I've been really pushing myself to do more art lately. I used to draw a LOT when I was kid. Mostly in my high school notebooks—I've done the occasional mural or big art piece, but I haven't done anything like that in a long time.

I avoided art in college because it wasn't something that I thought I could make a living doing. Also, if you major in something like English or Political Science, then fine art or illustration electives aren't very practical, because it's hard to figure those classes into a degree. I was very much all about min-maxing so I could take the fewest classes possible, have no student loan debt, and pay for it all out of pocket or using what little grant money I was eligible for.

This is a story that I've told quite a few times over the years. While I was still a senior in high school I was accepted to the Academy of Art College in San Francisco (now the Academy of Art University). But I had a serious decision to make, because my parents didn't have the money to pay for college, so it was assured that I was going to have to take out loans and continue to work to get through the schooling. I was already working before I graduated high school, and had been in the workforce all through high school even. Whether it was in the mail room of a newspaper stuffing advertisements and bundling packages by zip code to go out for the Sunday edition, or shampooing carpets in the summer to help my Dad out. I even did an internship program one year, and that's the business that ended up hiring me when I graduated high school.

On top of that I had never been to San Francisco before, so I would be leaving home to an unfamiliar city, without any real guarantee that I would actually be able to make something of myself. Or be able to make a living doing art.

Looking back at my behavior in my late teens and earlier 20s, it's probably for the best that I didn't dive head first into art school and take out a bunch of loans. There's always the possibility that I could have come out the other side as a brilliant and accomplished illustrator, but I also could have just as easily come out the other side as a degenerate drunkard with a bunch of non-dischargable loan debt.

Business and art are two separate things. Surely the two can co-exist, but there's no guarantee that you can actually make any money at art, or maybe the best ways to monetize your art aren't necessarily the things in business that you're good at. So, unfortunately abject poverty is a real possibility, and when I calculated the risk for myself at that time (around sixteen or seventeen years old), it didn't make sense for me to pursue.

It was either the summer before or right after my senior year in high school, I got a job working crowd control at the Wizard World Comic Convention in Long Beach, California.

While I was there I had an opportunity to talk to Cam De Leon. He's an amazing illustrator, and I would say he's probably best known among people my age as the guy who did the Salival album cover for the band TOOL. In any case, he sat and talked with me for a good thirty minutes to an hour. I didn't buy anything from his booth, he just gave me advice on the art world, and shared stories about what it was like to make a living as an artist. I appreciated his time and took a lot of what he had to say to heart. Plus, it made more sense for me to continue living and working in Long Beach and do night and weekend classes at the LBCC.

After I moved out to Vegas, I did end up taking a work trip to San Francisco and spent one night at a bar not too far from Union Square. A cook from one of the restaurants in the Tenderloin and I, we ran the pool table all night and played a bunch of art kids for free beers until last call. So, in a way I still got to experience a taste of what it would have been like to be an art student there myself... But that's a story for another time.

I've always been interested in art and I've been fortunate to have worked with a bunch of mediums as a child and adolescent; clay and sculpture, wood carving, painting with oils and acrylics, modern illustration (traditional and digital), water colors, plaster casting, and on and on. Comics and illustration are really my passion though. So that's been the focus of my renewed interest in drawing and sharing my art with the world.

Fast forward twenty years, and I'm finally in the a place where I feel that I have the life experiences to truly layer some meaning and emotion into my work, or sew the imagery with some true passion. And when I look back, that's always what I wanted to be able to do. Sure, being a comic artist for Marvel or DC or doing my own book at Image would be fantastic, but I'm still working on steady output; voluminous and quality output is another realm entirely.

So, for the last year I've been drawing weekly. For the past four months I've been drawing at least every other day. Then, just this last month I was on a daily streak, and I'm mostly keeping to that schedule, even if it's just a random character sketch.

Comic artists are the most prolific artists out there, and it's incredibly impressive to watch some of these guys in action. A page a day is generally the expected. To get to that point is really to kind of be on another level. Not saying that it's necessarily hard to reach flowstate, but every artist that I've listened to has always complained about days where they just force themselves to do it because they know they have to, not because they have any deep affinity for the work at that moment in time. That's a hard barrier to cross for a lot of artists.

Since I am still out there just working a regular 9-to-5 job, and I'm married, a lot my free time goes into spending it with my wife. Carving out an hour (sometimes more) per day to draw hasn't been that difficult, but it does have to be a conscious decision that I make. Then there is the deliberation in my mind on what kind of art I should be working on.

