It seems I've done nothing all week but do comics. No, that's not meant to be in the plural. Comic. Just one, and I've only done 7 pages for it so far. It's taking an insane amount of time, but I'm really happy with the way it's progressing.

If you want, you can check out these 7 pages in the downloads page, at the bottom. I don't really have any proper comic online publishing thing set up on this site yet so it's just gonna be thumbnails you click on like a normal image.

I'm hoping to get it done before I head back to Cornwall, so that there I can focus on other things, like my animation project for next year. I still have no idea what to do for it, and even began modelling and considering doing this story (the one in the comic) for it. In fact, a big reason I'm doing the comic now is so that I can forget about it becoming a short. I want to do something big, but there's no way I'll really be able to do something like that. Not for a long time and not without a team.

It's really helping me work through different Photoshop techniques, though, and am improving my tablet skills more, as well as my colouring (I went for black and white for this, both for a more manga-esque feel, but also so that I wouldn't have to worry all that much about getting the colours right).

Stylistically, I've been looking at the work of the legendary Naoki Urasawa - the brilliant mind behind the unbelievably epic 20th Century Boys, about a group of childhood friends who find the fictional Book of Prophecies they wrote are coming true under the command of the terrifying Tomodachi, the films of which I'm rewatching and the manga I've started to read. It's such a huge story though, this might take me a while to get through.

It's not the only piece of work by Urasawa I'm checking out. I've (finally) started watching Monster, which a lot of people have been recommending me for a while. And I have to say it's really living up to the hype. If you haven't heard of it, it's a bit hard to explain in a few words without giving anything away. But it's a really well paced, thrilling mystery, and I'm learning a lot about storytelling simply from watching it.

このマークを俺たちのもとにとりもどそう