Short Explantation:

New comic coming in 2023! This one will be an adventure that starts in the subterranean world of Pelkern, and it will be a short story (with 70 comic pages or less, taking 1-2 years to complete). The work in progress placeholder name is “The Sea Serpent.”

The digital painting here is a study of an eel I made in research for this comic. I painted it in Adobe Fresco using vector brushes. (The reference is from an istock photo I purchased with a standard license).

Long Explanation:

I first started working on the idea for my previous comic “The Pelkern Cycle” when I was in high school. After graduating from my university, I created the practice short comic “The Wolves of the Wynd” for two years, and then started posting The Pelkern Comic pages in 2018.

Then in 2020 I experienced the onset of my autoimmune disorder and resulting bone marrow failure. As I tried to pick up the pieces of my comic in 2021, I started to realize I had outgrown the story of “The Pelkern Cycle.” The themes that were close to my heart during my university years aren’t as relevant to me anymore. I also started to realize–both from my experience and from reading about other graphic novelists’ experiences–that this is a common issue with long form comics. Comics take so long to make that by the time you’ve completed a long form comic you’re a completely different person, coming from a completely different place.

So I started to pivot in my thinking on comics. I am shifting to making short story comics–comics that can be completed in one year or two–that all occur in the same world. Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors, wrote 41 books in the same world, but each book is a complete, stand-alone story. I have always loved how you can pick up any book of his in whatever order, yet the stories were steeped in a world that is rich, complex, and multi-layered because of the 41 books’ worth of worldbuilding.

So I’m planning on continuing to build the fictional world of Pelkern that I first concieved in high school, but letting the accrued worldbuilding feed into a variety of short stories instead of one novel-length story. With shorter stories I can switch up art styles, story tone, and timelines when needed, as well.

Ace, Carolyn, Sol, and Myles will return in this new comic. I am currently working on completing the comic script, and I will start doing thumbnails and then comic pages once I have a 2nd or 3rd draft done on the comic script. I have been working slower since being so sick, so I don’t know the exact start date yet, but the comic will be ready to start posting sometime in 2023.

Friday marks one year from when I went to the Emergency Room with bone marrow failure in 2020. I was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder soon afterwards. My immune system attacks and destroys my bone marrow, and bone marrow is the part of your body that makes blood, so losing a lot of bone marrow is dangerous. The disorder had kicked in a year or two prior, but it wasn’t obvious because the issues were on the inside.

Last year was a rough year, especially in the midst of a global pandemic. But after many months of treatment–blood transfusions, immune suppression treatment, and medications–I survived, and we managed to get my bone marrow to grow back. Now we’re keeping my disorder in check with medication.

So I am working on comics again! It’s been a tricky transition to come back, so I don’t yet have a firm date for when I will start posting pages again, but I am chipping away at it. (The image above is a concept painting of Pelkern–a subterranean world–that I did while I was getting treated).

In the meantime, if you want to read my comics, “The Pelkern Cycle” (my current comic) starts Here, and “The Wolves of the Wynd” (my first comic) starts Here.

For this week’s concept art, I painted a photo I took of an armor set from Meersburg Castle.

(I painted a different armor set from the same castle about a year ago, found here: Armor Study 1).

It took me 7.5 hours to paint, but I compressed it to 50 seconds in this speedpaint video:

Page 49 goes up next week (on Wednesday the 12th).

This is my favorite line-art from one of the upcoming pages–I especially love how Sol turned out. The three have walked into a worrying situation, and I feel like I captured that in their body language.

You can find the most recent Page of the Pelkern cycle Here.