C'mon C'mon C'mon

 The main reason I started blogging so long ago was to share my experiences as an English peddler.

It was the early years of the internet and well before Netflix became a K-drama delivery system so anything from East Asia was fascinating for everyone back home.

Cancer. But Asian!

Later it became how I got my brain operating in the morning. Coffee. Sit down. Go through the computer looking for a comic, drawing, or photo that would trigger an idea. Start writing.

Like what I'm doing right now.

I fell out of the practice late last year. Partially due to being focused on fulfilling my promise to myself to post a comic online. 

Partially because the world turned idiotic beyond idiotic and it has been getting worse each day and fuck me it's depressing to the point you don't want to do do anything. But I keep doing things.

For example;

Cherry Berry: Necromancer

I started drawing a Panel-per-Day comic that I posted up on Instagram... barf puke hurl... a few years ago. I stopped because I was so far out of practice making comics that it was obvious. The script was still there in my sketchbooks and it only needs some refinement to get it readable.

A pseudo-murder mystery starring a necromancer. 

Murdered She Rose

HAHAHAHA! Man, I crack myself up.

In the end, everything I do is done for me and that means at a pace best for me. I have to do it just for me because I'd be a damned fool soft shoeing for the attention of a moribund society like our own.

Clickity Click Expat Trick

Note- Everything you're about to read is true. But it's truth as filtered through a brain that can barely remember last week, let alone twenty years ago. This is different from flat out lying to save face.

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Suyu-Dong, Seoul. 2007(?) Pentax ME

Making webcomics made me take up photography. I needed a new hobby after I stopped making webcomics. There are many reasons for that. I'll be kind and just say, "irreconcilable differences".

Writing an Expat Blog (one of thousands at the time) made me take up photography. I wasn't happy with the images I was using to document my life in East Asia. My little Dimage Z5 was a good camera but it wasn't up to some of the tasks I was asking of it and I needed more flexible gear.

Also I had more money than brains and everyone was buying DSLRs so... Hello, Canon D60!

Which died when I went to visit my good pal Greg in Busan and I had foolishly forgotten my battery charger back in Seoul. And he said, "I am a film evangelical and I will not rest until every man, woman, enby, and child has converted their toilet to a darkroom."

Or something to that effect. He suggested a few film cameras and the following weekend I hopped on the subway...

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Quick translation for Canadians and Americans: A "subway" is a form of public transportation. It's like one of those train toys you had as a kid but bigger and runs underground. People in nations who didn't plow acres of forest to build parking lots use them to get around.

Like a car. But good.

______

... and went to the then photography hub of Seoul, Chungmuro. After a bit of poking my head in and out of shops and comparing different famous models, I went with a Pentax ME.

Chungmuro Station, Seoul. Before the suicide barriers were installed.

The first photo! Ooo! Lookiedat! I was a street photography savant! 

Greg made me take up photography.

Years later I stopped trying to do street photography because other street photographers were being assholes, sexual crimes were being committed with smartphones, and the public turned against anyone with a camera. Then Covid hit and I stayed inside with nothing to do but start drawing comics again.

Then I returned to Canada and still didn't go outside.

Soju Night 34

 In the end, I think I just don't like working under a deadline. Even slack ones that I grant to myself.

Click to embiggen Seoul Saturday night.

Back in school homework was rarely done, and if it was done it was dashed off at the last minute. I've since been vindicated by studies showing homework is only mildly effective and then only as a reinforcement of the ideas. A hour redoing what you did in class? Wasted effort.

Sadly, university was the same way. Especially when the professor wanted twenty pages on a ten page topic. A lot of snark made its way in. Sometimes the professors enjoyed the asides because they knew their page length was bullshit too. Most of them had "clinical" beaten into them on the way to their doctorate and thus they lacked the joy of writing.

I graduated. That's all that mattered.

Work? Employers want you to do six things at the same time. This is so they don't have to pay a salary to anyone but themselves. That offends my brain and so I decide what's a priority and what isn't. What isn't gets left to the last minute. For me that has always been paperwork. More specifically it's paperwork about stuff the boss already knows damned well about.

Teaching EFL that was filling out the lesson plan form that you got from the boss in the first place. That was make-busy work. I deeply hated that and treated as the meaningless thing it was.

