moodybluthcomic - Tumblr blog

[moodybluthcomic]

IT TOOK ME only like four full gregorian months to draw this page. Two weeks of drawing it and then three and a half months of being too depressed/disabled/in quarantine/gay to function. Put another way... I hated what I drew so much it took me four months to work up the nerve to try to fix it. Is it even fixed now?? WhO CaN SAy?

Keen eyes will notice I’ve changed the header to reflect that new pages are not- and have not been for months- posted every other Monday. They shall be posted whenever I damn well please because y’all? Life is HARD.

Next page goes up: ???

{Image Description:

Panel 1-

Moody moves through a massive, ancient temple. The walls are a series of sloped walkways and terraces lined in archways that lead away into dark passages. A waterfall pours from an opening on the back wall, and steam and pillars rise up a crumbling facade on which is carved “AUTO-AUXILLIUM” in ancient latin script. A thick, dark line of lipstick criss-crosses the space, marking Moody’s path through the temple. They pass broken statues: one holding a clock, another with it’s legs crossed in a meditative pose, a third with a stack of books piled on it’s head. Moody’s lipstick path moves in and out of the maze of archways, always ending up back in the main temple. 

Panel 2-

Moody is silhouetted in a stone archway with light pouring past them. They give a satisfied “Aha!”}

[moodybluthcomic]

EDIT: Sorry no new update this week friends! I’ve been dealing with some bad mental health stuff, and some work stuff, and some mental health stuff, and some commissions stuff, and some extremely bad mental health stuff. New comic will actually go up more like.... February 17th? Ish???

This is the fastest I’ve ever drawn one of these pages I think. I didn’t really have time to do a pencils layer I just WENT for it. It’s kinda loose but I dig it. 

Next page goes up like, around February 10th.

{Image Description: 

Panels 1 to 3- A close up the mouth of Moody’s shoulder bag, which has in it a book and some loose pages. The tube of lipstick from the Mysterious Stranger rolls out of the bag, across the bag’s flap, and then onto the floor with a ���clink!”

Panel 4- Moody, lying on the floor, rolls over to see the source of the sound and looks at the lipstick, puzzled. A question mark floats over their head. Panel 5- Inside Moody’s mind, they are floating in a black void, staring uncomprehending at a tube of lipstick. “Lipstick?” they think. Then, a tiny Moody floats by with their arm around a massive tube of lipstick as a realization dawns on them. “Lipstick!” they cry.

Panel 6- Back in the real world, we see Moody’s hands grasping the open tube of lipstick. “That guy from before, what was he saying about the DSC again?” they say.

Panel 7-

“Maybe there is a mystery going on here!” says Moody as they hike, determined, up the pile of sand towards the open door. Clouds of mysterious fog roll out of the door. Moody, one arm outstretched, is drawing a thick line along the wall behind them with the open tube of lipstick. Behind them, they’ve drawn a big lipstick X on the wall at their starting point.} 

[moodybluthcomic]

YOU GUYS i am so tired.

Next page goes up either January 27th or February 10th I dunno.

{Image description: 

Panel 1- A wide angle shot of a massive abandoned temple full of collapsed stone pillars and sand. We see a tiny Moody silhouetted in a door frame which on this side is framed by a stone arch and half-buried in sand. Similar archways and doors run along the walls in either direction. Moody says, “This is impossible! There’s no way this is real. Oh no-- is this all in my head??”

Panel 2- Moody is hunched over, their heels dug into the sand as they try to pull out their bag which is lodged in the sand. “This has got to be my fault,” they moan, “I always screw things up somehow--”

Panel 3- “GAH!” Moody yells as the bag comes loose with a “sproing!” and Moody loses their balance and goes flying backwards. 

Panel 4- An increasingly despairing Moody drags themself across the ground, through the pile of sand. “I give up!” they bemoan, “I’ll never get out of here.”

Panel 5- Moody lies dramatically on the sandy floor, one arm flung despairingly over their face. “Oh sweet Marple!” they cry, “I hope someone kind takes you in. Someone who has liver treats. And all of Murdoch Mysteries on DVD-- So long world! This is it for me. Moody Bluth ends here. End of the line...”}

[moodybluthcomic]

Happy new gregorian year from Moody Bluth! Thanks to the Eli of @elion-art for this extremely cozy guest art, and also for being an extremely good friend and saving my butt with this so I could have a lil holiday break. I want these snow f**ck yourself pajamas for myself very badly. 

