Think of this as the “Director's Cut” for the comic that I've been working on the past few months. If you've noticed, I haven't been doing regular blog updates, it's because I've been working on this comic that I call “The Ghost of Jupiter.” You can read it in its entirety on my Deviant Art account, and in the original resolution (very high quality). Deviant Art isn't the best site for hosting a web comic, but it is a great site for hosting original artwork.

So, what is the “Ghost of Jupiter” comic?

It's part Film Noir and part Atomic Age Sci-Fi. My personal interpretation of David D. Friedman's vision of what a true anarcho-capitalist society would look like. Set in the not so distance future, the entire solar system is colonized, but this story in particular takes place on Enceledus. It's a world where various rights enforcement agencies are crossing paths, so what are the conflicts that they are dealing with? And even though space travel is commonplace, there still appears to be a need for a good gumshoe... Or, two, or three, or several.

Of course, every gumshoe needs to be an alcoholic. I call him “The Ghost of Jupiter”, it's an incarnation of another character that I've played around with in some of my short stories. However, when those short stories take place the character wasn't known as “Ghost,” he was only known as Kai Zarrison. Eventually I'll share why that is, but only when it becomes important to the story.

No home... Just the foul, the funk, and the forgotten. Cast aside on city streets or deep within alleys. Between the concrete cracks, we are the roaches, the tarnished, and the human trash.

You might be able to tell... I just started drawing pages, one at a time. The first drawing I did was back in August, with the most recent pages being completed just the other week. So it has taken me about 4 months (give or take, because of the holidays), to finish ~13 pages, or ~24 panels, complete with text (narration and dialog).

Whatever happens to strike my fancy is what comes next. That being said, the last 4 months have taught me that planning out a few pages in advance isn't a bad thing, so I'm always thinking about that while I draw. The general story is already in my head, and I know where I want it to go, but page to page I draw them a bit like people play jazz. I'm just tryin to riff on my emotions in the moment but still tell a coherent story.

Hopefully you can see some improvement as the pages have gone on... I've always sketched and doodled, ever since I was a little kid, but these days I'm rusty. I actively gave up art for a long period of my life. So, the discipline is coming back slowly, it's like working a muscle that hasn't been used in 20 years.

Comics are as much about the entire page as they are the individual panels. So the layout is important. It has to be visually interesting, but it still needs to tell a story.

I can remember my art classes from Junior and Senior High as being very enjoyable and memorable moments in my life. I was lucky and had some really amazing art teachers when I was younger.

Somewhere around when I drew the pages above (008-009), I had made the decision that I wanted to do some type of a romance or love story as well as capitalize on a noir aesthetic or feel. But instead of the traditional murder mystery (which quite a few noir films have), I'm going to focus more on the comic being a commentary, with romance and action going on in the background.

Yes... Ghost is the main character, and he will never show his face entirely. Wearing a mask and having a secret identity is such a major aspect of both super heroes and villains. With anti-heroes being vulnerable individuals who maybe don't make the right choice, but they do it for the right reasons.

Ghost is the hero, but Lisa will be his anti-hero foil as well as love interest. I think female anti-heroes tend to tread in mostly comedic waters, so there are missed opportunities for story telling if you do a female anti-hero who isn't always making fun of themselves and the world.

So this is where I'm at. I feel like my art is evolving, and I'm expanding my mediums even. I still want to do traditional art, because I feel that's when my drawing looks its best, but I also want to start incorporating alcohol markers. Sharpie are the most notable brand, but there are markers made just for artists; Cali Art and Ohuhu are the two brands that come up most often. I opted for Cali Art, even though I have more experience using Sharpies, and have had some success using them in my drawings.

What I have not done before is mix fountain pen ink with alcohol markers... My workflow thus far has been sketch, and then ink. Well, I did that this last time, and then tried to lay down some markers and realized that alcohol is what you use to get fountain pen ink off of your hands or on a surface, etc. So I had to stop trying to color the page that I was working on and just leave it as is. Going forward I'll be penciling, coloring, and then layering the inks on top of all that. I think it'll work just fine. However, I may have to let the marker sit over night to dry before putting the inks down.

Ghost of Jupiter has it's own website: jupitercomic.com.

Feel free to also follow me on Instagram and Youtube.

Everyone has their own winter rituals. Either you make them or you follow what has come before, or you choose to ignore them all together, we're all acutely aware that it's something that a lot of us do every year. Figuratively, symbolically, or astrologically, everything in the human condition is a cycle of some sort, like a series of a million different Venn diagrams creating infinite combinations of various overlapping factors, perpetually in motion like celestial gears; these cycles dictate a number of things related to our lives. Or, the cycles at least preside an influence over our perceptions, emotions, and actions during certain times of the year, or periods in our lives over the course of several years.

Today we simply use dates to covey that information, but the vestiges of our ancestors' attempts to delineate time in relation to the sky (or celestial overlay) for personal, cultural, and societal events are still with us. Whether or not you believe there is some sort of ancient purity to the older traditions or whether current traditions have been tarnished by commercialism and capitalism... that isn't really relevant for the point that I'm trying to make. Arguably, the fact that commerce and capitalism—as extensions and systems of civilization—follow the ebb and flow of celestial patterns is probably more telling than most would agree to admit.

