#full comic for today

[austajunk]

Komanami Week ❤️❤️❤️

Day 3: Hurt/Angst/Comfort

When you meet new people, make sure to leave the past in the past, okay?

[franeridart]

op main favs + headwear

[bacchuschucklefuck]

dreaming abt sophomore year class swap bard!riz

[heroesspirit]

Chapter 2

Part 8

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[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Happy Halloween and Wei Wuxian day!

[chiropteracupola]

scribblezine about my great-grandma (who died before I was born) and related topics. who can say.

[mainalias]

thinking about compiling screenshots of golden/silver age batman exclusively calling dick his ward to combat the allegations that it was “initially a father-child relationship”

[rebar-head]

on today’s rat assisted doodles: POV YOU KIDNAP THE WAYNES

[todayisafridaynight]

redraw

[triglycercule]

i'm finally doing it. i'm finally making that stupid ass horror character analysis i promised myself to make like a month ago. and DAMN this shit is actually so fun ngl horrortale is so beautifully tragically written. i've been listening to SAS's horror theme the entire time i've been doing this because it's actually a pretty good theme for depicting horror ans i need to get into a HIM mood. this sets the tone. my hands are so sweaty but i also have my fan blasting at me so i don't know why the hell i'm so sweaty wtf. anyways idk when i'll finish this but it'll be soon TRUST (i need this character analysis more than anyone 💀💀 this doc is just a first draft since horror is like wayyy more complex than i originally thought wtf)

[gazkamurocho]

Someone is really happy 👀❤ (WIP)

More progress ✨

[petricorah]

hi whats prince and the fool day

hi!

a while back the book Legacy of the Fire Nation was released and it had this quote in it, from a letter Iroh wrote to Zuko:

needless to say, zukka nation went a bit crazy about it. today's the anniversary of the book being released and so ppl think of the quote and have fun with it

full quote in the read more:

“Sokka: I never considered sarcasm a natural element--until I met Sokka, that is. If what comes out of that boy's mouth is not considered a special type of bending, I don't know what bending is. At first, I would have dismissed Sokka as the weakest link in Team Avatar as he has no elemental powers. But it was his bravery and heart that gave his friends their strength, and in turn gave you an example of how friends could be your advocate in life and an asset in battle. The prince and the fool. But is that all you and Sokka were, or were to one another? No, I think not. There, see? I got to answer my own question. One of the many joys of writing this to you. Well, that and I don’t have to hear your back talk. But talking is most of what Sokka is: a mouth on legs. That gets him into plenty of trouble on its own. But it was when Sokka chose to act that you both got in over your heads. His fool desire to save his father from the bowels of the Boiling Rock prison without a plan, without help--it was only you who knew what Sokka was trying to do. And you stepped up. Sokka was brave enough to do something stupid for someone else, but he needed you, Zuko, to remind him that being brave can mean failing. Your experience with failure and your refusal to give up helped Sokka when he needed it most. And maybe you needed a bit of his foolhardy spirit to remind you that you are human too and that trying to do the honorable thing doesn't always mean doing the right thing.”

[raiiny-bay]

:-)

[tangledinink]

my brain is like “we can’t possibly go to sleep we haven’t made nearly enough progress on this comic yet” and I’m like. hey bestie I’m just saying? we already posted a new comic today. and yesterday. and two days before that. and two days before that. and the day before that, too, so like. i think we’re ok actually.

[spotsupstuff]

off the string Boreas needs a chiropractor god damn.

that he does! n the best he's gonna get are these two

[dreadnotau]

Happy three years everybody! As always, there’s a lot to say on the occasion, so pop in at the end of the post for the tl;dr if you don’t have time for my detailed diatribes, haha

Boy, time flies, huh? Feels like the second anniversary was just yesterday, but maybe that’s just the several long hiatuses getting to me. I’ve been scarce on uploading anything anywhere for a while now, even though I promised I’d actually pick up the slack this time around. What gives? Well…

For one, college hell, and for two, a lot of unfounded anxiety about putting my art out there. Allow me some theatrics for a moment and I’ll actually get back to the comic at hand… I’ve never had an exceptionally supportive environment for making art. It wasn’t suppressive, not in the slightest, but it also wasn’t… encouraging. It was always treated as a hobby or a distraction rather than something I was allowed to be fully proud of, especially because a lot of my art focused on more cartoon-y and fantasy ideas, rather than still life studies and painting (which people generally outside of the art sphere tend to value more, arbitrarily). Couple that with a childhood full of being bullied over minute shit you hadn’t even considered could be an issue before, and you get a teenager hellbent on never sharing his interests or ideas with anyone, mostly due to the fear of rejection.

