Weekly Upload 05/28/22

Back at the height of my blogging dedication, I would have taken some time to write up thoughts about the latest highly visible school shooting. Now I’m just tired. I’ve cried about it, fretted over the safety of my own students, been breathtakingly angry about the deliberate apathy of politicians who won’t do anything besides make excuses for lax gun control laws and try to blame mental illness for violent crimes. That’s all been squeezed in around the demands of the day job and the moments I take for nurturing my creative life. There’s nothing left to say. If you care about this stuff, go inconvenience some policy makers; I’m going to be trying to get to the end of the school year with some shred of my sense of humanity since everyone who doesn’t work in education seems bound and determined not to let teachers have that anymore.

Art

I did one two pieces this week, one of a group of teen characters from the current New Mutants series watching some kind of lightshow with joy and wonder (the other was finished on Monday before the week went south, and so in my head was briefly forgotten). They’re small figures with awkward bodies and too little experience to fully understand why the world is what it is. They’re being children, which is what children deserve to be.

Week 21 Addendum
Completely forgot for a minute that I also drew this Shark Girl piece on Monday. It’s technically my participation in MerMay. If you squint sideways. #xmen #drawing pic.twitter.com/JaxHzekLbY

— Jason K Jones (@Jkjones2185) May 28, 2022

Speaking in terms of craft, the two pieces I did this week included some experimentation with making textures using a couple of different color layers and creative use of digital brushes as erasers. I quite like the effect I got on Shark Girl’s skin and in Rain Boy’s body, so that’s a thing I’ll be adding to my coloring toolbox. I’m always fascinated by the way skill increases through incremental steps that are usually not noticeable in the moment, so it’s fun to document a concrete development in the way I use my rendering tools for deliberate effects.

Blogging

It’s very meta to have a section labeled “Blogging” on my weekly update blog, but I started a new critical reading project, and since those go up in this space, it seemed like the best way to make note of it.

Because someone on the internet was wrong, and I’m trying to be less combative and more constructive, I got to thinking about how incredibly good Vita Ayala’s current run on New Mutants has been, and I realized I wanted to unpack why that is. Consequently, I’m doing a new Reading series here where I’ll be taking a close look at each issue in the run to date starting with issue #14. It’s my usual mundane rumination, but if anyone wants to follow along, the first post can be found here. New entries will come along as I feel like working on them, but my summer is only three weeks away, so I expect I’ll be picking up the pace in late June.

Comics

Legion of X #1 is good, and I’m thrilled that ForgetMeNot has a first name (It’s Xabi in case you don’t remember). I also speculated about the plot arc of the book on Twitter, although I fully expect to be wrong. I’m sitting on Saga #59, unread, because my heart was too full for potential fictional tragedy this week. I also have Captain Carter #3 on my to-read list along with my monthly grab bag of floppies that my local comic shop sends me. There’s also the smattering of stuff I picked up for Free Comic Book Day a couple weeks ago that I haven’t flipped through yet. It’s just one of those periods where my reading habits slow down a little bit, I guess.

Video Games

Rachael asked me last week to start a playthrough of BugSnax so we could see the free expansion that dropped last month, and I’ve been enjoying it. I watched Rachael play through it when it first released a couple years ago, so it’s been a nice casual game to revisit. It’s the breeziest horror game you’ll ever play. Spider-Man: Miles Morales is still going strong as well, though I think I’ve accepted that I’m not going to gold star every challenge in the game; I was obsessive about the first Marvel’s Spider-Man because I played it while Rachael was on a two week writing retreat and I needed some way to pass the time.

Media

In the bubblegum department, The Circle Season 4 was delightful almost all the way through. While I’ve been pretty neutral about the series’s previous seasons, The Great Pottery Throw Down Season 5 was pretty much perfect from beginning to end.

For movies, we wanted to finish the week with something soft and light, so we picked Pokemon Detective Pikachu, which turned out to be way less soft and light than we had anticipated. I’ll say that for a video game movie, it ranks up there with the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie in terms of quality. The premise is utterly baffling though. How did this specific idea get approved? Who was it that pushed through the vision of “just like the real world, but with CG cartoon animals all over the place”? I have questions.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week, but I did take Wednesday off to hang out with some friends who were visiting from out of town, and we had lunch at the outdoor food pods near our house, so that was pleasant.

Weekly Upload 05/22/22

I missed updating yesterday because we had some friends over for an evening hangout (been a while since we did that), and the day just sort of slipped away in all the prep that we had to do ahead of time. It was a lot of fun, and we’re looking forward to the end of the school year because we’ll feel a lot better about doing in-person visits with people once we’re in our off season and much less higher risk to be around in terms of potential COVID exposure.

Art

I don’t have anything new to show off this week because I spent my drawing time working on a new page for my fan comic Krakoan Counseling. I’m up to five completed pages now, which is pretty cool given my goal at the start of the year was to finish, like, one. I’m currently two pages into a story, and I’d really rather keep them to myself until I have the whole arc finished, which might take some time given I literally took two months off from comics creating between this page and the last one. I hope I don’t take so long before I get to the next page since the shift in art is pretty noticable, but there’s not much I can do about that short of redrawing the first page of the story, and that seems like a very silly idea given this is a project I’m doing to amuse myself. On the art front, I do have an idea for a piece for Mermay, a drawing event that I typically skip because I don’t really care about drawing merpeople, but this one tickles me, and it will probably only take like a day to execute.

Comics

There were a lot of good X-Men comics out this week, and I honestly felt a little exhausted scrambling to read all of them on Wednesday. It’s a thing that I’ve been thinking about lately with the shipping delays that have been happening in general, but what started out a couple years ago as a thing that was fun and breezy reading on a weekly basis with two or three titles a week has turned into this real feast or famine situation where there will be weeks with pretty much nothing new coming out that I care to read and others where I have a stack of nearly ten books to catch up on. I know that it’s largely about my own relationship wtih the hobby, and I don’t actually have to read everything the day it publishes, but participating in X-Twitter creates a lot of pressure to be up on stuff so that I can just use social media casually during my work day. On the other hand, I tend to stay away from Twitter if I’m not caught up on comics, so maybe that’s a plus? I don’t know. Everyone’s relationship with social media in general is a little screwed up, so who can say?