Thanks everyone for being patient this week with this delayed post, I hope you’ve all been too busy enjoying time with your friends or your family or watching anime alone in your room over the holidays to miss me. This was absolutely my fault as I’ve been going to parties and playing euchre and watching UBC sketch videos on youtube for 3 days instead of writing this post. But can I say?? Kinda worth it. 

Next post is on or around Monday, January 13th and it will be a new page from me. Hope 2020 is good to you all! Twenty-money get that paper baby, to survive in a capitalist system you still need to participate in capitalism while also working to actively dismantle it from the insideeeeee ✨✨����💋xoxo {Image Description: Eli’s guest-art is a digital drawing in shades of greyish-purple. It features Moody lounging in a beanbag chair in front of a window filled with snow. They are wearing pajamas with a pattern that says “snow f**ck yourself” over and over again, and at their feet is a steaming mug that has the chemical symbol for hot chocolate on the side.}

[moodybluthcomic]

From Thumbnails to Comic Page

This is the second in my series of Behind-The-Scenes posts about Moody Bluth: Anti-Neoliberal Sleuth. Next full page is scheduled to go up December 30th- I will let you know if that changes, which it might since December is a busy time of year! For this post I wanted to run through the process of deciding what goes on a comic page. I presume that are much- much- better and more controlled ways of doing this that what I’ve done. Personally, for other comic projects after this, I would do way less scripting and thumbnailing and save those for later in the project, starting instead by just laying out how many pages each major plot point should take up, and which actions should happen on each page. Then I would make looser scripts and thumbnails for guide, to give myself more flexibility in changing the script later, and to keep the page count from getting too big.

Buuut. I didn’t do that here. I did something miles more convoluted and indecipherable. So here I’m going to run through page 21 (read the finished page here) from my first scripts to the full page. I thought this would be a good example page to use since it barely even existed in the first iterations of the script and has changed a lot since then. 

I wrote the initial script for Liptstick Don’t Lie in summer 2018. I kind of knew what all the central plot points would be (or so I thought) but not having drawn a lot of comics before, I had no idea how much action/dialogue I was going to be able to fit on a page and have it be readable. I went about figuring this out the most time consuming way possible: by starting at the beginning and working my way through the story making full-size stick-figure sketches of each page and hand-writing in the dialogue. I knew I wanted the comic to be printable on 8.5x11 paper so I just took 8.5x11 note paper and drew two pages per side. This was a slow process, often interrupted when I would turn to a fresh page to start drawing only to realize that I’d left myself an awkward amount of action or dialogue for the next page and I had to go back and re-sketch pages. I would stop and make quicker, smaller thumbnails for the next several pages, and then thumbnail in those pages larger, and then still find myself going backto revise the whole thing. I would scan those in, type out the script above, send it to Margo (my research supervisor and editor, god bless her soul), and then go back and revise the whole thing again. I don’t remember the details of this process, but I know there was a lot of change, hashing and re-hashing of just what the plot points and dialogue would be. 

{Image Description: Two numbered images:

1. A scanned script document containing a 4-quadrant chart. The top two quadrants contain scripted dialogue for two pages in which Moody wanders lost around the Disability Services Centre saying things like, “Am I imagining things? It’s like I’m walking in circles,” and, “Celebrated Youth Sleuth Can’t Even Find Way Out Of Administrative Building.” The bottom quadrants of the chart contain scanned illegible thumbnail drawings of layouts for the above pages, with Moody wandering through empty hallways. The gist of it is that these scripts and pages hardly resemble the finished page at all. There are also a number of sketches of Moody’s face, eyes, and facial expressions in the margins that don’t look much like current Moody.

2. A pencil sketch of a page layout done on lined paper. This page has Moody standing in an empty hallway with a chair and two doors, looking down the hallway purposefully with their hands on their hips, walking around a corner, and then standing with their hands in the air in front of a wide open space full of trees and obstacle course equipment.} _____

Parts of the initial script have stayed the same from the very beginning, but parts of it are unrecognizable. Page 21, the one in question, didn’t even exist there in its current form. In fact, most of the second half of the comic didn’t really exist. Initally I had Moody simply getting lost in a maze of unending hallways in the Disability Services Centre. "Remember the scene from I Heart Huckabees where he’s running through this white hallway and there just keeps being hallway and he keeps running and it keeps being white and it there just keeps being hallway?” I asked everybody who read the draft script. I wanted it to be like that. (Nobody remembered.)

