Hello! Just a quick note to remind those in the Earthquake Critic Patreon tier (10+) to ask for a custom drawing, if you wish. I’m about to post the new finished comic, and this gap between the progress on stories seems like the perfect time to work on these rewards, and hopefully share them here as well. I’ll be working on these drawings over the next week.

Maybe you are in this tier, and are fine with not asking for drawings, and that’s totally ok too. But if you wish a custom drawing, feel free to do so. I know I’m bad at reminding periodically of this!  Here are some ideas:

A quick portrait of you, or someone else, as a gift.

A drawing of a pet, for you or someone else.

Your character in a game, or an original character from something you are writing / thinking about.

My version of your favorite fiction character. (Fanart, in other words.)

A sticker for your messaging app, prompted by you. (you need a sticker management app to install it. I think)

How it works: Write to juan@thesecretknots.com with your idea, and photo reference if needed.

Thanks!

Note: If you are in any other tier, you can also edit your pledge for one month to access this reward. That’s cool too.

Final pages!

• This time I did like the glitch effect. It’s done with a liquify brush in ClipStudio, very fun to use.

• Speaking of glitches, I removed a piece of dialogue where Xeni asks “is it a glitch”? and Fran replies “I’m not sure. Does it matter?” I’m still not sure about keeping or leaving it. It might be a good reminder that this is all a digital environment, after all. But in the sketch version, it sounded reiterative.

• On the other hand, I’ll add a dialogue in the first panels, where the mom talks about Xeni using a weird big head avatar. I get the impression that, without any mention of it, the moment where she drops the head, seems off, and the reader could be expecting something else. There’s no reveal, other than she’s a regular girl. The big head is only a choice that comes from her sadness; it’s not the central point of the story, though. (I’d say the point is rather the difficulty of healing and moving on, and tangentially, the risks of artificial measures of relief from grief)

• My overall feeling is that I’ve been looking at this story from too close lately to be really content with it. I need to “zoom out” a little in order to know how it works, if it works. I’m afraid it’s more “enigmatic” than I wanted it to be, but I’ll settle for it to have a sense of completion, and communicate a transformation. I’ll try that the final assembling and bits of tuning improve the comic a little.

I hope you liked seeing the construction of this comic bit by bit! I’ll put the pieces together next, to share the whole story, and make a post with it. I appreciate the input and comments on the process. To be honest, now I really want to start drawing something new. (Also, the next post is about custom drawings!)

Thanks!

Continuation of the comic in progress. (Almost finishing)

• I need to work more on the glitchy effect that the plant has on its surrounding. I think in the next installment it’ll be more visible.

• My favorite panel here is the close up of her faces. The expression in Fran’s face is exactly what I was looking for, and it worked well with two different dialogue versions I tried there.

• I still don’t like the CHAT panels. I’ll work out something different for the shapes.

• While drawing these pages, I’ve been listening to a Spanish podcast about the publishing story of the X-Men comics. The episode about the 90s comics only is 7 hours long. But listening to people talk about comics, while drawing comics, has turned out to be effective, it keeps me very focused. I wonder If, when I see this story later, it’ll remain linked in my mind to hearing about Magneto, future clones, and Chris Claremont.

Thanks again!, and I’ll be back as soon as I can with the next part.

Hello! These are some side notes for this update. I’m bullet listing them, as the scattered thoughts they are:

• Progress have been a lot slower than I expected. Sorry for that, and thanks a lot for your patience, dear patrons. February is always a particularly slow month for me. I had some days out of town, where I managed to clear my mind a bit, but now I’m trying to catch up with this comic.
  

• This part of the comic ends up with a repetition of a dialogue. (Not a typo, but part of the plot) The next part is where we find out why.
  

• On the subject of drawing: the software (ClipStudio) has tools for drawing straight lines by sticking automatically to the guides, which is faster, but less satisfactory. I’ll keep up with it for some of the lines here, but I’ll revise afterward if I want to keep doing that for the next comics. In the end, I prefer architecture and furniture drawn with shaky lines, (although it’s harder). I wish I could draw shaky, organic straight lines the way Taiyo Matsumoto does, but he’s a master of the craft, obviously.
  

• I found out that I enjoy drawing sneakers, even if I don’t get to a high detail level, there’s something in their shapes that I find appealing. Speaking of specific preferences, it’s always fun to read, in comic artists interview, when they list what they like and hate to draw, because they tend to be unexpected things. And I think I remember Peanuts’ Charles Schultz praising specifically the drawing of bedside tables in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. That struck me as an oddly specific comment, back then when I saw it in a book blurb, but I think I may have now a better understanding of what he meant, and why he said that. There’s a particular level of reality (jumpy, dinamic) in Calvin and Hobbes that seems to show even in common details. I don’t know if I have that kind of attention to the aesthetic of details, but I find myself enjoying more some small things in the world of the stories, than in the past.
  

Thanks again! I’ll see you soon with the follow up to this story.

Hello! This is another progress update for the comic “Meta-memorial” (working title), after I made some changes to the beginning, and took a different direction with the art. I included a roughly sketched panel in the end, because I think the text in the conversation on that panel gives a better idea of where this is going. This is the first part, and covers around 30-40% of the comic.

I like the little cars in the screen, they remind me of Calvin and Hobbes.

I’m seeing more clearly the whole story now, and I believe it’ll work. But I won’t know for sure until further down the road. This tale seems to be one of the tricky ones, where there’s a constant temptation of changing words here and there. I hope it’s satisfying in the end.

Thanks!