Setting all that metacommentary aside, the books this week were really good with the standout for me being New Mutants #25. I’ve been looking forward to a Magik-centered story for a couple years now, and I think the one that Vita Ayala and Rod Reis are putting together is going to be really good. I honestly want to re-read the issue and put together some longer thoughts on it outside the context of an update, because I feel like it’s doing some really smart things as a direct sequel to the Magik miniseries and the original Inferno event.

Video Games

I gave up on replaying Arkham Asylum and decided to instead play Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I’m about halfway through the game right now, and it’s a really fun follow up to the first Spider-Man game from Insomniac. All in all I’d say it’s very much more of the same, but the first game was so polished that I really don’t mind that.

Media

Rachael and I got into the Amazon Prime series The Wilds this week, and we’re nearly finished watching the two seasons that are out. It’s remarkably good for a mid-budget streaming drama.

Pandemic

At work this week I recieved an email from my school district saying that the COVID risk level for our county has been upgraded to medium, which means that masks are recommended but not required indoors. I’m hoping there will be an uptick in masking behavior at school, but I’m doubtful. It’s weird seeing stuff like that and realizing that I never really relaxed in the first place.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to any coffee shops this week.

Weekly Upload 04/16/22

Despite being a full week of work with a fair bit that needed to get done, I think it was overall a very pleasant week for me. Granted, we had a freak snowstorm Monday morning that forced a late start, so that general weirdness might have had something to do with my generally positive mood. Mostly, I’d characterize the week as one where I had a lot of small successes at work that made me feel good about my job.

Art

After the really frenetic pace I had with drawing last week, I slowed way down this week to try to figure out some fundamentals that I still feel are really shaky for me. The big one that I’ve been trying to troubleshoot is my habit of making torsos extremely long on my figures. You can see it in the one finished piece that I posted this week where both figures have pretty solid anatomy (in my opinion) except there’s just a ton of body between where the rib cage is supposed to end and where the pelvis starts. If I were trying to do something in a more cartoon style that would probably be fine, but my focus for years has been on getting down realistic body proportions. I spent some time looking at my references on figure building, and I’m trying to key in to a set proportion model to help me not elongate torsos so much going forward. In theory I’m going to be explicitly practicing eight head height figures so that I have a clear reference to check when I’m drawing rib cages and pelvises. I have a piece in progress right now where I’ve been especially careful with measurements for my figures, so I’m hoping they’ll look less like glam slendermen when they’re finished. I think I’m on the right track because I really had to fight my impulse to lengthen the skeletons after I finished drawing them in the new piece I’m working on.

Art practice has also been a little slower this week because I’ve felt pulled in a couple different directions with art projects, and I have a terrible sense of commitment to whatever I choose to work on at a given moment. Essentially, I was having trouble choosing what project to do next for fear of losing enthusiasm for the projects that I didn’t decide to start, which is perhaps the dumbest form of FOMO anyone’s ever described. On the bright side, I’ve begun noodling around with scripts and layouts for my next page of fan comic. The irony here is that I still haven’t posted the last page I did because I don’t like the idea of posting work that may take a long time for me to reach a satisfying conclusion on. Given that it’s been over a month since I did the last comic page, I think that was a wise choice.

Week 15 Art Output
I don’t have a lot that’s ready to show off this week, but I was mildly productive with some beginning work on my next comic page. Spent some time thinking about my figure building process too. #drawing #fanart #wicdiv pic.twitter.com/iGKrQwq7Ny

— Jason K Jones (@Jkjones2185) April 16, 2022

Comics

It was a relatively light week in reading, although I feel the need to give a shout out to the Spider-Punk #1 that I bought on a whim and which seems to capture a lot of the general vibe and aesthetic of Home Sick Pilots in a Marvel book. I mean, it’s not punk-horror or anything like that, but it’s a lot of fun with art by Justin Mason that feels distinct from Marvel’s usual house style in ways that are a little more reminiscent of underground comix. It still feels very much like a glossy superhero book, but I like that it’s been artfully roughed up to evoke a zine. Other high notes for the week included the Eternals issue that came out; it’s not quite as grand awful melodrama as a few of the other keystone issues of Gillen’s run, but it’s still solidly entertaining, and I really enjoy any book that dares to make fools of the Avengers. I also got a kick out of X-Men this week because like a lot of people I clocked that there’d been a continuity error in an earlier issue where Polaris manipulates Laura like a puppet while she’s unconscious, and as the intro for this week’s Wolverine-focused issue they did a whole page explaining how Laura suddenly had a full metal skeleton and hung a lampshade on the error by saying Proteus had screwed up during one of her resurrections. That kind of playfulness from a creative team is a lot of fun.

In comics-related things, I listened to the episode of Decompressed that Kieron Gillen released with Steve Orlando (because I’m a total mark for X-Men/comics craft/Gillen content), and it was a really fun creator interview. There’s a bit in the conversation where they’re discussing the rhythms of different ways you can write a comics page, and one of them points out that it’s a lot closer to poetry writing over prose, and that’s been rattling around in my head for a few days. I think I’ve had the idea about page writing as being all about hitting certain rhythms to evoke the feeling you want from the page, but something about the poetry comparison just clicked so well. The bit in the conversation about not wanting to give your artist something absolutely horrible to design and draw was also fun since my very humble fan comic work is basically a one-man operation. I now understand the pain of artist-me staring at a script that writer-me put together and thinking this was a huge mistake. I can’t imagine what it has to be like writing pages for a collaborator to draw. Anyway, comics writing is like poetry. I should get a sticker of that.