The closest thing I can find in that initial script to the current page 21 is Figure 1, above. Some of the dialogue that happened on those two page now happens on page 21. Some of it happens other places. Some of it I’m pretty sure no longer exists. Those two pages had Moody essentially wandering through the hallways of the disability services, becoming more and more lost, and beginning to feel desperate. That script was a whole was a bit longer than I had hope, but still comfy at 28 pages - the two pages pictured were pages 15-16. Now, the action and dialogue of those two pages is interspersed with other things across many many more pages in the final comic, from page 18-ish or so to page [SPOILERS REDACTED]. But that didn’t happen until later.

First, the initial, white-hallways-only version of the script went through many edits and revisions. Margo and I sent it to friends and family members for feedback and sensitivity reading and suggestions on how to make the disability theory and anti-neoliberalism read clearly. We finalized the script- there were a few sticking points (I can’t remember what they were) but we seemed almost ready to move on. 

And then, in early August or so, at a meeting about one of those final revisions, I had my Great Big Terrible Horrible Very Good Idea. What if, instead of hallways, I had Moody wandering through impossible, magical rooms: like the fairground, the obstacle course, and [SPOILERS REDACTED]. This seemed like such a better choice metaphorically and artistically and theoretically that I knew instantly it was now the only option. Not wanting to add too many pages or revisions, I frantically took the already finished and proofread script and tried to fit the existing dialogue to new thumbnails- which became Image 2. above. 

You can see in Figure 2 above, we have something at least with the same basic premise as the current page 21. Moody is in a hallway that looks just like every other hallway, they turn a corner, and then find themselves in the forest with the obstacle course. This version only has 4 short dialogue lines for the page: “Wasn’t I just here,” “I must’ve gone the wrong way,” “what?” and, “Where the heck am I?” In that version of the script this was page 17, but I had managed to move and condense things to keep the script still at around 28 pages.  I scribbled those revised pages in the back of a notebook and then left them there. “That will be good enough,” I thought, “I’ll worry about that later.” It was the end of the summer, Margo and I were no longer having regular meetings, I wanted to start drawing. I pushed the later pages to the back of my mind and started at the beginning. I designed the characters, I figured out fonts and line weights and style guides. And then finally I started drawing.

{Image Description: Four numbered images: 1. Two stickynotes showing tiny sketches of a revised page 20-21, labelled Autumn 2018. 2. More stickynotes showing a revised pages 20-25, labelled Feb 20, 2019} 3. My big wall of stickynotes containing the whole comic laid out in 2-page spreads. 4. Stickynotes with a once more revised pages 20-23, labelled present (Nov 2019)}

_____

I drew. I moved across the country. I drew. I, unbelievably, began preparing to move houses a second time. I kept drawing. And then, sometime between moves, around October 2018- Panic! I realized that somewhere in the kerfuffle of moving, I had ended up referencing a wrong, older version of thumbnails. At this point I had completely finished drawing 8 pages, and at least a couple of them had mostly-correct-but-just-wrong-enough-to-be-a-problem layouts.  With comics, it is important to maintain rhythm: for example, a big surprise reveal will feel wrong in the middle of a page- it should come at the bottom of a page, or at the top of a new one. And in the careful dance of condensing pages without messing up those rhythms, my little errors was going to throw off the entire rest of the story. I stayed up that night with a pack of stickynotes, moving around pages until I got something that worked. It was, if I remember correctly, around 34 pages or so long. It was going to take me a month or two longer to draw, I was tired, but this was fine. It was fine. That reshuffle was where page 17 became page 21 (Figure 1). At this point, this page has moody tumble through the door from the fairground, and dust themself off, and then much like the previous thumbnail sketch the script is:  “Wasn’t I just here?” “What?” and, “Where the heck am I?” as they presumably move around the hallway and then enter the forest. 

I kept on working and thinking and over time and a number of minor changes and re-shufflings ensued. I have a bunch of scanned images saved in my computer of stickynotes dated to February 20th, 2019 that include more re-working this section, moving around panels and dialogue (Figure 2 above). They are pretty sparse to look at, but I could remember what they meant. (Or so I thought.) These stickynotes have the action of what is now page 21 spread across 3 pages: 21-23. Since I always wanted the comic to be printed as a booklet, from the very beginning I was always planning all the pages in facing 2-page spreads. And in this case, I thought it was important that the big reveal of the massive forest view come either at the top or bottom of a new spread, not in the middle of a page somewhere. I guess that moving around panels on the pages before this must have pushed this action forward into it’s own spread, which explains why this version has “Where the heck am I?” on it’s own page- so that a big, full-page climactic view of the forest could close out those two facing pages. Interestingly, in these layouts, the line “Celebrated Youth Sleuth Can’t Even Find Way Out Of Administrative Building” was still on page 25, somehow. I can’t remember if this iteration of edits made the page count longer or shorter. I think around here was when it reached it’s longest- a devastating 36 pages. 

