Weekly Update - 267 - 4/21/25

Is it Monday again already? Sheesh. It's starting to feel like every other day is Monday. Or maybe it's just that every single day feels like yet another giant step backwards for this part of the globe.

Don't forget to vote in the votey thingy (Max is currently in the lead!):
Who Should I Draw Next? - Round XIV (It Riley time!) | Patreon

TLDR: Derping around with Comic #2 (3?) this week cuz I want to and it's my berthduh. Otherwise feelin' fine.

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Today alone, I've started and nearly finished three entirely new comic pages. How? Great question! I'll explain. Before I do, however, no, they're not for Kiva's story. They're for that second comic I was hinting at awhile back. I haven't forgotten about it. Some of you might remember me mentioning it about a year ago. And some of you are new and this could be the first time you're ever hearing about it. But yeah! A second comic exists and it is a work in progress that is currently working in progress.

Anyway! Kiaun planted an idea in my brain a while ago when he mentioned just how quickly he can finish a drawing. He offered me some tips that might help speed things up and I've been kind of marinating on them ever since. Normally it takes me roughly 20 hours to take a single drawing (usually one to three characters) from a blank page to a finished state. And it can take me even longer if the drawing is more complex, or if I keep getting interrupted by anything. My most productive days involve getting up in the morning, making coffee, then putting my headphones on and drawing until bedtime, with maybe a short break for lunch or dinner. That'll be good enough usually for me to finish one full bonus art, give or take a few extra hours on a follow-up day.

But why? Why does it take me that long to complete one single drawing? And is there a way I can do it faster, put out more comics quicker, without sacrificing quality?

Well no. Not really. Quality and quantity are mutually exclusive when I'm literally the only person drawing. To improve quantity without hurting quality I'd need to increase the scale of production somehow, which in this case would mean hiring a team of artists. That ain't happening -- it would defeat the whole point of this for me. However, it may be possible to sacrifice quality in places where most people won't notice in order to crank out still quite passable art but at a much faster pace. As with many things, I'm really of two minds about it. On the one hand, most people probably don't notice when I take extra time to make some super clean linework around the elbows and to clean up any minor artifacting and to make sure my colors don't bleed out from every fine tuft of fur. On the other hand, SOME people probably notice that stuff, and there's also a school of thought I recall being taught once where attention to detail, even when most people probably won't notice, contributes to an OVERALL quality of any given art piece. A piece of art with neat lines and neat colors and fewer mistakes may be, to many, simply more pleasing to look at when compared to one where the artist favored haste over detail. In theory anyway. Barring a specific case where there's some sort of competition with an array of judges, does it even matter? Does story matter over style? I think so, to a point.

Style and format are also factors in the equation though. Webcomics (and perhaps periodicals in general) tend to be a little more forgiving, I think, so long as the content continues to trudge ahead. Some artists have a style that lends itself far better to a sketchier look. And if I were, for example, to begin using a faster, rougher style for Kiva's story, that change in style would almost certainly be noticed, and it would probably be jarring -- perhaps even look awful in comparison to previous pages, even from a macro scale. If I were to do something like that, I would probably have needed to do it from the start. So I'm not gonna do that.

For the SECOND comic though, I may lean more heavily into a rougher, quicker style, and just really explore that and see what I can do with it. There's a lot I can do to speed things up I think. I can make my pages simpler -- pack in LESS stuff on them. Then I can go a little bit sketchier with the lines, and a little rougher with the color fill. And I can make more use of tools like scatter brushes. I thought about maybe going monochrome with it, and I'm sure that'd save a ton of time, but I like color way too much, and this comic proves it has the potential to be particularly vibrant, so I nixed that idea right away.

Anyway, it's my birfdoo this week, and because it's my barthmew I think I just wanna work on the second comic this week. So... will there be a comic this week? Yeah. But it'll be something new. Something I can maybe keep up with at a much faster pace than once every couple of weeks. Something I might keep a few extra pages of in reserve for when I'm lagging behind on everything else. And I'm curious what y'all might think.

I think I hope to do 5-8 pages for that second comic this week, just really try and crank them out as fast as I'm capable, as a test to see if I even can do this. Then I'll seed them out slowly as I work on Kiva's story, so I can start getting better about posting SOMETHING each week even when I haven't finished the next God Slayers page.

Ramble (as if I haven't rambled enough already):

"The minnow of intellect drowns in the sea of fools." I quite like that line.

Alongside my daily compounding disappointment in things I've been continuing to detach myself from stuff. Disassociating. It's as if the world is not a place I care to be a part of right now. It's not exactly a healthy state of mind, I know, and it's certainly a defensive mechanism, a minimum effort to protect myself from the unavoidable deluge of disappointing and distressing news. However, it's all having an annoying side effect of absolutely murdering my routine. Staying up later, sleeping in, skipping meals, everything has been trending towards chaos, as if the part of my mind that managed such things has been paid a visit by the Chosen of Bhaal.

Which is actually what caused me to binge Baldur's Gate 3 all weekend. A game that... regrettably... continually hits me over the head with all the failures of D&D's core gameplay system when examined from a gameplay perspective. BG3 is, after all, probably THE game that inspired me to finally take my own tabletop game brainstorming seriously and write something like 400 pages of my own now playable rulebook (a rulebook that needs some heavy editing now, btw). But now, don't get me wrong, BG3 IS amazing, because Larian made it so, but the worst part about the game is, I believe, its D&D root. D&D fails at being a video game by the very nature of being a tabletop game. But it also kinda fails at being... a game.

Games should always be about making interesting choices. Rock Paper Scissors is a game. It is, perhaps, the simplest possible distillation of a game. Why? Because it is nothing BUT one single interesting choice made by the participating players. That choice, although it is simple and only involves three options, is interesting because a player must try and predict what their opponent will chose. As a result, it is not a game that can be played solo, because without a second person to make your choice of rock, paper, or scissors interesting, it stops being a game.

D&D's most interesting choices involve creating your character, selecting what class to play, and from that point on, it's really nothing more than an excuse to hold regular social events. While the same could be said about most TTRPGs, including mine, 5e D&D in particular goes an extra mile to deny players their most interesting choices in favor of rolling a dice and letting it determine the outcome of each potential encounter, with the random component doing most of the work. In 5e, as you level up, the game even tells you what you gain, rather than presenting any interesting choices. There are barely any choices to be made in that regard, aside from perhaps selecting feats or spells.

Anyway. Rambles appear to be returning with a vengeance. Kinda funny, I launched this comic in 2018 and I was depressed and I had plenty to say. Then around 2022/23-ish or so, everything was fine and I ran out of stuff to bitch about, stopped rambling almost altogether. Eh, whatever. Everything is fine. Nothing is real. Rambling makes me feel a little better. Thanks for reading.