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.

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.