There were more shiftings and shufflings and the final page count is back down currently to 31(ish) pages as per the massive pile of stickynotes currently sitting on the wall above my desk (Figure 3, above). Somehow, even my most current stickynote iteration (Figure 4) doesn’t have page 21 correct, with “Where the heck am I” still a line, and it’s accompanying reveal of the forest still taking up most of page 22 as opposed to it’s final place on page 21. 

{Image Description: Two numbered images: 1. A digital sketch laying out the panels and action for page 21 in transparent blue. 2. The final completed page 21 as it appears online.}

_____

So when I finally sat down to draw this page a couple months ago, I was faced with, mostly just a bunch of illegible stickynotes and an inaccurate script from over a year ago. You can see I relied heavily on going back to those lined-paper sketches from last summer, although I added several more panels to make the layout more dynamic and accurately convey the space within the hallways that Moody is walking through. I knew I wanted them to be able to be walking to the right so it would look like they were venturing forward down the hallway and into the forest space. But I also knew I wanted them, when faced with an identical hallway from last time, to try walking in the opposite direction. (You’ll notice on page 19 they walk to the right of the chair to get to the double doors that open to the fairground, so this time I needed them to walk to the left. But walking left on a comics page reads a lot like moving backwards. You can make it work, but in this case I thought it would disrupt the forward-motion that makes this page feel adventurous and like you are moving energetically through the space.) 

Dusting off the cobwebs from the only thing I learned in that one film class I took in school in like 2014, I knew I didn’t want to jump too quickly from left-facing to right-facing because that could be visually disorientating. Instead I added two new extra panels to give the framing a camera-panning-like quality. We see Moody from the front, then they turn to look down the hallway as the camera pans around and above, and then down behind them, following them around the corner until ultimately we see them from right side of their body, so that we can still see them walking to the right of the page in a way that reads as going forward, while knowing that they actually walked in a different direction than before. 

When I did the final layout sketches for this page (figure 1 above), I actually also did the layout sketches for the following 2-page spread as well. That’s not my typical workflow- I usually try to work one spread at a time, otherwise it gets hard to post new pages on a regular schedule- but at this point it felt necessary to understand how Moody was going to move through the forest and obstacle course on the following pages, before I could know what it looked like and thus be able to draw it from above. It ended up being simpler than I thought, since the part of the obstacle course that Moody climbs through in page 22 didn’t really end up being visible from here, but I still was glad I planned it out. 

Working on that blue layout sketch is where the dialogue got finalized for this page. The text layers are turned off in this screengrab, but I actually laid the whole text out here so I could make sure it fit and plan the drawings around it. I also had to come up with more dialogue to fill this page and make sense with the action, since the 4 sad lines of dialogue I’d been moving around on sticky notes weren’t really cutting it for me any more. I went back to that original script from last summer to check if anything important was missing, and decided to add the line “What’s wrong with me?” back in from the original script. I think that was when “Youth Sleuth Can’t Even Find Own Way Out Of Administrative Building” finally made its way to its rightful place on the page as well. I’m pretty sure I came up with the lines “Nancy Drew on a sweet blue roadster-- what is going on here??” on the fly as I was laying out the panels for this page. In the back of my head I had always known “Where the heck am I?” was a placeholder line because, since Moody doesn’t say any real-word curse words in the comic, I knew that at some point I was going to have to come up with something else clever. Some other time, I’ll do a post about going from a layout sketch like this one to a finished an inked page. But for now this has gone on way way long enough. ANYWAYS. This is a very long post. If you read this far, I hope you gained some understanding of the the convoluted decisions that get made while working on a comic over time. And also a good idea of some things to absolutely not do (Spend too much time on the initial script and thumbnails, leave yourself indecipherable notes, move across the country and then move again two months later...)