Media

The Ultimatum is bad reality television. Rachael and I made it to the end of episode three and decided that we just couldn’t deal with it any longer. So much about the production feels incredibly uncomfortable and manipulative. We didn’t particularly like any of the cast members, but that doesn’t mean we felt like it was fun to see them go through the ringer with their relationships for a stupid TV show. So now we’re trying out Bridgerton, which I have to say is incredibly dumb but very compelling. I love a soap opera (come on, I read X-Men), and the small touches the show includes to help ground the social conflict in a more contemporary context make the whole thing very good trash TV. Also, it’s all fictional, so I’m not going to feel like I need a shower after I watch these characters make obviously bad life decisions for my amusement.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week. There was a taco truck at work on Thursday, but because it was open to staff and students, I did not get to eat good tacos at work. I did get Taco Bell for dinner that night, so that helped resolve some of the taco lust, although we all know that Taco Bell is its own category of food separate from Mexican.

Weekly Upload 03/19/22

I’m on Spring Break this week! We’re going to the beach! Much fun, so excite!

That’s looking forward though. Looking back on the week, things were aggressively fine. The mask mandate ended, and there was not massive social upheaval at work as kids and staff quietly divided themselves up into the done-with-maskers and the nope-not-yet crowd (as well as a smaller third group I think of as the contextuals who let the present moment dictate whether they were masked up or not). Apparently the messaging about witholding judgment of other peoples’ decisions worked well enough. Hooray. We’ll see how things look after a couple weeks and there’s been time to track whether we see a rise in infections coinciding with dropping indoor mask requirements. Otherwise, work was fine, I did some fanart that I like pretty well, and we’re finally opening up into spring time after the long winter.

Art

I finished a comic page, and it looks pretty good, but I haven’t shared it yet because I haven’t written the rest of the story that it goes with. Given how slowly I produce pages, I’d rather not put out an unfinished thing when there’s still a lot of planning and writing left to do (let alone actually drawing the thing). The stuff I have shared this week is all fanart based on the new Hellfire Gala looks that dropped in anticipation of the big one shot they’re doing at the end of June. Wolverine’s look is the obvious banger of the set, and I rushed to get a piece together based on the main cover preview before Marvel revealed the piece with a full look at her outfit. There are some front details that I missed because they just weren’t visible in the reference I worked from, but I think I did a strong piece. I’m doing my best to remain proud of my work without despairing over it only making a small splash on Twitter. The algorithm hates everyone, so I’m keeping in mind that it’s not personal. Also, I’m very much not a professional artist, so I constantly have to temper my expectations against the reality that I can’t produce stuff as flashy as what other folks who get paid for their work do. I also did a portrait of Magik that was fun (I got a specific compliment on the eyes, which was satisfying since that’s an element I tried to do better than normal), although as I’ve complained on Twitter, I’m just not super into the all-black Alien bodysuit thing. Anyway, here’s my work on Twitter.

Week 11 Art Output
I finished a comic page (but I’m saving it until I have some more done for the new sequence I’m working on) and did two fanart pieces based on the new #XmenHellfireGala looks that came out. Really happy to be on Spring Break now. pic.twitter.com/RUGtZHeBkz

— Jason Jones (@Jkjones2185) March 19, 2022

Comics

Setting aside anticipation for a thing that happens in three months, I felt like it was a pretty fun comics week. I read the two latest issues of Eternals, which continues to do exactly what I want Kieron Gillen books to do, and I’m slowly getting excited about the “Judgment Day” event that’s going to happen over the summer. I don’t usually care one way or another about events, but it’s Gillen doing his thing with X-Men and Eternals, so I’m sure it’ll be a blast. Also probably upsetting. Never get too attached to anyone in a Kieron Gillen story; they will probably suffer horribly and then you will have to deal with the psychic damage.

My primary reading for the week was to finish the Amanda Conner & Jimmy Palmiotti run on Harley Quinn. I had heard for a while that it was a good run that does a lot of rehabilitate the character into a lovable anti-hero, and I’d say that overall it hits those beats pretty well. Having finished it now, I’m not sure if it was entirely my thing, but it was a fun diversion from the usual superhero melodrama I typically enjoy. It was a shame that their last arc is collected in a trade with the beginning of Frank Tieri’s run, so I ended my reading with some stories by him that are significantly less good. He seems to get the emotional core of Conner & Palmiotti’s version of Harley, but he’s also the kind of straight male writer who clearly has no problem throwing in casual homophobic jokes and hiding behind the fact that he’s writing a book that’s supposed to feel grimy as a defense. Final takeaways for me are that it was a fun detour into material for a character whose mainstream presentation has been kind of shallow in recent years (aside from the animated series, which is truly a gem), but there’s not enough there to keep me coming back.

Books

I’m still plugging away through The Somebody People, and I finally got through the first part the other night. It was kind of rough doing about two hundred pages of “so this is where we are now” with the characters that survived from The Nobody People. I was surprised by how refreshing it felt to reach an interlude about Kevin Bishop and Raymond Glover; it honestly felt like a completely different story for about fifteen pages before the casual existential horror set back in. On the bright side, it’s Spring Break, and I need a beach book, so I think I’ll make some good progress on this one.

Media

Rachael and I watched Soul last weekend as the latest in our ongoing Pixar catch up project. It was good! I’d say its primary appeal is visual, although the story was sweet, and probably a little more memorable than Onward was.

We finished watching the second season of Space Force, which was definitely better overall than the first season. I think pivoting into a more Parks & Recreation vibe where everyone is generally competent and likes working together was a good choice. If it gets a third season, I’d enjoy spending more time with these characters now.