If you've read through my last post you'll see the mini comics that I made... Those didn't really garner any attention. So I've pivoted a bit to do more fine art illustration; think Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist. However, I do plan to do more mini comics in the future, I'm just focusing on building an audience on Instagram now. As much as I didn't care to use that site/app, I had an account on there that I had made just to preserve my moniker, then I'm watching an interview with Todd McFarlane and he comes out and says:

“I look at all the art websites. I look at, you know, Instagram and Facebook and, like, any place where anybody’s posting stuff. I’m always phoning sort of, you know, either complete unknowns or somewhat unknowns…”

Listen to the interview HERE.

So, I figured fuck it, let's just start posting on Instagram. Most of the people I went to high school with are on there and they're starting to catch on to me posting every day as well. Most everyone that follows me knows me in real life. Specifically the people I went to high school with, they were sort of my original fans anyway. Plus, Todd Beats called me out in a comment I made on one of his posts.

Nothing to loose, everything to gain.

So far, that's what art after 40 has been like. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. If you're still interested in following my art journey, feel free to follow me on Instagram and continue to watch this blog for more updates.

As the quality of televised and digital entertainment has degraded over the years, and not wanting to be bombarded by the sheer negativity of it all, I've found myself spending more time listening to music and reading comics. It's been a gradual transition for me... That isn't to say that I don't spend entirely way too much time watching garbage on YouTube or mindlessly surfing, looking at things I'll never buy, or researching video games, or learning things that have no real practical purpose in my life other than to be interesting topics for cocktail parties that I'll never attend, etc.

Something happened though... A tipping point? I did attempt doing a web comic maybe a year or so ago, but I never stuck with it. I have revisited the idea though, and this time I sat and thought about the story ahead of putting pencil to paper, I drew a few outlines and sketches first.

Just from my 9-to-5 and thinking about the type of comic that I wanted to read, I came upon the idea of an insurance company in the relatively near future. But it's going to evolve beyond that, because, fuck it, I have a story universe where people live on Europa and Titan, and giant monsters are a real thing. So I'm going to play with the surreal and the supernatural, the pragmatic and the practical, and I want to put it together to highlight the absurdity of life and the human condition.

We're really in a timeline where aliens are real and just a few years ago we globally went into lock down for a novel communicable virus which may or may not have been created in a laboratory. That's some Depression-era level shit right there. So of course there is a need for art to reflect on that stuff.

I don't really care to debate the details, I just want to examine the greater implications and the social structures behind how civilization deals with those types of situations.

Super hero-adjacent characters exist, but won't necessarily be the focus of the stories that are told. Corporate espionage and libertarian -slash- anarcho-capitalist theory will be themes explored—because I find it interesting, the actual practicalities of implementing such civic systems aside. But it's all just flavor for the world and to inform the behavior of the characters.

Switching gears a bit. One of the things that I need to do is think about how to implement a page navigation system. WriteFreely doesn't really have a “web comic” module like Wordpress does. However, Matt Baer has thought about the utility of his writing platform, and he's implemented a place where you can inject some js into every page. I like that, and it should serve this particular purpose just fine.

I've intentionally labeled each entry as the page number, so the url slug and the title as well as page number are all the same. I do not anticipate ever going beyond 999 pages.

That being said, here's how I implemented an automated page navigation:

let path = document.location.pathname;

function displayNav(){
    let page = parseInt(path.substring(1,4));
    let next = (new Array(3).join('0')+((page + 1).toString())).slice(-3);
    let prev = (new Array(3).join('0')+((page - 1).toString())).slice(-3);

    let div = `<div class="page-nav">
                <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
                    <tr>
                        <td id="first"><a href="/001"><i class="bx bxs-chevrons-left"></i></a></td>
                        <td id="last"><a href="/${prev}"><i class="bx bxs-chevron-left"></i></a></td>
                        <td id="next"><a href="/${next}"><i class="bx bxs-chevron-right"></i></a></td>
                        <td id="recent"><a href="/"><i class="bx bxs-chevrons-right"></i></a></td>
                    </tr>
                </table>
            </div>`;
    
    let content = document.querySelector('.e-content').children.item('p');
    content.insertAdjacentHTML('beforeend', div);
    return content
}

if (path !== '/'){
   setTimeout(() => {
    displayNav();
   }, 200);
}

Everything hinges on the url path, so that's defined at the top level scope. I figured this would be the easiest way to deal with pages. Stylistically I wanted to go with three digits, so working with that in javascript is a little clunky.