As I’ve worked on this comic, these kinds of edits and changes have become a necessary part of the process. Not only am I working from scripts and thumbnails that might as well be inscrutable runes, I’ve also had new ideas, made interesting mistakes that need to be fixed, and learned new drawing skills that have changed what I can and want to do. As I’m writing this blog post (in mid-November- a bit ahead of time), I’ve just had to recently re-organize, re-thumbnail, and re-work dialogue for most of the next five pages of story, just because of accumulated errors and changes from previous pages (ie: some of the dialogue I was planning on using for a page I accidentally used elsewehere...) or changes in what I can do (ie: wanting to fit more action on a page now that I have better drawing skills). That’s a part of why I’m sharing these behind the scenes posts- to buy myself some time to reorganize and get these next pages right! As always, thanks so much for reading and supporting Mood Bluth! Talk to you soon :)

[moodybluthcomic]

It’s up! A day late but I’m still proud of myself. Next post is an off-week post on Dec 16, and then next new page goes up Dec 30 probably unless I decide to go on winter holiday...

{Image Description:

Panel 1- Slop! Glop! A door opens in the ceiling and swampy water pours out, as Moody clings from the door handle in the deluge. The panel twists, shifting the view as the ceiling becomes a wall, and Moody is washed down the hallway and lies inert on the floor in front of the next door down the hall.

Panel 2- “Agh!” says Moody, as they clasp at their face in exhaustion and frustration, water dripping off of them and pooling on the floor.

Panel 3- A birds-eye view of the hallway as we see a wet Moody lying on their back on the floor and gesturing upwards in exasperation. “This looks like all the other hallways!” they exclaim.

Panel 4- "I feel like I’m going in circles” Moody says as they move around the hallway, bracing their foot against the door that just closed and won’t open again, and then pounding on the next door with their fists, “It can’t be that difficult to submit some paperwork!” They come to the front and pound one fist into their hand determinedly, adding, “Toughen up Moody--”

Panels 5 and 6- Moody opens a door saying, “You’re just not trying hard enough. All you have to do is--” WHUMP! They are interrupted by a deluge of sand which pours through the door, knocking them backwards.

Panel 7- We see the back of Moody’s head and shoulders from behind, the rest of them buried in sand. Through the open door beyond is an enormous temple, with crumbling stone pillars and slanted walkways going back and forth and up several stories across the walls on either side all lined with rows of arched doorways. Above Moody’s head is a partial speech bubble containing simply, “...”}

[moodybluthcomic]

Character Design for Moody Bluth

Welcome to the first behind-the-scenes post! (Like I talked about last week, one post a month will be a post about sketches and process- starting now.)

Below is a compilation of sketches that I did while developing character models for Moody. Most of this work I did before I started officially drawing the comic, buuuut it's a poorly-kept secret that I did not start using a proper character model until like... ten pages in? 

I settled on the basics pretty early- long pointy face shape, shaved/buzz cut on the left with a big hair swoop on the right- but I tried basically infinite variations on this. The REAL truth of it was I just couldn't fully decide what I wanted Moody to look like, but I also didn't have unlimited time to futz around with development not so I pushed myself to make decisions fast. The Moody circled in green was actually one of my first sketches of Moody, and at the beginning was pretty much my official character design.  Notice though that it's literally only a side-view, (????!) AKA the one view of Moody I almost never draw, lol. I hoped I would settle into a permanent design naturally as I went but of course I ended up just drawing them a different way every panel, and liking each new weird way better than the last. Finally I got fed up- partly just with the innefficiency of various parts of my process (it was around this time that I also changed the way I did screentones for efficiency as well), but also with my drawings looking so inconsistent. So I ended up compiling a lot of my favorite drawings of Moody in Photoshop, tracing them, and then putting them on a grid so I could move the individual features around until I got something that at the very least had roughly the same proportions from every angle. That resulted in the heads that you see in the bottom right. Which are still the models for Moody's head that I use to this day. You will notice: this post doesn't  show models for their body, or for their head from... Pretty much any angle that I actually end up drawing them from? Any ideas why? Oh what's that, in hearing "because I'm extremely too lazy to make/use such models"? Bing bing we have a winner. Ironically, Moody Bluth, the character who I committed to drawing in almost every panel of every page, is the character I find hardest to draw. I think I figured out how Loisel would look in one single afternoon and I've drawn her- or at least her face- more or less the same way ever since. 

{Image Description: A number of images stitched together, including scanned pencil, ink, and digital sketches of Moody Bluth mostly from the neck up. They look different in pretty much every instance. Prominent in centre is my first more-or-less official character design: a full-body sketch of Moody circled in green, where they are seen from the left side, wearing a blazer and in a sneaky pose. Down in the bottom left are several iterations of my current character models: a series of rows of heads each seen from front, left, and 3/4 right views, with the row that I now use as models circled in blue.}

[moodybluthcomic]

Important Update!

