The Pen Monster Blog

 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...

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. ____   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...

 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 ...

 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 th...

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 ...

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 t...

"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 lik...

...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 En...