While we’re in the process of giving old shows another chance, we’ve also begun watching the second season of Sex Education. This show’s deeply strange because it does a lot of really good work presenting the current state of what good sex ed looks like in charming ways, but it also seems to have a big problem with not going to the queer tragedy well for Eric’s subplots. We’re only about halfway through the second season right now, and both Rachael and I are not thrilled with Eric getting romantically involved with the boy who bullied and assaulted him in the first season. I’m hoping the show understands that we shouldn’t feel good about this development, but we’ll see where it goes.

Pandemic

I think I actually put most of my thoughts about this in the intro this week. Hard not to think about it when much of the meat space trend seems to revolve around trying very hard not to think about it. Don’t think about pink polar bears, yeah?

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week.

Weekly Upload 03/12/22

I think this was mostly a sanguine week of work, if you set aside the sense of impending doom everyone has about the mask mandate ending this weekend and the potential anxiety explosion we could face come Monday. I saw two shows this week (like, the in-person theater kind), one socially with some friends and the other as support for my work bestie who has run herself ragged trying to prepare a student musical under pandemic conditions this year. Both were fun! Both involved late nights! I’m very tired this morning as I write all this.

Art

I think I mentioned last week that my copy of the Morpho book on clothing folds came in, so I’ve taken a sudden interest in observing how real life clothing works and thinking through how to recreate those looks in my drawing. I did a couple of pieces this week that were meant to give me chances to practice folds on slightly looser fitting clothes (superheroes tend towards the form-fitting side of clothing), and I’m mostly pleased with the results. I’ll probably keep doing weird clothing stuff for a little bit while I’m focused on this element. I’ve also started playing around with the settings on my sketching brushes a little bit. My rough drawings tend to look kind of blobby because I’ve gotten in the habit of using a brush that has a pretty dynamic size range, and I’m starting to feel the limitations of that, particularly when I’m working on comics pages and have to work in a much smaller space than what I’ve gotten used to with my other art. I’m hoping that moving towards a finer tip brush will help me develop some more refined habits around detailing, though I’m absolutely certain it’s going to slow me down in the short term. I think the more interesting question will be whether I adopt a similarly fine tipped brush for inking. It’s a largely open question at this point, but an interesting one for my brain to noodle over while I’m drawing.

Week 10 Art Output
Slightly less this week, but I think this diptych is pretty strong. Trying to practice more elaborate clothing folds. I also began the next page of my fancomic, though we’ll see if I finish it by the end of the week. #drawing #xmen #artistontwitter pic.twitter.com/DGIun6RNRG

— Jason Jones (@Jkjones2185) March 12, 2022

As for the fancomic, I have a decent idea for a new sequence, though I haven’t figured out how long it’s going to be yet. I’m working on the first page right now (which is all I’ve scripted so far), and then I’ll see if I want to post it before I move on to the next part or not. I think at the very least, giving myself permission to take breaks in between pages to do standalone pieces will help a lot with the grindy aspects of production. The two week period where I only worked on two pages back-to-back was really difficult.

Comics

Somehow I managed to have ten new comics to pick up on Wednesday this week, and I still have a few that I’ve not read yet since I’ve been deep in drawing land. The highlights for the week were the conclusion of the Life is Strange series that’s been going on for a couple years. I’ve been into that book since it started back at the beginning of 2019, and the final issue provided a really lovely coda to Max and Chloe’s story. The conclusion to Christopher Sebela’s Comixology Unlimited series .Self dropped, and it was perfectly satisfying. I find Sebela’s story concepts to be deeply fun because he loves a near-future dystopian moment. Also in the Sebela column for this week was volume 3 of Crowded, which I jumped on after the first arc concluded, adored through the second arc, and then spent a year patiently waiting for the series to conclude all at once. In terms of creator-owned work, it might be one of my favorites of the last year. I’m absolutely certain that it’s due to the art team’s work; Ro Stein and Ted Brandt deliver a visual style that leans just enough into exaggeration to make for some really fun characters who still feel grounded. I look at their stuff and want to be able to draw people who look like that. Now that the whole series is done, I think I will plan to reread it all at a go some time soon.

Media

Like a lot of people, we watched season 2 of Love Is Blind and were baffled by the motivations of the people on the show. Unlike a lot of folks, we finished that and thought, “Is there a better version of this?” Enter Love Is Blind: Japan! If you’re looking for a bit of trash television that actually follows people who seem to be taking the whole dating and romance thing seriously, you can do a lot worse than this show. The structure of the series feels much less like a bunch of people pretending to date for the sake of being on TV than folks who are serious about trying a novel way to find a long-term romantic partner. I found myself liking most of the couples, even as it became apparent who was likely to get married and who was just incompatible. In slightly less trashy television, Rachael and I decided to give Space Force a second chance since we’d heard it gets much better in the second season. The first season is deeply uneven, with a few episodes that really work and many that are just bizarre. We just wrapped the first season up last night, so we’re looking forward to getting into the good material now.

Pandemic

The statewide mask mandate has ended, and we’re all just waiting to see what kind of chaos might erupt at work after the weekend. I hope that it all ends up being a big nothing in terms of impact on case numbers, but I think the optimism of last summer before Delta and Omicron hit has left me feeling like declaring things over in terms of community mitigation is premature. I wonder (probably idly) if this is just going to be a cyclical pattern for the foreseeable future.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to any coffee shops this week. I did eat a burrito from a taqueria before I went to one of the shows I saw this week, so that was nice, even if it wasn’t the same as hanging out for a couple hours.

Weekly Upload 03/05/22

Despite being a very meeting heavy week at work, I think things were generally okay. While I have a lot of stuff going on with my to-do list, it feels like the most obnoxious part of the post-holiday season is passing now. I got past my art block from last week (somewhat spectacularly, if I can brag for a moment), and the weather’s feeling more and more spring-like every day. I’m sure my mood has been helped considerably by Friday being an in-service day, which meant no students, which also meant I was free to work from home. Working from home is pretty great, and I sincerely hope it continues to be an option for in-service days going forward.