I HAVE SOME IMPORTANT NEWS:  Moody Bluth: Anti-Neoliberal Sleuth is going to be changing for the time being to a one-page per month schedule. First I want to say thanks so much to all my readers for your patience and support as new pages have been a little bit delayed these past few posts.  I'm so grateful to have such wonderful readers. The next few pages coming up are really exciting; we're approaching the climax of literally years of work and planning and research. But, they are are also really pushing the boundaries of what I feel comfortable drawing. I'm really stretching the new drawing muscles I've grown over this process to their fullest extent. And it's really important to me to get these next few pages right- not only because they are important to the story but also because they are important to why I wanted to tell this story in the first place. Buuuut... it's also important for every Anti-Neoliberal Sleuth to watch out for the nasty little Neoliberalisms in our own lives and minds- so it's also important to me to value myself as more than a worker and neoliberal citizen (and an artist who stays up all night drawing mystery comics...), and to model that for others. And that means making time to manage my own personal, physical, mental, and financial wellbeing. SO. With that in mind I've decided to rearrange things a little. HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: In between new pages I will be posting behind-the-scenes artwork and sketches, and sharing some of my process. If you want to be the first to hear when new pages go up, you can follow me on twitter or instagram for updates when new posts go up. Otherwise, here's the plan: next Monday, November 18th, will be a behind-the-scenes post. The following Monday, November 25th, will be an off-week like usual. Monday, December 1st will be a new page; the following Monday will be an off-week, the Monday after that will be behind-the-scenes, and so on. I'm not sure how long this new setup will last. Ideally I would like to go back to new pages every two weeks as soon as possible. Hopefully I can use this little slowdown to build back up my buffer of pages and get my body and mind back in order, and be back  to my regular schedule in no time. But no matter what happens I will keep you posted. And rest assured, this comic isn't going away any time soon! That's it, that's all you need to know.Thanks so much for being a part of Moody Bluth and I hope to have you back for the next page in December :)

[moodybluthcomic]

We are really in the thick of things now. I’m so pleased with how this story has come along. A year ago I never would’ve even known how to begin drawing a page like this, and I can’t wait to wrap this little arc up. And now, Lipstick Don’t Lie (that’s the name of this story, remember? Don’t worry, I promise it will finally make sense in a week or two...) is finally approaching it’s climax! That makes this the best time for new readers to start getting into the comic, so please consider sharing Moody Bluth on social media or passing it on to someone you know! I’m so grateful to all the folks who have followed and shared this little project along the way. Word of mouth is the only way new readers find the comic so your sharing really makes a difference 💕 At my current 2-page-per-week rate, it will still be a few months before this story is fully finished, but I am definitely looking at my storyboards and feeling like the end is in sight. I’m not 100% sure what the future will hold after that. I definitely want to keep making comics in some form, but I’m not sure what it will look like. When I first started developing Lipstick Don’t Lie, I also came up with basic outlines for 6 or 7 more stories in the Moody Bluth Anti-Neoliberal Sleuth series. I’d love to give Loisel her own story arc, and introduce Moody and their friends to lots more wonderful characters and magical, anti-neoliberal adventures. But creating a regular comic like this is also an extremely time consuming task, especially when you’re dealing with mental or physical health issues too. If you love this comic as much as I do (or even half as much. A quarter as much!), the absolute best thing you can do is just to spread the word. The artistic (and financial!) success of webcomics is closely tied to their readerships, so every single new reader is a step in the direction of more stories, publishing this work in print, and all kinds of other exciting things. I honestly am just so floored and so grateful that this comic has gotten to where it is already, and that’s all thanks to the support of readers like you!! So thanks!!

Next page goes up Monday November 4th! Or... thereabouts. {Image description: The action blurs together. One large comic panel drips down the page like liquid. We see fir trees on a shore in the background. Moody falls off the rope and splashes into murky water. They float for a moment, stunned, and then swim towards the viewer, squinting with effort, trying to navigate the darkening water. Various burbling sound effects. Then, at the bottom of the page, in the foreground, we see large and close to the viewer, deep underwater, shoulder bag floating behind them, arms outstretched, eyes wide. The bottom of the panel drips off the page.}

[moodybluthcomic]

A little late again this week due to computer problems! But please enjoy Moody’s very swoopy hair.

Next page goes up October 21!

