Posted by qynceb on Nov 19, 2021
Howdy!
Welcome to the first official ~studio update~ on my comradery! The plan is I'm gonna do these every friday, that's what I'm committing to, & we'll uh see how it goes.
Studio updates will be updates on my Big Project (my comic book, Glued in Place!) as well as any other projects I'm workin on, and maybe also life updates and various thoughts on like, art and shit, maybe local politics if i'm feeling spicy, or housing co-op drama if i'm feelin REALLY spicy.
For anyone who doesn't know me personally IRL here's a little about me: I live in a four bedroom housing co-op called Nimblewill, which I helped start a year and a half ago. It's a part of Kalamazoo Collective Housing, and is our first & only substance-free house. I live with three great humans and two perfect cats, one of whom is my son, Kiki. I've lived in co-ops for over two years and the values of cooperation are really near and dear to my heart, which is why I was so excited when I heard about comradery -- i'm hype to be a part of building this project now!
I used to have a patreon for a minute, but wow, it sucked, and I barely ever posted on it. I think part of the reason why I never posted is because it sucked, but also part of it was that I was having a hard time and was not dedicated to it at all. I do worry some that this will turn out the same way, where I post regularly at first and then kind of forget about it entirely, but I think part of what is going to be very cool about comradery is that it doesn't need to be siloed and individualistic in the way patreon is. Since it's a cooperative, there's like, built in ways to be involved and get to know the other people involved, which should help in feeling like it's not just me out here, blasting words no one cares about into the void and hoping people notice?
Anyways, here's some fast facts: my favorite TV show of all time is LOST, I love comics and webcomics especially for their DIY ethos, I'm in a band but I can barely play the guitar (we play old labor songs, as well as new labor & protest songs that we write,) I love to cook and bake pies, and I bike around and have aggro cyclist bro tendencies (ie; i hate cars.) I am trans and I love to be trans and you can too.
Now, for my the actual studio update. Here.......is my studio:
It's my bedroom! It's currently the cleanest it's been in a while OK! This is my lil drawing nook. I scored the drawing table from the university surplus store a while back.
So, where I'm currently at with Glued in Place: it has a new title (previous title: Hands on Learning. not good at all. the new title is growing on me.) I received a grant of the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo to help me make the book, and I used some of that money to hire an editor! My editor, Akira, fuckin rules! Hire them for your project, too! At the end of September we finished editing the script, and now I'm on to thumbnails!
I experienced a really awful thing happen at the beginning of October that has disrupted my life and mental health pretty significantly over the last month and a half. Truthfully, my comic book has been one of the last things on my mind and I haven't been working on it like, at all. Because of the grant, I do have a deadline to finish it, sooooo I'm currently trying to kick myself back into gear on it. Hopefully posting updates here will help. In the photo above are the thumbnails I did earlier this year, before editing the script. I did them to try and get a sense of how many pages the book will be and start to figure out the visuals. My next step is to revise these to reflect the new script, and finish thumbnailing the whole book. One of the things Akira and I worked on was pacing and reducing the number of pages, so right now the book looks like it's going to be about half as long as I initially thought! Around 150 pages instead of 250.
Here's the first sheet of thumbnails. One of the things i'll be working on in the next pass is doing much much less of talking head panels. The prospect of doing thumbs is exciting, I like to do them fast and dirty, but wow...I just want to get to penciling and inking y'all...
Anyways, that's the studio update! Thanks for reading! Fuck the state! Love & care for each other!
Qynce