Art

I produced three pieces this week, which is pretty great given the amount of work that went into them. One was a riff on the classic cover of Lord of the Flies with the close up of the character Ralph with leaves and brush tangled up in his hair while he stares straight out at the reader. Because X-Men stuff is what I thrive on, I used Doug Ramsey in the place of Ralph, increased the amount of foliage obscuring the face, and decided to give it a creepy twist with elements of Krakoan vegetation and techno-organic material growing over Doug’s face. I’m not totally pleased with the finish on the painting, but I think I generally hit the vibe I was going for. Probably won’t do intentionally creepy stuff a whole lot, but this was a fun experiment, and I think the framing I did with the foreground elements is pretty strong. My other two pieces this week were a little more straightforward; one is a simple illustration of two characters in my fancomic meeting (I’m currently hashing out a story for them), and the other is an illustration of Magik and Mirage (good old standbys that they are when I just need to pick a subject to do some work) in variations on their “graduation costumes,” a set of looks that I have never thought were particularly interesting or engaging, even when Art Adams drew them. I mostly like the changes I made, but I think I whiffed a little on Illyana’s feet; her legs look spindly at the ankles.

Week 9 Art Output
I bounced back with a vengeance. #xmen #Cypher #Frenzy #Husk #Magik #Mirage #drawing pic.twitter.com/HnB2WKXGHS

— Jason Jones (@Jkjones2185) March 5, 2022

In other art-related things, I just got in the new Morpho reference book for clothing folds, and I’m excited to do some experimentation. I feel like folds are something that I sort of understand, and I have some guides in other books that explain the concepts, but they never go very deep beyond showing the basic ideas behind the folds on simplified shapes. I spent some time flipping through the Morpho book today, and it still has those core shapes at the center of its method, but then there’s like a hundred pages of sketches showing how they work in conjunction with different parts of the body. I’m hoping I will one day perfect the chunky jacket.

Comics

I know that I read some good comics this week, but I feel very much like there’s not much to say about them besides “They were good!”

I did read the second issue of the Cowboy Bebop series that Titan’s putting out (pretty unfortunate to be running a tie-in series for a show that was already canceled), and I’m really into it. Dan Watters is writing, and what he’s been doing in Home Sick Pilots was strong enough to get me to check this series out. The second issue is an extended riff on the Lotus Eaters myth, but it ends with everyone on the Bebop deciding they’d rather be bounty hunters because it’s just too boring being that happy all the time. The whole thing’s a very energetic take on the things that made the original Cowboy Bebop so much fun. I’m going to guess this is only going to be a miniseries in the end, but I’m enjoying the ride.

I also received my monthly grab bag of physical comics from my local shop, which included the conclusion of Dirtbag Rapture, a Chris Sebela-written series that I found delightful from the start, and the last issue of Volume 1 of a John Wick parody that imagines a world where John was killed instead of the dog, and now the dog’s out to get revenge for the death of his human. It’s called Good Boy, and while it’s probably not something I would normally choose for myself, there is a fun tongue-in-cheek feel to the hyperviolence of the thing. The set also included #4 of What’s the Furthest Place From Here, which I feel sort of ambivalent about, although I admit I find the weird post-apocalyptic setting compelling in a fun, creepy way. I genuinely wish the cast of characters were smaller because I can’t remember who anyone is from issue to issue. Last in the set was #6 of Sweet Paprika. That one’s a big shoulder shrug; it’s fun to read in the moment as a bit of fluffy romance, but I feel like the constant reminder that Paprika is just horny all the time kind of detracts from the things I enjoy in romance books.

Video Games

Rachael’s playing Ghost of Tsushima which is beautiful and a delight to watch. I’m picking at Neo: The World Ends With You, which is a great button masher action RPG with lots of collections to accrue. If I have one complaint about the game, it’s probably that the collecting element is so comprehensive that it’s really slowed down my story progression. I don’t especially mind at the moment, although the fact that I have a different, hundred hour long RPG playthrough that’s been sitting on hiatus for a couple months now waiting on the backburner makes me feel like I may have chosen poorly in my game palette cleanser.

Media

Severance is a great show. I’m into the absurd workplace comedy vibe of the interior parts of the show that rub up against the ongoing outside plot that reminds you just how horrible it is what these people and their employers have done to themselves. Rachael and I finished the utter train wreck that was Love is Blind season 2, and we agreed the best episode of the season is the reunion, because everyone, including the hosts, reads Shake for filth. While watching the thing we were convinced that Shayne was the worst person on the show, and he’s still pretty bad, but it was fascinating to see the cast confirm that the producers actually edited the show to make Shake look better than he was. Weirdest part of the episode was the compulsory trailer for a completely different reality show at the end that looks way trashier than Love is Blind.

Pandemic

The indoor mask mandate in Oregon is going to expire on March 14. All teachers are bracing for impact. Seems like an excellent recipe for ruining some spring breaks (scheduled to begin exactly one week later). On a more positive note, it feels good to spend time outdoors and relax a little bit about masks. We customarily go to the a local park for walks when it’s nice out, and we bring masks for politeness when passing folks on the trails, but it is genuinely nice to have just one less thing to think about when getting ready to go out for a bit of exercise.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week.

Weekly Upload 02/19/22

It was mostly a pleasant week. At work we’ve wrapped up the argument and research unit that helped bridge the worst of the drag that is January through February (lots of work days for students to do independent reading and writing), and we’re about to start a short story unit based on some stuff that we designed and used four years ago. It’s nice to revisit old materials, especially since we’re going to combine them with some texts we haven’t used before. I’ve also been dealing with some mild grumps about the Comixology app update that dropped this week, but having a long weekend sitting ahead of me helps to soften the general blow.