{Image Description: A black and white, 6-panel comic. Panel 1- Moody lower’s themself down a pile of massive tires. “Unghhh-- why is this-- hhnghghhh-- so-- difficult?” they grunt. Panel 2- We see a bird’s eye view over some tall firs as a tiny Moody climbs down the huge pile of tires and turns to see forest clearing surrounded by barbed wire fencing. Crowding the clearing is military-style obstacle course, with a set of monkey-bars and tall wooden frame. Moody looks out over the clearing saying, “I must’ve taken a wrong turn somehow.” Panel 3- A sweating Moody swings across the monkey bars. They say, “I should’ve just brought Marple with me.” Panel 4- “I should’ve paid more attention to which way I was going and I--” Moody breaks off as they climb over the top of the rope net, grasping at a thick rope wrapped around one of the wooden support beams. Panel 5- “Oh,” Moody finished their sentence, seen close up, hair blowing in the breeze, their hands grasping the rope as the they swing through the air. Panel 6- Moody hangs quivering off the rope as it dangles over a muddy pool of water. “Oh no,” they add.}

[moodybluthcomic]

Sorry this week’s page is late again. Instead, please enjoy this concept art from way way back in the beginning when I will still deciding what this comic would be called! I’m so proud of the work I’ve done and how much this idea and my work in general have grown. One of the early working titles for the comic was Policy Forensics, which came from a joke that Margo I had when I was first doing the research that inspired this story. I was reading through disability services policy documents and I was always trying to piece things together from the bits of documentation I was allowed to access. I always said it was like doing policy forensics.

 Fun fact: this drawing and Moody’s apartment in general were modelled after the first apartment I ever rented myself, a teeny tiny bachelor suite I rented when I was in my early twenties. Everyone who knew me when I lived there recognizes it immediately, right down to the street view outside and weird stairwell that appeared earlier on in the comic. It was a super cute place, but I don’t recommend anyone try living there. Whole place ended up being lousy with bedbugs.... 😅

 I know there’s been a lot of delays lately, but don’t worry I’m not going anywhere! I’ve had such a hard time getting caught up lately with... life and all. I’m giving myself this week off to try to get some work under my belt. Next page will either be next Monday (Sep 30) or the Monday after (Oct 8). If you want to be the first to know when it comes up, follow me on instagram or twitter! I always post when a new page goes out.

{Image description: a scanned ink drawing of Moody in their apartment. It looks a lot like it does in the comic now: messy, full of loose paper and sticky notes and books. Moody is asleep at their desk, with their chair tipped back a messenger cap over their face. A channel of light streams into the room from the foreground, as if from the door just out of sight, landing on the desk and the corner of a bed poking out into the room from the right. A big shadow of a person’s shape looms in the centre of the light. A title scrawled in pencil reads, “Policy Forensics.”}

[moodybluthcomic]

What IS going on here???? Next page goes up September 23!

{Image Description: 

Panel 1- Moody comes flying head over heels through the door into a hallway, their shoulder bag falling through the air behind them. They tumble to a stop, get up onto their knees, stand up and dust themselves off, and then look down the hallway confused. “Wait a minute,” they say.

Panel 2- We see Moody from slightly above, holding their bag in one hand, the hallway stretching ahead of them with a fish-eye lens effect. There are doors on the wall behind them and chair identical to the ones they were sitting in a few pages ago. “Wasn’t I just here?” Moody says.

Panel 3- Moody is silhouetted from behind, hands on on their hips, gazing down the hallway in the opposite direction than they went before. “I must’ve gone the wrong way,” they say.

Panel 4- “What’s wrong with me?” Moody wonders, as they follow the hallway around a corner, “Celebrated Youth Sleuth Can’t Even Find Way Out Of Administrative Building.” Panel 5- Moody stops and puts a hand on their head. The bricks of the hallways wall behind them has begun to crumble, and blades of grass are poking up through the floor. “Oh, Nancy Drew in a sweet blue roadster--” Moody curses. Panel 6- We see wide-angle, birds eye view as the crumbling walls of the hallway open up into a clearing in a fir tree forest. In the centre of the clearing is the beginning of an obstacle course, with a row of big tires lying on the ground leading to a massive pile of tires. A tiny Moody, hand on head, gazes out at the scene before them and adds, “--What is going on here????}

[moodybluthcomic]

UPDATE: Put some finishing touches and screentones on this page! Finally finished :)

Thanks everyone for your patience with this post being a week late! I tried my best but I just couldn’t get a fully shaded page finished. This was a real wild page to tackle after not being able to draw for a couple weeks... :) I’ll try to come back and update this page later when I can, but right now I want to focus on getting back on track for next post, which goes up next Monday, September 9th! 