Getting back to the point: Eternality has a very slack deadline. It makes me not want to do the comic. It is what it is.

I won't be swapping to a When I Can Be Arsed schedule. I'll be finishing it on the schedule I started on. But it's also going to be done with Story 10. I can push through.

When it's done?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I do have a comic script that I'm working on. Wanting to put in the work for the minimal reward it'll get suggests I won't commit it to paper, but who knows? I do want to get back to doing comic illustrations like the one above. But...

 

The Git Gud Machine

I wanna work pen and paper. It's harder, yeah. But getting it right is satisfying because I don't have the ability to yell, "Fix it, Clip Studio!"

It's like using film with photography. It forces you to get better. I want to get better.

Just without a deadline because deadlines are for chumps.

Maybe That's Just Me

 As always, click to embiggen any art you see...

 When I'm feeling dissatisfied with some aspect of my art I grab some photos, or art by creators I think got it right, and I trace.

When I dissect to see if I can sort out the construction that went into it.

Then I have a think. 

I consider what works for others and what isn't working for me and I "overlay" them in my head. It's just how my brain processes where I am versus where I want to be and it works. Once the gap clicks into place I become very aware of where I want the lines to be and become better at hitting it.

Is this how other people do it? I doubt it. But they're not me and I'm not them. If I had known that my brain doesn't parse information in the same as everyone else does back in when I was a kid school would have been a lot less stressful and depressing.

_____

Before you ask: No, I didn't get an adult autism diagnosis done. It's $2500 just to walk in the door and say hello to the shrink. Getting an expert to pin a scientific name on something I already know I have isn't worth the thousands of dollars at this point in my life. I got better things to spend that money on. 

 Maybe thirty or forty years ago when it would have helped. I figured out how to help myself in that time. Too little too late, Doc.

_____

I am wondering why I'm still trying to get better. I've already decided that making comics on a schedule is a drag and I'm not going to continue after Eternality is done in a few months. I might make more comics if I have a complete and compelling story to tell. But I think I'll just get back into my weird little comic illustrations.

They're more fun, TBH.

Eternality Story 7 Preview

I'm working on story 7 of my webcomic at the moment. Eternality is a comic about Space Gods so I felt we needed to take a look at them from the perspective of the mortals who worship them.

I won't spoil things, but the reality of the situation is not what everyone assumes.

One art issue I wish I could think of a better solution for: Snow and wind are portrayed as white in comics. It can result in great images but since I started making this comic in colour to meet expectations I didn't feel like that would work here. The blues and greys are an attempt to make it feel cold but I can't shake Snow = White.

I mean, it is an alien planet. They can have purple snow.

_____

At the moment there are only five stories in this tale after this one. I'm still deciding how - what - when - if I'm going to do comics wise after that. 

Today I'm leaning towards, "Still not worth the effort. Go back to illustration." 

Tomorrow I'll be trying to sketch a character design writing down a plot that's rattling around my head.

So it goes.

Sexpats. Sexpats. Asking where the hookers at~

The guy here isn't "Bassist", but he does have his own set of stories I'll share one day.

 Back in the ancient era of spring 2006, Bassist sat next to me at the bar in Itaewon. Handsome fellow. Charismatic. We worked together and he had only been in Korea for a few weeks.

"So, where can I find the girls?"

I looked up from my basic boy Long Island Iced Tea and swiveled my head around the bar. "I see a lot of them here. Have at 'em."

"I mean the hookers. I don't do relationships."

"Oh?"

I don't do relationships either. That's one of the downsides of having my particular brand of spicy brain. They always bring more pain than joy. Partially because understanding motivations is hard. And partially because the spicy brain lures in certain types of predatory women. After a while I just stopped.

Then again, I don't hate my own company like most of you seem to do. You need to work on that.

Bassist went on to explain that all women are bitches and money drains... and... oof. If you know this type of guy then you know the rest of his list of problems women cause that ruin his relationships that he's totally innocent in. Him just being a well-meaning man with strong morals constantly being ruined by no-good wimmins.

"So when I get into a new town I say, 'Where the hookers at'?"

"Huh."

"And they're better at fucking." 

"Uhn-huh."

"And none of their bullshit afterwards."

"Ah."

I point over my shoulder out the window. "Hooker Hill is just across the street. On the way to the mosque. You can't miss it. It's pretty famous."