Art

I’ve taken a week off from working on my fancomic to do some standalone pieces that have been quite fun. I feel like I’ve played a lot the last couple months with some techniques related to rendering line work that I go back and forth on. I feel like they suit different moods in my pieces, so I’ll probably switch back and forth between them for the time being. I did one portrait this week where I ended up making two versions, and I’m still not sure which one I like better. The blended lines make for a more painterly look overall, but I also love the striking contrast that the black lines give, especially since I tend to gravitate towards really vibrant, high saturation colors in my work.

I’ve also begun reading a graphic thesis on teaching and visual art called Teaching Artfully by Meghan Parker. I’m only about a third of the way through it presently, but I’m enjoying what it proposes in terms of art’s function as a tool for shaping what and how we think. There’s a brief discussion of self portraiture as a way of reflecting on what we see and emphasize in ourselves that I found especially fascinating. I’m sure I’ll have finished the book by next week and will have more thoughts.

Week 7 Art Output
Three pieces that I’m pretty pleased with. Never did decide if I liked the version of Pixie with the black lines or the one with the lines colored to blend in with the rendering. They each have their own charm. #drawing #xmen #Trigun pic.twitter.com/OOTgAAroYS

— Jason Jones (@Jkjones2185) February 19, 2022

Comics

I went into the week feeling apprehensive about the Comixology update. Two days into the new status quo, I’m a little less irritated about my personal experience with the app, but I know that’s because I’ve been reading primarily on my tablet for over a year now, and that’s obviously the experience Amazon wants to push people towards. The biggest loss I’m personally experiencing is with the storefront. For series that I know about, the search functionality works fine, but I feel that I’m going to miss a lot of less prominent stuff that I might pick up on a whim while browsing the weekly releases. More abstractly, my Twitter feed has been full of comics people pointing out ways the update has been absolutely catastrophic for the indie and small press wings of the industry. It’s not great!

In actual comics reading, I thoroughly enjoyed this week’s X-Men issue with MODOK. It’s worth the price just for the panel where MODOK dropkicks a rage zombie while shouting “…for SCIENCE!” I’m also really enjoying the ongoing plot in Home Sick Pilots, a series that I initially felt kind of ambivalent about until the second arc got going. It’s settled into its groove as a punk/creepypasta action-horror story, and I’m finding the whole thing delightful. I think I wrote earlier this year that I need to just re-read the whole series to see how it hangs together, and I still intend to do that at some point.

Books

I finished reading The Nobody People this week, and while I really enjoyed it, I was definitely irritated that the relationship between it and its sequel is less “duology” and more “one novel that was too long to publish in a single volume.” I would describe this book as hitting its resolution about fifty pages early and then taking the rest of the time to explain to you in excruciating detail how actually that just made everything worse. I already have The Somebody People lined up to read next because a story that pauses at prison camps, impending war, and mass coercive recruitment of child soldiers feels a bit too unresolved for my tastes. Stepping back from that one mild critique, I think what I enjoyed best about the book is that while it’s obviously an X-Men pastiche, there’s very little in the book that’s feels like it belongs on the page of a superhero book. I don’t think I ever reach a point while reading where I thought, “this should have been done as a comic.” No one runs around in colorful costumes, and the application of powers, while occasionally told in a way that would be really appealing if given a visual treatment, is much more focused on their personal significance to their users, which is a kind of internality that I think prose especially excels at doing.

Video Games

I finally finished Going Under, which ended up being about twice as long as I originally anticipated. It was cute! I wonder if the studio that made it is unionized.

Media

Rachael and I started watching In the Heights last night, but we had to stop because it was late and we apparently still had 75 minutes left. What we’ve seen so far is very charming and very much in keeping with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical style. Ironically, we’re finding that Tick,Tick…Boom! was much more engaging as a film that Miranda directed versus In the Heights as an adaptation of one of his own shows. In stupider fare, we’ve started watching the second batch of Love is Blind season 2 episodes, and we continue to be baffled at just how bonkers the plot lines in this season are. It’s much more palatable as a show when you think of it as a series of contrived stories that the producers cast real people to act out rather than any kind of realistic depiction of developing romantic relationships. I hope that’s the case at least, because no one on the cast seems to be okay.

Pandemic

The dominant thought about the pandemic for me these days is that it’s going to be great when the end of Oregon’s statewide mask mandate coincides with the return to school from spring break at the end of March. Really looking forward to another COVID wave in the early part of April.

Seriously, I hope that I’m wrong and everything will be fine. Doesn’t mean I intend to stop masking myself in public for the rest of the school year.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week. The weather’s pretty nice, so maybe we’ll go get lunch from the outdoor food carts this weekend? That would be nice.

Weekly Upload 02/12/22

It’s a very full weekend, so I don’t think this update will be too extensive. My work week was rough for reasons I can’t get into on the internet. It’s nothing terrible, just one of those unique aggravations that teachers deal with and which I find myself personally very poorly equipped to handle. It’s been a lot of negative feelings to sift through.

Art

I finished the second page of my second comic story early this week, and that was a big relief. I find that I generally enjoy the process of writing and drawing the comic, but the time investment gets draining when I reach the end, publish the results, and get very little response. I have to constantly coach myself not to expect anyone else to care much about my esoteric pet project, but it’s definitely a little deflating to go, “Here’s the thing!” and get no feedback on social media. That whole mess of feelings plus the work frustration left me wanting to draw my feelings, so I did a portrait of Cyclops being uncharacteristically visibly upset about the way he has to keep himself under control all the time. It is definitely projection on my part. Aside from that therapeutic exercise, I also encountered a comic artist’s work that I found really engaging this week and gave myself permission to just enjoy copying some of his line work. The results are nothing worth sharing because, well, they look like I copied someone else’s work, but it was a really relaxing exercise and fun to spend some time analyzing how another artist uses shapes to build their faces. I’d really like to learn to loosen up in my own composition process so that my finished line work doesn’t look quite so stiff, and this felt like a productive way to practice. I could be entirely wrong; I don’t know.