{Image Description: A roller coaster track arcs back and forth across the page, passing a circus ring where seals balance balls on their snouts, and a tiger jumping through a series of hoops. The black line of the roller coaster track divides the page roughly into three panels, each getting closer to the viewer as Moody speeds along the track in a roller coaster car. At the far back, the roller coaster falls down onto the track with a “thunk,” with Moody yelling “AAAH.” Then, in the middle distance, Moody gazes over the edge of the coaster at the seals, saying, “What is this place?” Then, we see the car in extreme close up as Moody hurtles towards the foreground yelling, “WHOA-NOO-AAA.” 

In a separate panel at the bottom of the page, the roller coaster cars blur as they swerve around a sharp turn and Moody is thrown from the coaster. Moody turns over themself in the air and then tumbles through a magical floating door that has suddenly appeared in mid-air beside the coaster.}

[moodybluthcomic]

This week’s page is going to be a little late, sorry everyone! Keep your eyes peeled :)

{Image Description: a quick, scribbly drawing of Moody holding their head and looking stressed. They are sweating a bunch and holding a pencil in one hand. Above their head is writted “Sorry we’re late!”}

[moodybluthcomic]

This lovely guest art piece is by my good good friend Yasmin. Check her out on insta @yazziz! I'm really deeply enamoured with her ink work. And this Moody is so elegant and expressive and has phenomenal hair. Where can I get that hair. Who is your stylist, Moody???

Thanks to all my friends for their art this summer. One of my work contracts is ending so I should be back to normal posts after this. 

Next page goes up August 26th!

{Image Description: Yasmin’s black ink line drawing. Inside a circular frame, we see Moody from the chest up, leaning their head on one hand. They have a pencil tucked behind one ear and their eyes are closed sleepily. Behind them, stacks of papers rise from shadows. In the foreground, Miss Marple’s head pops up, looking at Moody. At the bottom, the image is titled “Moody takes a nap” and dated “2019”}

[moodybluthcomic]

Back to our regularly scheduled programming! Today’s page is a real........ roller coaster. 

Next post goes up August 12!

{Image Decription:

Panel 1 - A close up of Moody’s face, distorted on a reflective surface. Moody says, “Am I imagining things?” 

Panel 2 - We zoom out and see that the distorted reflection is because Moody is passing a row of funhouse mirrors. Moody is walking backwards nervously, looking around and asking, “Why would all this be in the Disability Services Centre?”

Panel 3 - Moody trips, falling backwards over a lever. Their arms are flailing and they shout, “Waagh--”

Panel 4 - The comic panels are beginning to slip and slide, tumbling down the page over one another. We zoom out and see that a dismayed Moody has fallen backwards into roller-coaster car. The lever that tripped them clicks into place. “Oh no,” says Moody as an ominous ticking starts up, “Tkk tkk tkk tkk tkk.”

Panel 5 - We zoom out further and see the roller coaster start to move up a ramp, “No no no no no,” says Moody, struggling to right themselves in the car. Ominous ticking continues.

Panel 6 - More ominous ticking. A tiny Moody, in silhouette, continues to cry, “No no no no no,” looking panickedly down the track behind them as the roller coaster approaches a big drop.

Panel 7 - “No no no-- Aaah!” Moody yells as the roller coaster hangs in midair and then plunges over the precipice.}

[moodybluthcomic]

More guest art this week, this time from the incredible Vanderbander! I’m absolutely floored (haha) by the Big Moody Energy of this piece. I’d be so jealous of their ability to capture my characters better than I can, if I weren’t so busy being completely in awe.

Vanderbander, aka Alanna Vanderbaan, is a Guelph-based digital illustrator and animator. They started making a webcomic for their thesis at OCAD University in Toronto, which they graduated from last spring. After attempting to continue to make pages for a while, they realized it was time to switch gears to making a portfolio for storyboarding and animation. Their portfolio site is here, and you can follow their work more actively on Instagram and Twitter!

As for myself, it turns out that having two jobs is somehow four times as much work as having one job. It’s like the neoliberal late-capitalism version of Horses in the Drift. I’m still working on catching up on comics but you can expect a new page from me next post, on July 29th! [Image Description: Vanderbander’s black-and white digital art of Moody. Moody is staring blankly into the distance, lying on their back on a pile of papers with Marple curled up at their feet. The image fades into a background of white text on a black background that seems to be detailing application instructions and policies for a disability services program.]