jeffmartinart

[jeffmartinart]

ACTIIING!

I say “AAAACTIIIING” while raising a hand dramatically on a surprisingly regular basis. Just, like, around the house, finding reasons to do that. I don’t know why my brain is like this, either. This week’s Patreon preview is about some of the art challenges that can come up with digital lettering. This post is coming to you via time travel, as I’m writing this before I leave for Calgary, but…

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Failure Chickens Feel No Shame

This week’s Patreon preview was about the strange process of drawing a webcomic, and how that influences the art. It’s one of the most interesting elements of webcomics as a medium, to me. In other news, Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo is this weekend (April 25-28, 2024), and I will once again be a guest. This year I’m at table P20 in the Big 4 Building, along with piles of my books and…

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Guess Who

I spent the weekend tabling at the Art Gallery of Alberta’s Comic & Zine Fair, so welcome to those of you that I met there who’ve made your way here! I was pleasantly surprised by the event, and particularly the response to Hell, Inc. from the AGA crowd. I look forward to returning next year! This week’s Patreon preview revisited a topic from a few weeks ago, which was how to use perspective to…

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Vital Liquid Science?

The Patreon preview for this strip is about my process of drawing study, which involves drawing a lot of comics. Speaking of a lot of comics, I’m going to be at the Art Gallery of Alberta’s Comics & Zine Fair on April 13th and 14th, and if you’re in Edmonton, you should be, too. Click on the image below for more info: EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK: Barrie Deatcher is Employee of the Week, which means…

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[jeffmartinart]

Vital Liquid Science?

The Patreon preview for this strip is about my process of drawing study, which involves drawing a lot of comics. Speaking of a lot of comics, I’m going to be at the Art Gallery of Alberta’s Comics & Zine Fair on April 13th and 14th, and if you’re in Edmonton, you should be, too. Click on the image below for more info: EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK: Barrie Deatcher is Employee of the Week, which means…

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Vital Science

The Patreon preview for this strip is about joke structures. It’s the kind of thing that I think is really interesting, and it’s my comic so I get to write about whatever I want. Regardless of whether it’s interesting to normal people. EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK: Cindy Gauthier is Employee of the Week, and you can read her comic on Webtoon! It’s called Posthumous, and is a comic about two friends (who…

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Thank You For Your Patience

The Patreon preview for this comic talks about a piece of advice I gained from early-career shop talk that continues to be a regularly used tool in my toolbox.  It’s about using rounded surfaces in the art. EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK: Ben Hamlin, host of Syndicated with Lesley and Ben (among other casted pods), is Employee of the Week, and I just made my fourth appearance on the show, this time…

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[jeffmartinart]

Skate Wizards is another zine that feels like it should forever be a zine, never a book. A collaboration between Michael C. Hsiung and Loot the Body, it's about, well, skating, cool tunes, wizards and…uh…pipe weed that is totally medicinal. The back cover perhaps says it best, “Once the world was cool. Then it sucked for a really long time. How it has a chance to be cool again or suck forever. It’s all up to the Skate Wizards!”

The system is based on Maze Rats (which I am unfamiliar with) and Nate Treme’s In the Light of a Ghost Star (which I am). This boils down to a lite, three attribute D&D derivative with some unusual spells. Each skate wizard gets the same Permanent spells that they can cast at any time — Ramp, Sidewalk and Rail — which conjure the necessary skating surface. They can also cast one Rando spell per day, the effects of which are determined by rolling on a table and mixing descriptive words, which are then hashed out by the player and the GM. I just rolled “Dope Expanding Fire Tree.” Finally, a Skate Wizard has one Bootleg spell prepared from their collection of skate videos that allow them to perform a specific reality bending trick, like defying gravity for five minutes. There are skater specific magic items and if a Skate Wizard’s health drops to zero, they become a Poser and roll on a table of six lame-o fates they suffer in their new normie existence. A big heap of adventures and a table for generating skate trick names rounds out the package (though, online, you can also listen to the kickin’ soundtrack).

It’s a real treat to have so much of Michael’s wizard art in one place. I love his bold, clean linework and how he often flattens details and patterns so they look like textiles or stitching. And the illustrations are just bursting with humor and personality. Classic.

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Helen: Judgement Day

Helen is probably second or third in the cast, behind B.L. Zebub and maybe Doug, in getting the super exaggerated demonic poses. That wasn’t something I intended from the start, it just kind of happened as Helen got more characterization that lent itself to over-the-top, expressionist depictions. In the Patreon preview for this strip, I instead talk about creating rhythm with panel layouts and…

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Bridget Smash... Hand Bones

I think that’s more or less what would happen to me if I tried to karate chop a desk in half. Just BAM skeleton hand flying through the air. I also think the visual of a skeleton, or parts of a skeleton, popping out of a person intact is extremely funny for reasons I can’t fully articulate. This week’s Patreon preview goes into that a bit. I’ve been nominated for a Sequential Magazine Award in…

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Office Cult-ure

You can tell whether you’ve got a good workplace by how much chanting happens. I assume more is better? I’ve never had a chanting workplace. I should try to cultivate that in my studio space, but guinea pigs and chinchillas are notoriously chant-averse creatures. EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK: As you may have gathered from the graphic below, I’ve been nominated for a Sequential Magazine Award in the…

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Chains of Bureaucracy

Ah, yes, the chained pens. designed to keep all of us thieving loons from costing companies tens of dollars a year in replacement pens. I’m sure in Hell they will also measure the ink levels to make sure you didn’t use too much (I’m sure there are also real, insane managers who wish they could do that). This week’s Patreon preview is about writing visual jokes, and how that differs from my normal…

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Regrettable Pluck

The “I can do it” to “I’ve made a huge mistake” pipeline runs fast at Hell, Inc. And also in making Hell, Inc., where I insist on drawing a library stack of personnel documents that the reader will look at for somewhere between 3 and 10 seconds. This week’s Patreon preview involves thoughts about organizing my own reference material for Hell, Inc., which is not a library stack. It is a stack of…

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Delusions of Upward Mobility

It’s busy around the Comics Bunker (aka the corner of the living room where my art desk is) these days. I’m bouncing between a freelance illustration job with Scholastic Canada (exciting!), doing some work on the Rent-A-Thug graphic novel (which has been a very slow process), and working on the story mode for Space Jerks. I just picked up another freelance gig that will start at an undetermined…

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[jeffmartinart]

Workronomicon

All shall tremble with fear in the face of the Workronomicon!

The Workronomicon is a terrible tome bound in human ennui and with the power to inflict terrible “line go up” brain on mortals. This week’s Patreon preview wasn’t about the Workronomicon, but about how writing characters becomes easier if you put in the effort to figure them out. And if you somehow haven’t heard yet, I made a video game, and you can play it for free! Check out Space Jerks on…

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Organ Liquefier

Doug learns more than he'd like about Ray's scientific methods in this week's Hell, Inc. strip, Organ Liquefier!

This episode’s Patreon preview is about the challenges of laying out a strip when the dialogue is concentrated into a smaller number of panels. It starts out with “oh no what have you done, past me?” and then I have to figure out what to do with what past me has given present me. EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK: Sebastian is Employee of the Week, and you can, too! It’s how I have predictable money, which is…

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The Zen of Failure

Join Bridget and embrace the Zen of Failure in this week's Hell, Inc. comic.

The Zen of Failure sounds like the state that occurs when I’m pitching projects. There’s a certain flow state that comes from copying and pasting pitch documents into various forms and formats to send to people who may or may not respond, and might not even look at them. It creates a certain feeling of acceptance that this action probably will not matter, but it must be taken or it definitely…

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