberts has clocked in at 391 pages! French the llama!

DEVIANTART!

New works this week include more warm-up sketches, a trade with my friend Casey of her character Haku, and a very wise old owl.

YOUTUBE!

Oh my gosh! I finally finished sharing my May Sketchbook in six parts! Golly that took too long

REDBUBBLE AND ETSY!

The very wise old owl from deviantART is now also a T-shirt or sticker!

And over at Etsy you can get another post-convention poster, The Queen of Crows, an original character of mine who also makes an appearance in the short story “Shadow” in Mini-Comic Theater! (Circularity: I am good at that).

TUMBLR!

I’ve been busy this week. Check out my social commentary piece, “If Feminism is Not Needed, Then…” And the Young Turks summed up my feelings on the Zimmerman case accurately.

And in less serious business, if you missed “Whose Line is it Anyway?” coming back on TV, I reblogged the first episode! Enjoy. :D

Also here’s an infographic on how to make the perfect story.

FRIENDS!

Check out Chloe’s short film! It’s cute and sweet and charming in its own way. She also shared some references on Tumblr for muscles and boots.

Scrollon, a comics-reading app that Christian helped to spearhead with Douglas Liefer, is making an appearance at San Diego Comic Con! And it’s now available for download at the iPad App store! It’s a really cool new way to read comics: instead of panel to panel, you read it like a scroll, with side to side swiping. Neat, huh?

Jeff shared a couple of cool comic pages you should look at, because they look AMAZING.

And Casey drew this really awesome Tron fanart! I am an absolute sucker for black shadows in art and just looking at it makes me go “ADVHDJASKNVLA.”

RECOMMENDED READING!

The books and comics I finished reading this week and enjoyed the most were:
The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell
Girls with Slingshots by Danielle Corsetto
Unnatural Creatures, stories selected by Neil Gaiman.

THAT’S ALL FOR NOW!

Thank you for your support, and Don’t Forget to Be Awesome!

New Weekly News Posts!

I’m going to try doing this thing where here, on this blog, I share all the progress, projects, and comics made in the last week. I’m hoping this’ll be a fun way to keep all of you in the loop. :D

So let’s get right to it!

COMICS!

Validation is officially online and updates every Monday and Thursday. We’ve been getting some good feedback already from readers, including a feature on MTV Geek’s Top 5 Webcomics You Missed This Week in the #1 spot! You should hop on over and check out what all the buzz is about.

Johnson & Sir will be coming off of hiatus the next week, with a change to the schedule: formerly it updated on Tuesdays, but now it updates on Saturdays, along with another webcomic…

Mini-Comic Theater! It’s now officially on the web, and will showcase the mini-comics I made for other anthologies and for conventions. Right now it updates every Saturday, but bonus pages will be added every Wednesday, should any come along.

The Legend of Jamie Roberts is still being scripted, and now it’s up to 372 pages! It’s still slated as a webcomic release for November of this year. I posted some teaser sketches from the script on deviantART and Tumblr.

STORES!

I no longer have a Storenvy store. Sorry.

But I DO have an Etsy store and a RedBubble store, both launched this week. New pieces will be added over the next week, including some cool new T-shirt designs in the works. ;D

While you’re at it, if you’re a big fan of Legend of Zelda, go check out my friend Melanie’s RedBubble! She makes great tees, including this one that I bought recently.

DEVIANTART!

Three new art pieces were added to my deviantART page, including Dragonball Z Convention Stickers, the Validation Poster, and the aforementioned Jamie Roberts teaser sketches.

Still currently working on a trade with my friend Casey. It’s 90% finished!

If you would like to be featured in the deviantART news section of later Weekly Updates, just leave a comment here, on deviantART, or send an email. I would like to feature other artists in the future.

TUMBLR!

Aside from the teaser sketches, other notable posts include a reblog of wonderful reference photos of Bengal Tigers, a silly music video by a trans singer, and beekeeper news and how you can help with the alarming number of deaths of bees (please don’t disregard this: as silly as it sounds, bees are humans allies, and the fact that many are dying because of pesticides that we are using should warn us about the state of our crops).

On a lighter note, my friend Chloe shared this wonderful art tutorial on how to draw hands holding swords, and she said some kind and awesome things about Validation.

John Liver also has some awesome art up on his blog, which you should check out.

And Christian Beranek, my lovely writing partner, shared this fun and curse-filled tip sheet on writing awesome work.

THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK!

Next week will be more Validation, more Mini-Comic Theater, new Johnson & Sir, some cool new T-shirts, and hopefully more awesome things from my friends!

See you again this week, and Don’t Forget to Be Awesome.

"Validation" Has Been Launched!

Today is the official launch of the webcomic Validation!

Written by Christian Beranek (founder of The Webcomic Factory), the story follows Ally, a transgender girl trying to love a normal life with a little help from her friends.

I hope you dig!

Does Any Artist Use Newsletters Anymore?

I’ve been pondering this question for a while, mostly because I’m debating whether I want to start one of my own.

See, back in the olden days before blogs became non-eyesores and everything looked like basic HTML code and CSS was barely conceived of, newsletters seemed like a cool option for keeping interested persons in the loops, concerning the goings-on of whoever ran the newsletter.

Newsletters also became relatively quick and cheap tools for selling one’s stuff through. Often messages would say something to the tune of, “Hi! I’m that artist that does that thing at the Brick and Bot festival you went to months ago. I made a thing! You should get it!”

Some newsletters I see today still have that structure of “Hi I’m that person I made a new thing come and get it PLEASE come and get it.”

But I don’t want to be desperate.

Thankfully there are some newsletters out there (like Marie Forleo’s) that don’t have sales pitches every chance they get. They’re often just like blog entries or just have a video clip. Heck, Todd Carey sends newsletters where the only message is, “Thanks for your support because you’re totally awesome!”

But I also wonder who signs up for newsletters anymore?

Am I the only person who still signs up for those things when I come across an interesting person?

Because I would LIKE to MAYBE have a newsletter of my own. Nothing fancy. Have you seen the John and Hank Green newsletter that launched recently? That’s the epitome of “nothing fancy”, but it gets the point across.

I want to do something similar to THAT: a newsletter to let you know what’s going on on the interwebs with me and some cool peeps I know (like Chloe or Jeff), clue you in on things you maybe never knew you wanted, or just point you in the direction of how to decrease the amount of suck in the world.

I honestly like sharing that kind of stuff, with as many people as possible.

But I would like to hear your thoughts on the matter before I jump the gun, get onto MailChimp, and sign up for something phenomenally disastrous.