the blizzard outside was 100% caused by me thinking "maybe i could go to the comics store on sunday"; apologies

i have spent the last six days only thinking about how to physically make it to the comics store to get my copy

this whole "deceptively simple / making it look easy" approach sure takes a lot of work, and when successful, makes even yourself think it could have been drawn off the cuff instead of taking ten hours

no wonder things haven't been going well, my talent prescription ran out

It's 20 years since @seanphillips.bsky.social and I exchanged a sketchbook back and forth in the mail, a drawn &painted call and response. INTERSECTIONS may be out of print but here is a flip through that sketchbook. You can still find the book out there :)

it's nice to see mushishi (and dragon head, next month) finally back in print after... 15 years?

by how morning has been going, it looks like tuesday will be mostly spent maintaining my standard ratio of acting adjustments vs inking adjustments, which is roughly 400:1

i usually frontload all the difficult parts, to not rush or do them tired them at the end, so when weeks of exclusively difficult stuff grind me down, and i finally get to drawing pages of just heads or something easy (or just not excruciating), i feel like i am doing zero work. it's a great system

it's hard to get a proper sense of the amount of email we deal with every day, because we check and roughly sort it every couple of hours, but if you can't check it for, say, six days, you sure get a better idea

ok am super sleepy. leaving for paris day after tomorrow. laying out the big drawings like they're trading cards. drew a cop. might have achieved a kind of invisibility. as per tradition: one pair of quirky earrings per town I visit

november already a significant improvement on october

i don't often use coarse language, but this whole month can take a hike

being able to improve my own (or, implausibly, even someone else's) mood with just some shapes and colors continues to be a valuable skill on a daily basis (more so by the day)

tuesday plan: pictures (several)

too many unusable days in a row again, but today finally seems better so monday plan: brain reclamation (and pictures)

is something to look forward to even allowed nowadays

thursday: it seems that I have again officially reached my fed up with the brush "that's it, where's the biggest pen i have" stage

at this point genuinely surprised that any mail from the US got here

there's that story about Tezuka being loopy enough to draw sandals on an astronaut, but not sure where to place drawing a guy for six pages, and then drawing the head of a completely different character - a woman with long hair -- from another comic - on page seven (probably under "gas leaks")

sunday recap

stay safe tomorrow everybody

other than the "never got around to it" tombstone strip, this moment from the Anno documentary is the most frequent reminder i think of (whenever i get lost in fiddly nonsense, like today)

by now i know to take dramamine if i need to look for a lot of reference on google maps, but fast forwarding through dozens of hours of vlog gimbal and drone footage today has unlocked brand new levels of nausea

speaking of another picture, i also missed this one showing up online. how long was i out? what year is it

those key ideas that make something click always arrive at strange times, but i don't think i've yet had one come while preparing the finished file for CMYK

past few weeks have been uphill enough that i didn't notice a new picture was out, so hey: new picture! (as always, the black and white version, and much sharper jpegs, over at the blog-- tozo.today/cover-gi-joe...)

a few minutes left in the day, on to the late program

yet again forgot that throwing something in the trash and doing a new version from scratch is faster than trying to tweak and nudge the old one into working

very long day / 3:18 a.m. seems like a good time to put this one on

Wanderlust book. Back in stock. jonathanestore.bigcartel.com/product/wand...

monday plan: previous monday

this week has been just a relentless pummelling so it's only fitting to cap it off by overwriting a finished file with a flattened version at 2 a.m. on a sunday

getting flattened again for the better part of the week reminds me that being able to do actual work on a tablet is something that i'm really grateful to have as an option, but that i also hate when it becomes a necessity

it's pretty funny that PTA does cars -and- running better than the entire mission impossible franchise

why even include the cancel button, i don't think i have ever seen it not be grayed out in the past twelve years of using the app

man I'll fail by October 2nd

today has been nice, and i realized it was because i didn't have to look at any reference material all day. however complicated something may be, building a mental model and internalizing it is both faster and a million times more enjoyable than drawing with one eye permanently on a photo

a while back i came up with the smallest possible personal comics so i could do them in scraps of time between other things, or late at night, but i still manage to turn them into way too much work in novel ways, like making "kuleshov effect: the comic" out of the current one

stealing the photo from @thebeguiling.bsky.social to convey urgent all caps news of FUMIKO TAKANO BOOK IN ENGLISH! FINALLY!! (bumping good worldwide developments counter to six)

David starting to do his own (painted) colors has been one of maybe five good developments worldwide in the past decade

Packing up this watercolour painting of Kyoto from 2017 ready to go to its new owner. 8 years has gone by very quickly! Prints are still available from shop.

anyhow, back to my high tech work

it's pretty funny that a site asks me to input a six digit code after i already logged in by using my fingerprint, but it also means that when we get to full-time eyeball scanning, you'll still have to pick all the sidewalks and handbags afterwards

oh good, more deleted days. i guess the plan for today is: the entire shohei imamura filmography

another consequence of my "start from whatever the picture needs > what i'd like to draw" approach is that it often takes me 40 to 80 hours of working on something and thinking "why isn't this more fun" before i remember that some things are, in fact, tedious and not fun to draw (who knew)

got my ticket for One Battle After Another; wake me up in nine days

how to even pick less than a hundred movies for something like this? here's a few that maybe weren't already listed