Weekly Art Blog 2/23-3/2/2025

I’ve been working on pages of this new Bet Your Sweet Bottom draft, so I think I’ll just post a photo of my current roughs. I’ve been doing a lot of rulers the past couple pages to get things symmetrical and whatnot, and it’s been great. I’m also remembering and being annoyed that I wrote a story that happens in a bar, because having to draw a back wall of bottles over and over is pretty tedious. But it does mean more ruler, so.

This is going to be a short one, I think. I haven’t been doing a lot of heavy thinking. I did have a nice thought earlier, with all the comic I’ve drawn lately. I have some real motivation to work on this. I want to be a comics artist, not an illustrator. I keep thinking that I need to practice more to get good enough to make my comics, and then I’ve been practicing illustration. Why have I been doing that? I could be drawing mini comics all the time as practice for much larger comics. It makes way more sense and I’d probably enjoy it more. I’ll try to take that lesson moving forward.

I have been thinking about my new draft for my graphic novel. I want to keep a simple, easy to understand structure that puts me on the spot. Five sixteen-page chapters seems like a good goal. I should be able to get a proper story in that space, and it’ll be more economical for the printer. I have a rough image of the latter half, still working on the first. Another good thing about this structure is that I’ll have to fully rethink how the story goes to fit properly. If I want to get to where I want to be, I need to hit certain parts of the story in each chapter, which is good for keeping the story flowing how I’d like it to. So I think parts of the basic story will be changing to meet this new format.

With the last episode of Dragon Ball Daima out, I’ve been thinking about my fanfic more. It’s becoming clearer to me what the big differences are with the lesser extra-media Dragon Ball projects and the main series. Going back even to Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods, which isn’t a bad story per se, there’s a recent pattern of anime-only or anime-first projects where they do remarkably little work to make the battle happen. The Oracle Fish tells Beerus to look for a Super Saiyan God, so he does; if he didn’t, Goku would never have gotten to god level. When Frieza attacks the Earth, Goku and Vegeta already have Super Saiyan Blue, so it’s a pretty boring development. Broly fights Goku only because Frieza brings him to Earth and tells him to. Piccolo just wishes to get stronger, which is anticlimactic; this, on top of him skulking around in an out-of-character way to string together the plot so the writers don’t have to do anything organically. It really makes me appreciate GT more. Sure, there are lore bits that could be fixed, but overall they actually made a story out of it. That SS4 was a cool idea, I still love Baby and the Machine Mutants, and the idea behind the Shadow Dragons is a good way to conclude the story. The execution isn’t on the level it needs to be, but none of the villains simply woke up and decided it was time to fight Goku, you know?

All of which is to say, I have a lot of work ahead of me to make real stories out of those events in Ultimate Dragon Ball. I’m tempted to skip some of them, but that wouldn’t be in the spirit of what I set out to do. And with the Daima stuff all out there, I’m now in a position to rethink the lore in ‘Redux’, which you can read in its current form on this site. Idk when I’ll get around to the big work of it, but I have goals with it now. There are moments of the story I’d like to elevate, and the entire premise of one chapter and several future stories is blown up by this Demon Realm lore. Since I have more important things to attend, I’ll wait until we see if the manga confirms or reworks it in new stories. It’s so exciting that the Super manga is continuing!

I’m also happy to be where I am as a fan and artist. I’ve been sticking with the series long enough to know the ins and outs of everything. With all the work I’ve done on my own stories, I’m getting better at learning and applying the knowledge for my own benefit. Writing fanfiction of Dragon Ball has taught me a lot about examining stories, how themes and intent drive stories in particular directions, and how structure works. It’s the kind of stuff I’m not good at figuring out at the beginning of a story, but I’m good at finding once I have something to dissect. Dragon Ball taught me how to do that.