Originally I had an lpad function that was taken wholesale from stack. It seemed like the most elegant solution. But I wouldn't have used that function anywhere else, or more than twice, so I refactored what the function did right into the declaration of my next and last variables.

Once we have those variables we know what our URL is going to be for going backwards and forwards. So I defined a template literal with the HTML of our navigation block.

How do we know where to place it? Well, I want to make sure it's right after the picture and that's the only paragraph we have. Writefreely dumps your post into a div with the class “e-content”. Despite the fact that it's not an id, it does only show up once on the DOM. So, we query that class, look for the p and dump our div variable as html at the end.

Writefreely also provides user-specified CSS, so I've imported the Boxicons cdn so I can use it like FontAwesome and have some icons to represent first, last, previous and next.

Might not be the most elegant way to do what I need it to do, and might not be the most robust, but it works, and I'm happy about that. I don't have to keep writing a table/navigation element for each page.

Not sure if this will technically be a review of the album... But it's the one album that I've been listening to a lot lately. I only had a mild fascination with Pierce the Veil when they first came out. After I'm done ranting about music today, I'll talk a little bit about MTK Ultra tomorrow, which is a web comic I'm working on and developing.

The album Pierce the Veil put out earlier this year though, is really good. It still has an emo feel to it, but it's much more hard rock, a bit nu metal at times. Even has some progressive influences. Much more diverse than their previous efforts. I'm kind of happy that “King for a Day” blew up on TikTok, I don't think they would have put out a new album if it hadn't.

Mike Fuentes not being in the band anymore does seem to have influenced the music a bit, but it has also been several years since their last album. I've read some articles about what happened with Mike, and my understanding is that it had to do with under-aged girls, but I don't know the details. Regardless, it's probably for the best that he's not in the band.

Unfortunately, there's no record of their musical growth over the past 6 years. We're just getting hit with the final product. Seriously though, the new drummer is fucking ace. Some of the stuff they've put up on YouTube is them performing at the When We Were Young festival. I would have bought tickets, but that show absolutely exploded and tickets were sold out almost instantaneously, so I'm happy they made some official videos out of their performances from that weekend. Seriously, just watch the new drummer on the “Pass The Nirvana” video from that festival, it's worth your time.

The album's title at least really resonates with me. Some of the lyrics do, but the music itself is really the appeal... Not that I don't like Vic Fuentes' voice, I do, his melodies are great and his singing is less “whiny” and much more metal, but the depth of the lyrics just isn't there for me.

I think if you're a person who likes rock, but you don't necessarily identify with a specific genre, or you're open to listening to new things, this is a great album.

Life has been pretty crazy.

The storm that hit here in Vegas a week and a half ago left our house with some damage. It's the first time I've ever filed an insurance claim in my life. I've only been in one auto accident my entire life and that was damn near 20 years ago, the other party was at-fault and it never even went to my insurance.

Just had a tooth pulled... That was an experience. Apparently only about 1.8% of people who are given lidocaine combined with epinephrine experience a vasovagal response. What a trip. That was one hell of an experience. Pretty thankful that my wife drove me to my dentist appointment. I was fine at the dentist, the tooth came out, and we paid and proceeded to leave, to go to the pharmacy to pick up the ibuprofen and amoxicillin that was prescribed to me, and I started to feel funny while standing in line. I remember saying that I had to sit down and felt like I was sweating profusely. We got back to the car and that's when it hit me. According to my wife I passed out in the car on the way home (which was literally just down the street), and then snapped out of it, but then passed out again when we reached the front door.

When I came to, my wife was on the phone with 911 freaking out. I was shaken, but pretty stable after that. The whole experience was only about 15 minutes total—from the time walking out of the dentist until we were home.

One of the paramedics said that my blood pressure was better than his.

In any case, happy to be alive. So with that, I've been spending time working on my own comic. I've given up caring about the quality, and I'm just doing it, just putting it out there knowing that the more I work on it, the better it will get. I'm not getting any younger. You have to actually try at some point rather than just saying that you will. Saying I'm doing is just semantics at this point.

I'm excited about it. I like the story that I have thus far, hoping to bring some people along with me for the ride.