Life has been kind of crazy over the last couple of weeks. I haven't been drawing comics. I've just been kind of... distracted I guess. My personal life took some weird, confusing turns. Things are good. Great even. Just different. It will come out in the comics over the coming weeks, I'm sure. Point being, I haven't been drawing comics. What I have been doing is
writing a lot of comics.
I'm trying to be more deliberate with this issue of Boredom Pays. I've actually given myself a theme to base the issue around, and from the amount of notes that have poured into my sketchbook it's a good one. I've got a bunch of short strips written and a few longer stories gestating in my head. I'm really committed to making the next issue of Boredom Pays the best possible thing I can put out.
Which brings me to this comic. This is a mini I wrote last fall between drawings while working as a caricature artist at Canada's Wonderland. I was quite unhappy at the time and it's probably more whiny than anything else but I learned a lot about writing comics from putting this together so, despite its flaws I'm still fond of it. I figure since I won't be posting anything new for at least another week or so I would post something old that never made it onto the blog.
Also, just a reminder that I will be tabling in the small press exhibition at
TCAF this Sunday from 11am-5pm! It would mean the world to me if you came by and said hi! And bought a book! So I can hopefully have enough money to eat over the next week! Yeah! Haha. See you there!
Jason <3
This might paint a bleak picture or something, but the second night of TCAF was super awesome and pretty much the opposite of this. I got to meet and hang out with a whole bunch of awesome cartoonists I had never met before. Apologies if I'm always a glass half empty sort of guy. I just feel this way at a lot of these things. Next weeks comic will be more uplifting!
This is certainly one of the sillier things I've done. Sorry about that. Trying to get out of my own head for a bit. I had an idea to serialize a couple more of these. I might, but who knows? I might not.
So, me and my girlfriend of the past eight or so years broke up a couple of months ago. It's a good thing, super mutual and incredibly loving, etc. but it still kind of fucked me up. Well, not only this - there were a few other things in conjunction with the breakup - but I went through the worst bouts of depression that I've ever had right afterward. The kind of depression that makes it hard to get out of bed and do anything at all. I would literally nap 3-4 times a day for hours at a time. Fucked up. Anyways, that's kind of what this comic is about.
A couple of months ago I really got into reading Johnny Ryan's Angry Youth Comix (which, I HIGHLY recommend, it's been a long time since I've laughed so much reading comix). As a result I wrote a bunch of comics with knives in them and stabbing stuff. A bunch of these comics had me stabbing myself. It was a weird time for me. I might draw a couple more of them, though, probably not along this pathetic self loathing tract.
I feel like I keep saying the same things over and over again. It's as if I'm trying to refine exactly what I mean with each comic. With this internal struggle to be happy in a world that just drives me crazy. If it's getting repetitive please forgive me. I intend to move on from these depressing things eventually, but thinking about them takes up a lot of my time lately and it would be dishonest of me to write... I dunno, fart jokes or something.