I find the annual cycles are pretty benign—until the end of a larger cycle slaps me in the face.

From what I understand, it was Rudolf Steinerwho popularized the idea of cycles of seven years as delineations for major life events. Seven year cycles have definitely been true for me over the past 21-28 years. Major life events don't always fall exactly every seven years apart, but generally every seven years or so there is a definite paradigm shift for me. This time around, I'm rediscovering some of the things I used to like about myself, but either buried or forgot about. That isn't to say that it's entirely a peaceful growth.

Today was the first time since quitting my job that I feel like “ah shit, I fucked up.” I wasn't expecting to feel that way. But those feelings are part of the greater cycle, I need a little bit of that foreboding fire because I've been numb for so long just going through the motions. Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I confirm to myself that I couldn't have stayed at my job... And my wife agrees. A wave of anxiety washes over me just thinking about the place. I'm reluctant to use the term “mental health” because I don't care for how I see that term being defined by the people who commonly use it. “Emotional health” might be a more adequate term, but even then I wouldn't really classify my disposition or attitude on life with a label like that. Realistically, it has just been really gloomy outside this week, and that has been negatively affecting my attitude. Vegas is so sunny most of the time, when there is cloud cover I retreat into my cancerian shell. I often joke with my wife that I wouldn't be able to live in the pacific northwest.

With some of this new-found free time that I have, I wanted to work on building an online storefront, and I was going to use my own personal comic collection to do that. Actually go through the process of setting up a functional online store... I might still complete that project just to prove to myself that I can do it (Square has already sent me a debit card and they are eagerly awaiting me to publish my inventory). But my engagement with that project is weighted by the fact that I only have approximately $5,000 worth of single issues and trades that I could sell as inventory.

Certainly more than if I were to take my collection to a shop and try to dump it for some cash... There I'd only make maybe $500 bucks—provided the shop owner thought they could at least break even on the purchase in a month or two. The real problem with a comic store/shop is not acquiring inventory, it's moving it. I don't really have any super rare books in my collection, even though I have books that mean something to me (e.g. pictured above, X-Men Vol. 1 (1990), Issue #1 signed by Jim Lee. When I initially thought of the idea, I didn't stop to inventory everything or think about how much I could realistically could get out of my collection if I were to sell it issue by issue. Five thousand is assuming that I could sell every single book, and I know that I wouldn't. If anything it would be a good functional portfolio piece for getting a web development job, but there are other code projects I'd like to work on that won't take up that time.

Earlier in the year I set the goal for myself to finish my Tarot application and write its companion book. That's a project with far more income and growth potential than selling my comic collection and trying to parlay it into a full mercantile. I'll have more about the Tarot application in the near future.

It's probably been at least 4 or 5 year since my father-in-law has made his world famous eggnog. It only takes one glass. But it's absolutely worth it ever year. But because he hasn't done it in quite a few years past, this year was kind of special. It was nice that some new people got a chance to try it as well.

My wife has never liked it 🤣... I can remember trying to get the recipe from my father-in-law, and him refusing to give it to me. So I asked him again.

“This is Thelonious Monk's recipe, right?”

*chuckles* “Charles Minugs, actually, a bass player.”

So now that I look it up online, and see Mingus' actual recipe, I have a vague memory of him telling me. Obviously though, I was too fucked up to remember it. In the spirit of those evenings as well as an honest effort to preserve the recipe so that it doesn't die in the ether, here it is, Charles Mingus' Eggnog:

* Separate one egg for one person.  Each person gets an egg.
* Two sugars for each egg, each person.
* One shot of rum, one shot of brandy per person.
* Put all the yolks into one big pan, with some milk.
* That’s where the 151 proof rum goes.  Put it in gradually or it’ll burn the eggs,
* OK. The whites are separate and the cream is separate.
* In another pot– depending on how many people– put in one shot of each, rum and brandy. (This is after you whip your whites and your cream.)
* Pour it over the top of the milk and yolks.
* One teaspoon of sugar.  Brandy and rum.
* Actually you mix it all together.
* Yes, a lot of nutmeg.  Fresh nutmeg.  And stir it up.
* You don’t need ice cream unless you’ve got people coming and you need to keep it cold.  Vanilla ice cream.  You can use eggnog.  I use vanilla ice cream.
* Right, taste for flavor.  Bourbon? I use Jamaica Rum in there. Jamaican Rums. Or I’ll put rye in it.  Scotch. It depends.
See, it depends on how drunk I get while I’m tasting it.

–Charles Mingus

I definitely want to to try to make my own variation of it in the near future, maybe next year? I think I'll probably do some substitutions though... The beauty is the fact that he says it all depends on how drunk he's getting while tasting it. So it could be a concoction of a bunch of different alcohols, and I think that was also part of the idea of the recipe, it's never quite the same each time because you're tasting it as you go, so you're getting drunk while making it.

In any case I'm extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity in this life to have a good family. That isn't something that is guaranteed. And while some of us make our families, there is always an inherent default to the people who are always around you by virtue of blood or circumstance. When it works, it's a beautiful symbiosis. When it doesn't, it can be quite unpleasant.

Happy Holidays!

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.