The journal comic was up and I scratch-built a wordpress-comicpress website to house it and give me a place to post it.

The journal comic was begun as an exercise in drawing and story-telling, but after Ivy was born it became a precious document of a very serious and pivotal moment in our lives. It also had the jokes and silliness inherent in our lives, which made it only more special. So I kept it up and, in the second year, rededicated myself to it.

I gathered photo-reference, drew from life, and experimented daily. My art and my abilities grew very quickly, and I was able to find a certain stride between the end of year one and the beginning of year two. (posted here)

Being deeply uncomfortable with the quality of my line art, and my early phobia of spot-blacks, I began to make up for the visual short-fall with marker shading. It was a tremendous revelation to me and my love affair with alcohol based markers has persisted to this very day. It was a revelation in another way as well.

As a boy, filled with adolescent fantasies, I could not shake the constant feeling that if I could simply get my hands on the “right” art supplies, I’d finally start getting good, or I’d finally be a “real artist.” In high school, the best of the best coloring implements were Prisma Colors. The colored pencils and the markers specifically. All the cool kids and really inspiring artists used them, but they were expensive, and the “cool kids” definitely came from much more liquid households than I did.

As an adult, I reached the point where I needed to experiment with them to grow. I started with only 4 of the precious Prisma things and the experiment was a resounding success! Being colorblind, I limited myself to gray markers.

By halfway through this second year of comic making, I had run through and fully killed a case’s worth of Prisma color markers. The time had come for the Super-Legit OnlySuperRealArtistsNeedThisStuff Refillable Copic Markers. I ran a small fundraiser and was barely able to afford the 12 pack of copic Cool Gray markers and their refills (things were lean in our house at this time).

I still use these markers regularly today, 10+ years later.

In rededicating myself to this comic, It became no longer an extended exercise, and instead became The Thing I was making. I began the process of trying to turn comic-making into my long term career on the back of this journal comic. An uphill battle to say the least. I began to lose even more sleep.

Experience is always the best teacher, and I learned a lot this year.

A lot happened as well. Moved back to Megan’s hometown (a stone’s throw from my own) and I lost my childhood dog. The story is in the middle of the batch and acts as a pretty severe gut-punch to most people who read it. Thus this warning.

I had to put that dog down more than ten years ago. I haven’t had a dog since. I can’t. At the time of this writing, I am a 35 year old man, and I still think of and miss that animal at least once a month. Filthy, fluffy, and dumb as a post. She was a 40 lbs. of clumsy mongrel, but yet also so sweet and loving as to give the coldest heart faith in goodness itself.

Anyhow, Enjoy this second batch of journal comics!

All my best,
-Gabe D.