He downed his American beer, pushed off his stool, and opened his wallet to pay for his drinks. "You coming?"

I became exceptionally Canadian. "No thank you. Not my scene. See you Monday."

_____

Here's the embarrassing thing about all of this. He's far from the only expat who has asked me about prostitution. I've never and likely never will. (I won't rule it out because if I ever get cancer I plan to go out in a way that would make the Klingons sing of my glory.)

Turns out if you're a doughy white guy in Asia people just assume. I get it. There's a history.

 I only knew what everyone else did. Seoul used to have a number of very visible and easy to find red light districts. Literally next to a busy train station sort of easy to find. That one used to be the last stop for new military recruits before they were sent to go shiver up at the DMZ for two years. It became a landmark.

In recent years the city has aggressive in razing their red light districts to the ground and replacing them with skyscraper apartments. They say it's because they want to clean up the city. I say it's because most of the business has moved online and they don't have to worry about losing bribe money.

Also, the companies building the apartments doubtlessly threw in a few won.

_____

Bassist was at least simple in his desires. Most expat fellows show up looking for the type of woman that only ever existed on TV in the 1950s. I'll write about them at some point.

Typing this all out as a blog post helps me think of solutions

"Allow Google to access your cookies" to upload images? Motherfuckers, you're the ones who put the cookies there in the first place.

Big tech nonsense aside, this is the first panel from a story I've been trying to massage to life with the working title of Liam & Mei Are Lost. Catchy title, huh? That's the first problem I've been having with the process. They're not lost.

They're lost in the way all young people with no future are. That's the motivation that sends them on their journey, but they know where they're going. There's a bit of wandering but they're never looking to get found like lost people do.

Solution? Titles change and I'm not worried about that. I can still use the Liam & Mei part.

A trouble spot has come in with the motivations and personalities. They swap. I could try to excuse that because of SPOILERS but that swap doesn't come about as part of their arcs. I just did it without realizing.

I do like where they both end up. The logical thing to do would be to rewrite the introduction chapter. Have the root of who they grow into evident in their first interactions. It will require a full rewrite of the dialog and of their motivations

Solution? Delete and write it again. Multiple drafts are nothing to be ashamed of even though they're rare in comics.

Trouble spot three is the antagonist of the journey. At the moment it comes out of nowhere. Like a trapdoor spider. This can be a good antagonist but I have it written as preying on their insecurities about their journey. I could say it's psychic shenanigans and leave it that. There are worse excuses for why the baddies can do what they do.

I thought of having the antagonist know their insecurities because it's the one that lured them on their journey to begin with. Turning the trapdoor spider into an angler fish. 

Honestly though? I like the idea of them embarking on their trip because they saw it as the best option. An angler fish inviting them in means only the angler fish has agency and they just react.

Solution? Psychic trapdoor spiders?

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P.S.- I'm still fiddling with Blogger's limited layouts. If you have any suggestions to make it easier for you to read, let me know.

I leave a trail of dead behind me...

...and by dead I mean dead blogs. Wordpress, Blogger, Substack, Geocities, HTML 4. Dial-up BBS. I've used and abandoned them all since the internet became a thing.

Most recently I was using the social media platform Pillowfort. I left after some unfortunate decisions by the dev team came to light and I couldn't abide by it. I've been looking for a new home to pour my ramblings out on since then. Right now that's Bluesky and Dreamwidth. Both have their strengths, but they are sub-optimal for what I need.

So I poked my head back into Blogger here. Turns out I already had a blog and a profile from the last time I poked my head in.

Or maybe Google made one for me. It's hard to tell these days. Meta gave me a Threads account because I never deleted my Instagram.

Yeah, I know. This! Is! Google! Only slightly less evil than Xitter and Meta at the moment. I'm still on the fence about using Blogger again. Many years ago it was how I told the world about my life as an English peddler in East Asia. 

 Good times. Bad times. Here's a photo of one of those times. Omuta, Japan. 2007 or thereabouts.

Click to embiggen.

 Maybe I'll keep posting. Uploading that was easy. Google probably has a copy of it somewhere alongside the life histories of me and everyone in the photo. 

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I blog about politics, comics, my comics, my art, my photography, being an expatriate, anime, music, Star Trek, and other nerdy shit.

Hello! Again! May the gods of data mining smile upon me.