Week 6 Art Output
I finished a two page story for my fancomic and also did a sad/angry portrait of Cyclops. #drawing #xmen #comics pic.twitter.com/muYPmUrQkq

— Jason Jones (@Jkjones2185) February 12, 2022

Comics

New Mutants is a book that comes out slowly enough that I tend to completely forget that it’s an ongoing series, and then a new issue drops and I am emotionally wrecked. First Vita Ayala made me pity Amal Farouk in #23 last month, and now in #24 they give contemplations on trauma and forgiveness and the complicated ways we imperfectly try to be there for our loved ones. Also Danilo Beyruth is the artist I’ve been low key obsessing over for a couple days. The rest of the week’s pulls were fine? I’m having a hard time connecting with the Wolverine event that’s happening right now, even though I do find the Moira plot genuinely interesting. The Secret X-Men one-shot was a lot of fun, which is high praise given my general ambivalence about space nonsense and the centering of Sam and Beto. Their bromance never clicked for me when Hickman wrote them, but Tini Howard actually succeeds in giving Beto a bit of heart inside his relentless braggadocio, so I was down with the silliness. I might even care about further space adventures whenever this subplot pops back up in one of the ongoing series.

Media

We watched Encanto last weekend, and it was a sheer delight. We will probably watch it again this weekend, because it was that good. I was fully prepared for Maribel’s arc to be explicitly related to her talent as a maker, but it ended up being much more subtle than expected. Also, I think the implication of the ending was supposed to be that the grandmother’s Gift was to literally hold up a wall around the community? It’s not that important. We also watched Tick, tick… Boom! last night, and it’s a really delightful musical. I’ve only ever seen the film adaptation of Rent, which is… not great, so I didn’t have much in the way of expectations for a story about the guy who wrote Rent in the first place. I’d been vaguely aware of his story, but I didn’t know about this strange little show he did before he died about feeling like he was running out of time to achieve his dreams. As a story about trying to be an artist in general and being a writer in particular, it was a blast. Rachael couldn’t stop cackling over the scene where Jonathan’s trying to write a song and all he has is the word you’re on his computer screen and then he shortens it to you. It got to some real feelings about the creative process. Other notable things from this week include a docuseries on Netflix about video journalists who chase down incidents that happen in Los Angeles to sell to morning news shows (it was way more compelling than we expected, although there’s an absurd amount of copaganda sprinkled throughout the whole thing), and the second season of Love Is Blind, which we are gleefully hate watching because we love to pick apart the seams of a glossy reality TV show.

Pandemic

People are starting to talk about the fact that the statewide mask mandate in Oregon is set to expire at the end of March, and it continues to feel relentlessly weird as a topic of conversation. I was chatting with one of my co-teachers about it, and we genuinely don’t know if our district will keep a mask policy in place or let it lapse. Either way, we agreed we’re unlikely to go to work without masking for the rest of the school year. I also vaguely heard that there’s been another delay in the approval of the vaccine for 5-and-under kids, which I’m sure is causing lots of anguish for parents of the really little ones.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week, although it was very pretty out and I did consider going to the outdoor food pods yesterday afternoon. That ultimately did not happen.

Weekly Upload 02/05/22

I think that this week was generally less stressful than last week, but it still feels like there was a lot of stuff happening. I worked from home on Monday, which was very pleasant, and then I took Friday off because Rachael wasn’t feeling well and needed some care, so the work week felt very abbreviated all around.

Art

I don’t have anything new to share this week because I spent most of my art time just working on pages for the fancomic that I’m working on. I did finish a page, but it’s the first of a two-page sequence that I scripted, so I figured I’d rather just save it and share both pages together once they’re done. I think what I’ve enjoyed most with the work I’ve been doing on the comic lately has been is its iterative nature. It’s not a terribly formal thing, but having to do multiple passes on everything from the thumbnail stage, through to colors gives me a chance to think deeply about the staging of the action and the rhythm of the dialogue. Obviously there are certain points later in the process where some things are locked in, but it’s been fun noticing at which points I stop to really consider an aspect of the comic since I know changing it later will become significantly more difficult. On a sillier note, I realized that I seem to enjoy writing end of page punchlines that rely on a character making some kind of silly face. I am unsure if this is something I should try to change up, or if it’s just the nature of my influences and the tone of the story I’m writing so I shouldn’t worry so much. Also, it’s funny to think about this creative process and be able to clearly identify the things I’m using as inspiration; I’m not sure that’s something I ever did back when I was playing around with prose fiction.

Reading

I am about halfway through Bob Proehl’s novel The Nobody People, and I’m enjoying it immensely. The elevator pitch for it is that it’s a prose X-Men pastiche that is actually able to delve more into the intersectional aspects of the mutant metaphor. Sexuality, race, and gender get explicitly considered as complications on top of being a superpowered being in ways that the Marvel comics often are forced leave as subtext, if the writers are able to address them at all. One of the main characters of the book is also a straight white man who has lots of feelings about not being included in the community that he’s connected to by virtue of his daughter’s abilities. At the book’s midpoint, he’s honestly not a fun character to read because he reflects some very real and ugly angst about being excluded from communities you support but also can’t really belong to.

Video Games

Last night I started a game called Going Under, which is a rogue-like satire of modern office work culture. It’s not the most refined rogue-like in terms of gameplay, but the story is pitch perfect. I’m still cackling over the dungeon that’s a cryptocurrency startup called Styxcoin where the motif is skeletons working in a literal mine. There are layers to that pun. Rachael and I also finished co-playing a game called Wytchwood this week. It plays around a lot with western fairy tales as you play a witch who is trying to get revenge on a bunch of truly awful people. The core mechanic of the game is collecting resources in ever more elaborate crafting chains to make the specific items needed to solve a problem in each of the main story quests. It was deeply charming.

Media

We watched Archive 81 on Netflix this week, and it was mostly good. The creepypasta nature of the story is very engaging, although we both agreed there were some misses in the way the season resolves. For my part I felt that the first half was a little slow moving, although I have also apparently been having poorer sleep than usual because I came home tired enough to want to nap after work almost every day.

