Mandragora with the Bad Vibes

I originally wrote this post for Patreon two times. That platform, for some reason dislikes me posting from my phone, so I guess this means every post needs to be a sit-down-at-my-desk type of endeavor. It feels more at home on Ghost anyway.

I’ve been having fun with traditional materials, just gel pens on smooth sketchbook paper. Gel pens are nice because the ink sits right on top of the paper instead of seeping in and spidering across the paper grain. That’s not always ideal for a cartoonist. I have thicker paper for that, but that’s more than I can manage right now. I got a cute little handheld fan to speed up the drying process. It’s helped.

I’m not really an OC artist. I think that type of work is lovely, but they’re more akin to playing with dolls than what I like to do. Most of the ones I end up seeing are made to be dressed up, posed, occasionally shipped with each other, and with just enough backstory to give the characters a dash of drama when they’re placed more than one in the same image. I always want a little more than that, though. I get bored without more story. But the reason OC art is a popular mode of working is that isolated pinups of figures are easy and appealing, and oftentimes these artists are hard at work doing other jobs. They get to have a little space to play without the burden of crafting a plot. And we all deserve to have a little playtime!

I’ve taken to writing little bits of the story in a little notebook. I’m also trying not to burden myself with the pressure to write a whole overarching plot, but there’s going to be a bit of that anyway. I want everything all the time, I guess, which is always going to require more from me. Right now, everything I’ve scripted feels like a syndicated strip. They’re usually standalone little slices of life in this domestic fantasy situation. That feels manageable to me for now. 

You can see the characters have names, though they haven’t been mentioned on page just yet. I’ve already sort of decided that it won’t adhere to any strict temporal markers. I want it to feel like an old-school fantasy, but I’m sure they’ll watch YouTube together on their phones or something.

My book tour is looming, and my deadlines are always hovering just beyond the horizon, and I’m still showing up to schools and guest-speaking about comics. It’s too much to juggle. I have to create a new presentation and probably map out some kind of syllabus soon. I get a lot of emails from students asking after professional advice these days, too, and the precarity of publishing, of comics, always makes me feel like I’m about to steer some poor kid down directly into a deep well. I’ll do my best. I do want to help.

And do let me know how I can help in small ways. I have so many opinions about sketchbooks, about paper and pens. I’m happy to dole out any recommendations. 

I’m tempted to put together a sketchbook club on a discord or something. I’ll look into it. At the risk of giving myself another side project, I think it could be fun. Plus, I’m much more inclined to be communicative through Discord than I am on Patreon or in the comments on my own newsletter platform .