So there haven’t been any updates this week, just like the week before that. The reasoning is pretty much the same: I’m trying to get Hell, Inc. finished so that I can get it printed in time for Indie Week in December. I finished page 20 this afternoon, and will be starting 21 a little later (it’s 24 pages long, incidentally). Because I feel bad for not having updated in a while, and because I won’t be doing more Rent-A-Thug work for a while yet, I decided that until Hell, Inc. comes out I’m going to update every couple of days with panels from the pages that are already finished and some kind of commentary on the production of the thing. Is that interesting? Maybe. Is it better than nothing? I think so. I’m going to try to start that off tomorrow or Sunday, depending on when I have more spare time.

Today’s comic might be late, possibly not up until tomorrow. Last week was super busy, and this week has kind of followed suit.

On the plus side, the Oilers beat the Vancouver Canucks 2-1 last night, in a squeaker that finally went the right way. The Oilers have apparently decided to solve last year’s scoring woes with a vengeance, since they’ve only scored less than three goals in a game once so far this year. I don’t think anyone would have predicted the Oil’s leading scorers, either. Dustin Penner (9 points), Gilbert Brule (7 points), Patrick O’Sullivan (7 points), Mike Comrie (6 points), and Denis Grebeshkov (6 points) are the top five scorers right now.

I’m currently juggling four different comic projects. Oof.

Edit: It totally wasn’t late! Hurray!

So, uh, tomorrow’s update isn’t going to be happening. I have ENTIRELY too much crap that I need to get done by the middle of next week (including, but not limited to, 24 Hour Comic Day, writing a 2000 word feature about said 24 Hour Comic Day for the Gateway, a Classics paper, a German assignment, and building a frame for a display piece).

So yeah, no Rent-A-Thug for a little while. Sorry.

24 Hour Comic Day is coming up alarmingly quickly, so I did some more character design stuff for Hell, Inc. Some of it can be seen in October 6th’s Rent-A-Thug, where I got some practice drawing Doug. The other important part of it is right here in this post. Doug’s boss, B.L. Zebub, plays a much more central role in the story than I had originally anticipated, but he’s fun to draw so I’m totally fine with that.

Next weekend is 24 Hour Comic Day, where (completely fucking insane) comic creators try to create a 24 page comic book in 24 hours. I’ll be at Happy Harbor Comics this year to join in on the insanity and raise money for literacy.

I’ve already written the script that I’ll be attempting to finish in 24 hours. I had to be conscious of keeping it relatively simple to hopefully prevent myself from getting bogged down during the art process. I’m not sure how it came about, but I ended up writing an office comedy… set in hell. I’ve also designed the lead character, Doug, and one of his co-workers, Steve. I thought Steve was going to be substantially more important to the story than he ended up being.

Anyway, here’s Doug. His design inspiration is part Hellboy and part Spy vs. Spy.

Here’s Steve. I think I might write more stories with these characters so that I can develop him a bit more. I thought he was going to be relatively important to the story, but he actually only ended up being in a couple of pages over the course of the story. The boss character was the opposite: I thought he would only appear in a couple of pages and ended up being all over the place.