*Includes notes about patreon rewards. 

Hello. As I mentioned some notes ago, I’m modifying my Patreon rewards in order to reflect the activity that has worked for the better in the past. The new system is as follows:

+1 tier get: Same deal as before, you can access this process blog and I will open an occasional call for drawings for everybody.

+3 tier get: The chance to ask for personalized drawings at least four times a year. These will be thematic and they will be announced here in the notes. In 2016 we had Frankenstein monsters, Animals and Space Heroes and I think (hope) it was fun.

+10 get: A monthly chance to ask for personalized drawings -including fanart- if they want, or they can participate in the seasonal drawings. I will remind briefly everyone of the drawings in the first ‘Secret Notes’ of the month.

The old rewards included pdf ebooks, but I haven’t compiled a new one lately. You can  get the Unspeakable PDF and the Martin Kardec one for free right here  if you haven’t done so. The deal also included new ‘horoscopes’ but I’m afraid I’m not making those right now either. My aim is to prioritize the making of new Secret Knots comics, instead of side content. Still, I apologize for any inconvenience it should bring and you may of course edit your patronage in any way according to your interest. I’m also open to suggestions for other forms of rewards or engagement, or drawing themes. And it’s totally fine if you want to edit your patronage in order to ask for a specific sketch one month, and then edit it back after it gets charged. Just a reminder.

I will also take this chance to thank you for your support so far. It makes a real difference in my finances and it keeps me motivated. I hope you enjoy this year’s new Secret Knots comics, as they are made possible by you. Starting in a few days with the risqué monks comic teased here.

Thanks!

Juan.

Watching (and reading): The Man in the High Castle.  Äkta människor . 

Scrolling through: 

The Unsettling Mystery of the Creepiest Channel on YouTube 

The Tritone: Sorry, Grandma, Turns Out It’s All The Devil’s Music  

The next Secret Knots comic is a about a monastic scribe who draws erotic stories for his abbot, and I totally forgot how a certain train of thought became this story, but I’m so into it. Pornography and monasteries, my friends.

While looking for references I learned the somewhat disappointing fact that the scriptorium is mostly an idealization of how we imagine the place where monks copied and illustrated manuscripts, or at least a rare occurrence, since most of this task was apparently carried on by lonely scribes in their own cells . On the other hand, comics tend to rely on common places in order to convey more efficiently some situations, so I kept drawing the big writing hall I had imagined (probably from reading the Name of the Rose) which serves much better as the stage of my story. Still, the image of the lonely monk doing his careful writing probably has a special resonation too, particularly on those who do their thing in isolated spaces. The slow making of comics applies.

I’m a bit late in delivering the Space Hero drawings, but they’ll definitely be arriving within this week to those on tiers 3+ who claimed them. 

I hope you have a fantastic week.

J.S.

Reading: Michael Moorcock’s books are hard to find here in Chile so whenever I see one I try to add it to my small collection, and this time I found Sailor on the Seas of Fate, an Elric novel, which I’m enjoying.
Still reading Murakami’s 1Q84 because it’s huge and it lags by the middle. My cat wrestles it sometimes, other times uses it to rest its head.

Watching: The OA. The Expanse.

Scrolling through:

William Hope Hodgson: The Forgotten Bodybuilding, Shark Fighting Sailor who Invented Cosmic Horror (and annoyed Houdini) 

Rare Maps Show Life in Hong Kong’s Vice-Filled ‘Walled City’ 

I don’t think I have been taking proper advantage of the patreon blog as newsletter / work and inspiration blog, but I intent to change that. This may be my first early new year’s resolution.

Meanwhile I’ve been struggling to get a new comic off the ground -discarding stories for being too long, too weird, being two ideas at a time or simply concepts that refuse to take a story shape- I’ve been following the reach of a repost of one of my comics on tumblr, which I reformatted considering mobile reading. The consequence of that being that it became my most reblogged comic on tumblr, with more than 15K notes so far , and I believe that’s a clear sign regarding format and how lots of people are reading and scrolling through content these days. Since I’m not particularly concerned with fancy page layouts, this is not a heavy restriction on how I present my stories, though it has some influence on the pacing and the kind of story-frames I put into each comic panel. I’ve been thinking about these aspects over the latest comics, trying to reach a formal coherence where in story terms, although most Secret Knots comics navigate around a handful of topics -culture parody, made-up references, imaginary places and habits, odd paranoia-  they often diverge in tone and genre. A more stable shape may be useful to me in order to work freely the different stories under a stylistic guise of cohesion. Yes, I’m unveiling a distraction technique here, but this is the Secret Notes blogs for patrons only, then so be it.

In local news, I’ve had some really good ones concerning print publication in my country. Over the latest weeks I was contacted by an indie graphic novel publisher to make a small print book with some of my comics, and a few days after, I found out that another publisher interested in making a bigger, hardcover compilation of my older comics was granted funds in order to do that, so I look forward to a bright new year regarding physical books. These will be my first print books ever, so I must confess I’m shamelessly looking forward to take selfies with my book on bookstores shelves; my book among other actual books. It’s the kind of thing that thrills you when you’ve been annoying bookstore owners with your constant, silent, ominous presence on their shops for years.

I hope you liked my take on Black Manta, above. I don’t know a lot really about superhero comics, but I’ve always liked that guy. Look at that suit, contemplate that helmet. Supervillains are so committed.

I’ll be here again in a few days with more notes. I hope you have a nice, lovely week.

J.S.

What I’ve been

watching: ‘Humans’,  season two.  ‘The Exorcist’ tv show, I think it’s accidentally hilarious and I love it. Finished ‘Westworld’ s01. Arrival. Happy Valley  season 2. 

reading: 1Q84 by H. Murakami. Normal by Warren Ellis.

listening: this best of the year podcast  (feature ambient, alt rock, psych, folk and more), and this one called   Cantus Orbis: Some Examples of Medieval Drone – Vol.3

scrolling through:  

‘Where to begin with folk horror’ 

 14 Beautifully Shot Horror Films That Changed Cinematography Forever 

I think this started as something very different. Not that it made much more sense in the former shape, though. But I enjoyed drawing a scene from a video clip and a soap opera, and the lovely architecture from Lonomia.

Brief one. This is what a soon-to-be-done Secret Knots comic is looking like right now. It’s about the implications of a strange tradition in some made up nation and I guess it’s part of what I’ve come to identify as ‘idiosyncratic’ stories, one of the topics I keep coming back to.

I swear there are some common threads in these comics though they may be hard to see… 

I hope you have a great weekend!