Here it is! I finished my remaking of Bet Your Sweet Bottom! I’m very happy with how it turned out. There are a couple things I want to do to clean up, but for the most part it’s ready for sale. Still figuring out how that will work. I tried searching for info, and I was immediately overwhelmed and shut the internet. You know how things have been changing over the years; it’s a lot harder to identify any reliable information or source because everything is Google payola or SEO bs. But anyway, I will find a way to continue moving forward. I got a new laser printer, printed out a copy, and tried out my bone folder. It all came out so slick, and it’s so cool to see a comic I made in my hands. And in the meantime, I’m already making great progress towards the new zine series format of my former graphic novel story, and will hopefully be in a position to start thumbnailing very soon. Oh, yeah, this picture is the back cover of Bet Your Sweet Bottom. Just a simple “yes/no” thing, in a cool style.
Sometimes things line up in the world, and it’s pretty great. I talked last week about how I’m going to be moving forward with zine making no matter what. I’ve finally gotten to a point where I want to move forward despite any hangups and accepted that it doesn’t actually matter if I achieve “success.” That’s also going to inform my next story, as there was always an element of personal journey in it; having these thoughts has really helped me to crack that code. And then last night, I saw a video by Jason Pargin where he directly spoke to that feeling. To paraphrase, he acknowledges that there’s a ton of luck and other factors in the world, separate from your abilities or efforts, that play a huge part in making art as a full time job. You have to pursue your dreams for yourself, knowing that the grand majority of artists don’t get to do it full time because capitalism is capricious. It’s nice hearing that from a person who grew up in the “everything sucks” generation. So yeah, the standard for success, as Brennan Lee Mulligan would say, is always trying your hardest. And then I’d like to remind myself what my karate teacher said, “It’s go as fast as you can, not as fast as you can’t.”
While I am out here, I want to encourage everyone to support their local public radio stations. The president wants to cut off all public media funding from the federal government. Seems likely that, as far as things go on that side, he’d have no issues getting that to happen. Independent public media is really important and vital in society, and while most of their operating budgets come from donations, the federal funding is what covers licensing fees and royalties and such, so they would be hit hard by the loss. I contribute to my public radio, and I signed up when they launched the music station. I’ve increased my donation this week. Public radio music is a really important service because it gives power to independent voices who care about music to play stuff you wouldn’t hear anywhere else, lift up artists who otherwise might not get heard, and create infrastructure and audience for those artists in places they wouldn’t go to, if not for the radio. Of course, there’s also great benefit in having an independent, non-corporate news source, especially in these times. The main fund drive has ended, but you can always make a donation anytime, and I encourage you to consider it.
I have not been playing Marvel Snap this week, so instead I’ve played a lot more ranked matches in Pokémon TCG Pocket. I’ve played against the same essentially unbeatable deck so many times in a row, and it’s really frustrating. Like, is that fun for them? I get that we all want to win, but it’s supposed to be enjoyable. Comparing these frustrations to the much better designed Marvel Snap has me thinking about game design again, and my martial arts tabletop idea. It’s changed a lot over time, having started out as a Dragon Ball game, and honestly who knows if I’ll ever finish it; it’s just a fun thing I can tinker with every now and then. I’m basically trying to make a table top arcade fighter game at this point. Where I last left off, I am now much more confident I was going in the right direction. The goal is to have the game focus on mechanics more than any single powerful attack or character. I want there to be a lot for people to consider on the fly while they play and for them to puzzle over during character building. All this overpowered EX Pokémon experience is reminding me how important it is to ensure there’s costs and drawbacks to strength.
One of the things I like about TCG Pocket, which parallels something in Snap, is that you only get one energy a turn. I’m in a position to reconsider how various attacks work and how energy is produced and consumed in my game, and the more rationed system is enticing. There’s a really good cost-benefit relationship between connecting energy acquisition to a more limited chance-based defense mechanic and influencing that chance with stat builds for a character; better defense means less damage, but also less energy for attacks later. I’m also wanting to reintroduce leveling up, which I had initially taken off the table to focus on mechanics over power. I do want some way to preserve the element of people carrying the history of their characters with them and have it influence the game in some way. Since I’m not going to be adding new stuff constantly, there needs to be something on top of an especially well-designed game that would keep people playing.
On my zine, I added a logo for vX Studios. That isn’t a real company, of course. It’s something I’ve been thinking about in the back of my head for a while. Partly it’s just something to tickle my fancy, because I should have some publisher logo in the top left corner of a comic. The origin of it is a reminder of all my efforts and struggles. At some point, when I was drafting and redrafting stories, I took to distinguishing the newer versions with v2 and v3 and so on. For one story, I lost track somewhere of how many versions in I was, so I called the new one vX. The one after that was vXx. I adopted it for all stories, and I have stories as far out as vXxXxXxXxXxXx. So the vX name is a statement to all the work and time I’ve put into a project, and a reflection of the creative process itself. Never ending, yet eventually you have to be satisfied. I should get a sign of it as I build out my tabling materials.
Weekly Art Blog 3/30-4/6/2025
Life in the Gutters 