Dancing with the Dead

Not for time-being. Lutz and I have talked about it but they're working on a monochrome comic of their very own. In the meantime, I commission them pictures of my beloathed fiends.

I try to design them as if they were collectible toys or figures. Each one has a gimmick, each one is special. So, when you put them together, it’s this rainbow of a bestiary. How I got this method is layered in all sorts of origin-points. One of which, bizarrely, was a mid 2000s reboot of the American “Crazy Bones” collectibles. Hardly 1970s but these “Gogos Crazy Bones” were all about those single-minded motifs. No two were alike, even when they got recoloured into entirely different designs complete with sparkling plastic. Another 2000s toy chain, U.B. Funkeys, also had this gimmick, albeit with mostly-identical moulds.

In the event of my sudden demise or I am stricken by unearthly forces to no longer draw (which I wish to avert with good ergonomics and living practices), it'll still exist in one way or another. If I still exist then assume I'm datahoarding; if I can't create I'll simply curate. To get back to the "right now" and away from the hypotheticals of this, I'm currently looking for more archives besides the Wayback Machine. If this site goes down, you can still use said machine to download copies of the episodes.

A myriad of things. Underground Comix, 20th century British comedies, Hammer Horror, Hanna Barbera and Edward Gorey.

If it's not dozens of hardbacks, I research by ping-ponging all over the place online. Archive.org is my main haunt, and I try to aim for a “back this up with multiple sources” approach. So that way, my information can at least be consistent. However, it has the very funny side-effect of getting me into the most random hyperfixations. In case you think I'm being glib, I own sixteen hardbacks on hunting alone. Death in the Long Grass is a really good book, so I can't complain.

We grew up using MS Paint. Teenage us would make pieces by drawing on paper, taking photos and then drawing back over them in the program. This was going fine for several inefficient years until Microsoft's plan to deprecate MS Paint panicked us into finding a replacement. After some frantic googling, we booted up Medibang Paint, hoped, prayed and clutched a Wacom tablet that hadn't seen use since 2012. See, we stored it away after a single christmas of trying (and failing) to learn Corel Painter. As we learned Medibang, we tried to draw in antialiased. It was what everyone else did, but frankly, we hated it. We absolutely hated it. We knew what we wanted to draw, but the lines felt too soft and blobby for our comparitively geometric art-style. So, we unticked the box, got our crunchy lines back on and thanks to our autistic sentimentality, we're here.

Several reasons. One, it compliments the art-style, two it compliments the tone and three it helps with suspension of disbelief. Modern-night-settings can make vampires work, but their interconnectivity takes out a lot of the scare-factor for me personally.