Pandemic

It definitely feels now like the Omicron wave has passed through work now, which is a bit of a relief. I did read an article the other day about COVID jerks that I seriously thought about using in a lesson with my language arts kids as an example of a solid argumentative essay that also makes a point about following mask rules whether you agree with them or not. We’re focusing on environmentalism and climate change in our argument unit this year though, so it’s probably not going to happen.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week.

Weekly Upload 01/22/22

With the holiday weekend last week, this was a relatively fast week of work. It was also a very full one because the Omicron wave is in full effect and lots of folks (both teachers and students) were out. I had a very clear idea for a series of drawings, and I executed them pretty quickly. Also, there was lots of good TV watching (maybe too much). Let’s get into specifics.

Art

I got fixated on the Illyana in sport wear piece I did a couple weeks ago and decided I wanted to draw it again with a front view. The action pose of her swinging the sword was fun because I don’t draw backs that often, but I really wanted to hash out what the full design looks like. Once I finished that, I was got the idea that I wanted to draw Rachel Summers and Kate Pryde in their own versions of workout gear, and then things sort of escalated as I immediately planned each piece to fit into a composite that I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to put together to my satisfaction. Because this was the only drawing I did this week, the full set is included in the embedded tweet below.

Week 3 output #drawing #xmen pic.twitter.com/1vTbNQ3vcv

— Jason Jones (@Jkjones2185) January 22, 2022

The big takeaway for the week on my artwork is that when I have a clear idea, I can pretty consistently execute it to my satisfaction in about three hours. That’s based on the work time metric in Procreate, which I suspect isn’t totally accurate since it only seems to record time I’m actively manipulating a file. Thinking more qualitatively, I find that it takes me longer at the sketching stage as I’m playing around with poses, refining the figure proportions, and thinking through what I actually want the silhouette to look like once I’ve added the clothing. It’s a lot of time staring at an unfinished drawing. Conversely, inking and coloring have gotten a lot faster even though they feel like stages where I’m doing a lot more mechanical work just making strokes and manipulating the blend modes on layers. I have maybe made this observation way in the past, but I find it interesting that so much of art production is about refining your work flow so that you implicitly understand what the final effect will be while everything is still unfinished.

Comics Making

I figure this probably deserves its own section. After I finished the first page of my fan comic, I took a few days to focus on more one-off projects. I did spend some time this week beginning to draft the next couple of pages I want to do, and I’m having fun with the process. Because it’s a storytelling exercise as much as an art one, I have a sketchbook that I use exclusively for stuff related to my comic. It has some basic character sketches, ideas for possible story lines, design layouts for locations where I want to set scenes, and scripts with layout thumbnails so far. Honestly, I think that whenever I move on from this project I’m going to be more pleased with the artifact of the design sketchbook than the digital pages I complete. It’s so incredibly hard to keep expectations limited to wanting to learn about my own creative process, but things like the sketchbook are a good reminder. It’s a private item that I’m not making for anyone else.

It would be nice if I had digital scripts that were easier to revise on the fly though.

Comics

I fully expected it to be a week of light reading, but then a couple of books that I’ve been following informally plus some new #1s that caught my interest released, and so did some reading. I’m very into Home Sick Pilots by Dan Watters & Caspar Wijngaard; it just started its 3rd arc, which will be about hunting down a haunted toilet seat in order to stop a giant mech from destroying a city. That’s a sentence you can write about a comic book, and it’s amazing. I’ve really been down with the series since they did an issue about a bunch of punks at a concert beating up the physical manifestation of nazism; I mean, that’s just cool on its face, but it was also an incredibly poignant issue about how we don’t need to give airtime to ideas we already know are categorically bad. After that, I’m down with whatever this series wants to do next. I’m also sticking with Al Ewing & Simone di Meo’s We Only Find Them When They’re Dead, which is a truly gorgeous book. di Meo does this incredibly elegant linework that I doubt I could ever emulate. I feel like the series’s biggest flaw is that it’s written for trade in a way that I haven’t experienced in a lot of the other monthly stuff I’ve been reading lately. Ewing’s an excellent writer who does really compelling long form storytelling, but I admit I would be able to follow what’s going on much better if there were a recap page. Since the second arc did just finish, it may be a good time to go back and re-read the whole series in one go.

Other more general reading projects include slowly making my way through the Conner/Palmiotti run of Harley Quinn. I have heard for years that it was a good run that does some nice work with the character in her post-Joker phase, but since I’m not a DC guy I never really looked into it. I’m still not a DC guy to be honest, but it’s mostly fun mayhem. The vibe reminds me a lot of good Deadpool comics.

Media

We finished re-watching Maniac this week, and I’m honestly surprised I never wrote down my thoughts about it the first time I saw it. If I had to hazard a guess, I probably wasn’t sure how to sum up an experience that was so well executed. I love everything about the series from its askew world-building to the character dynamics to the utterly perfect ending. I might try to do a separate post describing all the cool stuff the series does later, but I’m not making any promises. It’s probably enough to say that the show’s commentary on mental health and our larger obsession with quick fixes for complex problems is pitch perfect and that the “cure” Owen and Annie get from the pharma trial is mostly just self awareness and a loyal friend in each other.

The other major TV moment of the week was starting the series Lodge 49. It has all the hallmarks of an AMC series: highly literary storytelling, grounded character work, and a fascination with the juxtaposition of the mundane and the absurd. Rachael and I watched the entire first season in two days, which may have been a mistake simply because there’s so much going on. We’re taking our time with the second season.

Pandemic

Rachael and I are doing our best to not obsess over work in our off hours because a lot of it is frustrating. We’ve both reached a point where we feel like the folks who make policy decisions for our districts have given up on mitigation strategies, and we’re just stuck white knuckling through the wave.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week.