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Pilot edition!
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Hello. This is Juan Santapau, from The Secret Knots comic, and first of all, I’m really grateful for your subscription to this newsletter. I’m glad that you are reading these lines, and I’ll try to make it worthwhile.
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Though I still don’t have a fixed scheme for the newsletter, I think this is probably a nice place to showcase parts of the progress on new comics, and keeping tabs of what I’m doing, besides sharing some references and interests, the way I was doing with the blog section. So, about the comics:
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New comic progress
For several weeks I’ve been working my way through a comic slightly longer than usual. It’s a new Lydia Ray story, a character featured in two previous stories, a series that has in common a mood of pandemic anxiety, and a frame of magical realism. I don’t know where these tales fit into the range of stories we all have told ourselves during pandemic times, which, probably due to planning issues, and perhaps a greater need for escapism, didn’t seem to feature a lot of people in masks. The Lydia Ray comics are stories with masks. Not only that; the whimsical challenges this freelance decorator faces are all related to small fears from the era: fear of going out, of meeting people, of change, concerns that are not at all absurd, on the other hand.
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On the first comic, Lydia finds a work as a cubicle decorator, an extravagant occupation suggested by a friend of mine (who was talking about the obsession with personalization of work desks he had seen at some job). The next one is about a house infestation produced by inner baggage. In this new comic, as many people go back to the crazy wheel of work life in this model, Lydia thinks so hard about chances she didn’t take, that she creates a sort of tulpa made of those alternate consequences. When she meets her doppelgänger in real life, as was pointed out on a Patreon preview by a reader, instead of the usual struggle with an evil twin, the Lydias try to help and comfort each other.
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I’m a little past the mid of the comic now, and making steady progress on it. I hope I’ll be sharing it in different formats soon. My idea is to gather the three Lydia Ray comics in a single ebook, something I’ll talk about more, in the next newsletters.
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Portraits
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October is here, and with it, my annual tradition of spooky portraits of Patreon subscribers. This year the theme is werewolves. I set up two main options, which are a partial transformation, and the full beast form, the stage they call Crinos in the World of Darkness tabletop roleplaying games.
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I had my doubts about this, because I thought it would be hard to recognize the portrayed people in this form, so I’m asking patrons who want this variant to supply photos using accessories. A common plot device in werewolves movies is the inability to know who’s the human that turned into furry giant shape, so when the defeated beast goes back to their original form, it’s revealed the killer monster wasn’t who we thought it was. We’ll see how it works in practice, during this month. If you’d like to get a portrait for this theme, it’s still time to join my Patreon. (Link button at the end of this newsletter)
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Some Sketches
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I like to make numbered doodles to remember all the brushes I’ve added to the drawing software (ClipStudio)
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And here we have some idle ink doodles I made while playing roleplaying games over Discord.
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This has been the pilot edition of the Secret Knots newsletter. I hope you have enjoyed it, and as a special request, please let me know if something doesn’t look good in your email app or page. I’m using Mail Poet for this experiment, and I’m open to change systems if something doesn’t seem right. Feel free to address your comments to juan@thesecretknots.com
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Thanks!, and I hope you have a great day.
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