I’ve grown, thankfully, but that paranoia and fear doesn’t go away overnight. As I’m sure you all know, Meowchela was the one who originally encouraged me to post this comic, and the only reason she succeeded was because she was the first person in a long time who listened and engaged with my interests and my art in a meaningful way. It’s kind of obvious her friendship had a profound impact on me, and I’d cite her as one of the reasons I was even hopeful enough to apply to an art college in the first place! This comic, and that bond with another person, proved that maybe these things I’m so passionate about weren’t duds, and weren’t something I had to keep to myself.

So, fast forward a few years. About three years, in fact.

During one of my classes, right before this hellish two weeks of exams started, one of the class assistants talked me into showing my comic pages to one of my professors. He’s generally a pretty open guy when it comes to new mediums, but I’m always… apprehensive about showing my less “traditional art”-y things to professors, but, he ended up being genuinely proud of it. Specifically, I showed him pages 85-87 (because they’re my favourites) and, he didn’t read the text, just the visuals were enough for him to say “good job, keep it up” (which is HIGH praise from that guy). When I mentioned I’ve been meaning to simplify the visuals because I didn’t have time to work on the comic very often because of college and classes, he dismissed it on principle. I was honestly caught off guard. Heavily paraphrasing, he suggested that worsening the visuals for an arbitrary deadline was counterproductive to making something that’s Good™.

That’s kinda stuck with me. For a good few years now I was more focused on optimisation rather than visual improvement for the comic, and though it HAS contributed to better visuals in some ways (cutting corners sometimes makes for a less pointy and jagged end result), it’s kind of weird I’m treating an art project that way, isn’t it? I set a lot of… arbitrary deadlines and standards for myself, in the form of expectations and what I “should” or “shouldn’t” be doing at certain stages in my life. I’ve thought of Dread Not as a passion project second and a stepping stone first, if I’m being honest. As if it was too… fandom-y and derivative to be treated with more gravity than that, like it’s an immature project because I was still a child when I came up with it. As if it was something I’m making to Build Up to Something Else, something Bigger and Cooler and More Important, and… the more I think about the future of Dread Not, and even my future career options, the more I realised that’s, ironically, a really immature way to think about it.

If there’s one thing going to this art college has taught me, is that there’s no “right” way to make art, and there’s no “right” way to success as an artist. There’s no clear-cut paths, just more commonly treaded roads, but even those are heavily overgrown. Why should I try to box myself into thinking I have to make things from complete scratch to be taken seriously? What’s so bad about Dread Not as a story and as a comic that’s caused me to vaguely keep it under wraps when conversing with people in my day-to-day life? Why wouldn’t I put all these skills I’ve acquired to improve and expand this project that’s Right There, WAITING for me to finally get off my ass and get pages out there again?

I wish I could say I’ve used all this time away in a particularly clever way, but I really haven’t - at least, it feels like I haven’t. My art has undoubtedly improved over time (though admittedly the art for this post was Very rushed, fuckin exams), and while I’ve been working on projects in the background, chipping away at them in a VERY disorganised way, I haven’t been posting that progress anywhere, and I haven’t made any good progress on my biggest project, Dread Not, because of the other ones. And, honestly? Admitting that kinda stings. This comic means a lot to me, and I wish I actually gave it the time and attention it deserves instead of letting it sit out hiatus after hiatus because I keep failing at structuring my time.

So, my new plan is a little more abstract: find a way to work Dread Not into my school schedule, and slowly build a habit of working on it more often. No clue how long that’ll take, but I think it’ll be worth it to consider it as an option, and hopefully finally end these long, drawn out hiatuses with short bursts of uploads in-between. HOPEFULLY. Building habits was never my strong suit, so please bear with me while I figure this out in what will probably be the most hectic upload schedule in this comics history, which is: no schedule at all.

From now on (until the end of Act 1), I’ll upload pages when they’re ready, and depending on how the weeks go and how complex the page is, they could be weeks or days apart from one another. Hell, some might even take a month to finish if school stuff gets REALLY hectic (god knows Hellish Exam Week number 1 and number 2 won’t be giving me much time to work on the comic), but I’m determined to do this. I want to be able to put my all into this project again!!

(And hopefully finish Act 1 by the end of this semester…)

TL;DR: College is giving me life lessons I didn’t expect, and because of them I’ve decided to give myself a non-existent upload schedule for Dread Not: Pages will be posted when they’re ready, and the spacing between pages could wildly vary depending on circumstances and the actual complexity of the page itself.

As always, thank you for being here, thank you for reading, and thank you for being patient!

If all goes well, there will be new content very, very soon.