Just a quickie little plug for my new comic, finally launching! Click on the cute lil’ dirigible above or go to ArclightAdventures.com for the beginning of a fun ride!

-The Gneech

I’ve mentioned before, mostly in connection with Arclight Adventures, that I’m trying to “break out” of my established art style. My recent apparent obsession with drawing My Little Pony is the most visible part of this process, but I’ve been doing a lot of simply studying other styles and trying to break down in my mind how they work.

This morning, as I was waiting for a reboot from yet another Adobe update, I started doing some sketches of John Dunn’s redesign, and I’m trying to utilize some of the new stuff I’ve learned. I’ve never been real comfortable drawing human faces (one of the reasons I gravitated towards furry art), and honestly with a few exceptions I just don’t like them very much. :P But one of the things I’ve been studying is how to get past trying to realistically depict an exact human form and create a stylized form that “reads” human.

I haven’t quite gotten it yet, but I’m improving. :) In the case of John Dunn, tho, I’m still coming to grips with what he should look like both “realistically” and “stylistically,” which is making it a little harder. I might end up just finding pics of an actor online and using them as a springboard (but not a direct model), like I did with Verity. Character-wise he’s been revamped to something like Beast from the X-Men with just a dash of Isiah Mustafah’s “Old Spice Guy” thrown in (as opposed to the Woobie Frankenstein he was originally), so I need to find a model who’s physically imposing in a way that Isiah Mustafah isn’t, but still has a hint of wry humor about him. Maybe Michael Jai White? I’d love to hear any nominations folks might have.

Ah well, back to work for now. But come lunchtime, that sketchbook better LOOK OUT!

-The Gneech

PS: Oh yeah, I meant to mention! Arclight Adventures has a launch date now! January 9, 2012. A bit later than I anticipated, true, but given how rough my early 2011 was, I hope you’ll forgive it. :)

Well, after some introspection and a fair amount of throwing away bits that didn’t work to make room for new bits that do, I think I may have Arclight Adventures moving in the right direction again. Fortunately, the changes I’ve made don’t require throwing away any of the finished pages!

And because I don’t want you to think I’m all talk and no action, here is a teaser page:

[1]

I think I’m ready to get back to work. :)

-The Gneech

[1] Artwork copyright 2010 by me, color by Richard Wyatt. “Steamcycle” design by Leo Magna, used with permission. Thanks, Leo!

So last year I talked quite a bit about this idea that was eating my brain for a new comic, a steampunk adventure thing that I was very excited about, and I even put together some pages and development art for it.

And then I sorta stopped talking about it.

And then the projected launch date wandered on by and shrugged when nothing happened.

I have had a few questions about it since then, so I figure I should go ahead and explain what happened for those who are interested. Long story short: it got mired in development heck. “Writer’s block” isn’t exactly an accurate description, but it does sorta apply.

Essentially, no matter how hard I tried, all of the ideas I came up with were turning the idea into something I didn’t want it to be. I have this problem occasionally: whenever I try to write songs, for instance, they always come out as country/western, and I hate country/western music. So the net result is I never write songs. In the case of Arclight Adventures, what I had intended to be a fun and over-the-top adventure comic kept turning into a grim and violent drama about the moreaus (who were supposed to only have the occasional subplot, not steal the show). Instead of Mission: Impossible [1] in Victorian garb, I was getting a treatise on man’s inhumanity to man.

I wasn’t happy with how the characters were developing, either. Fagin (the fox moreau) came out nicely, but I never was comfortable with John Dunn, and as things were developing, the character of Charlie was becoming less and less a character of her own but instead being defined by who her father was. In short, I was falling into the same old racefail/genderfail traps, but every time I tried to steer away from them, they just kept popping back up.

Eventually, I just got frustrated and stopped working on it, hoping that some time away would let me come back to it with a fresh perspective. So far, well, it hasn’t happened yet — but I’m hoping that the upcoming Dragon*Con will help. I fear that the only way to fix it will require a major tossing-and-redeveloping of the main cast, which is a painful process. At the end of the day, I may be better off to just do a different project all together, instead.

-The Gneech

[1] The cool and awesome original Mission: Impossible, not those crappy Tom Cruise movies.

As you might imagine, I’ve been very distracted recently, and so this piece of news almost slipped through the cracks — but I can’t let that happen! Bad Dog Books has released Roar, Volume 3, which includes my latest short story, “Blackbird Singing In the Dead of Night.” It’s a murder mystery starring Squash and Stretch, Suburban Jungle’s pair of mustelid gumshoes, and was a lot of fun to write.

Among other things, this is a biggie because it’s my first piece of prose fiction to be published by someone other than myself, and so is a step into new territory for me. Time to update the bibliography!

This is the latest in a series of big changes that have come at me fast and furious, with very little time to process one before I’m in the midst of another. I’ve passed so many crossroads in the past year-or-so that I’m amazed I haven’t stepped sideways into another dimension.

A week from today will be another one: Thursday the 17th is when we bring down the curtain on NeverNever for what I expect to be the final time. It’s been a long and twisty journey, and in many ways it feels like the last steps are the hardest, but I’m happy to see it get a proper finish and I’m grateful for all the hard work Sue, Richard, Higgins, and Tiffany have put in to help bring it to fruition over the years. Of course that also means that it’s time to crank out Attack of the War-Cats as fast as I can to get it done by Confuzzled. My usual book printer has unexpectedly gone belly-up on me, and the plan I was looking at with Amazon appears to have developed a few holes as well, so I’m now scrambling to figure out what to do on that front. I’m sure I’ll find something, it’s just a matter of being able to sit down and hash it out.

What comes next from there? I’m not sure. The ending of NeverNever is significant in the larger picture of my “creative life” because it will be the first time in a long time that I didn’t have a comic running in some form, even if that form was sporadic updates. I was expecting the new steampunk comic to pick up more-or-less on the heels of NN shutting down, but as time goes on I’m finding it harder and harder to stick with that, for a variety of reasons that I don’t really want to go into here. So I’m trying to decide what to do next.

Right now I suspect that the next step will be more short fiction. I have some ideas burgeoning for Roar Vol. 4, and I also think short stories could be a good way to flesh out some of the myriad “characters in search of a plot” ideas I’ve got going, from Brigid and Greg to Not-Dead Darby and the Reagent Man. It might also work to get the juices flowing on the steampunk comic idea, for that matter. The main thing is to keep moving; I’ve been treading water for far too long now, and it’s time to start making progress again!

-The Gneech

I’m starting a fund.

-The Gneech