It’s been a busy week! I tabled at the local Mutant Bazaar show (formerly known as Weird Wednesday), as well as the Monster Market on Saturday (which is tomorrow for me, and yesterday by the time you read this). Between shows I was finishing pages and putting final touches on my pitch for Eerie-my latest and greatest comic idea-that I will be querying agents with very soon in hopes that I can get one. Anyway, before I bury the lede, let’s get into it.
I actually don’t have any new comics for you guys this week. Like I mentioned above I was working on pages for Eerie and don’t really want to show/spoil too much of that for the moment, especially since I’m hoping to use that project to get an agent and then hopefully find a publisher. That’s right, doing things the old school way. Not to mention I’m in the midst of brainstorming the next story arc for The After Death. While I know a lot of you guys come here for comics, I’m all tapped out this week. To make it up to you, I’m sharing a fun little off-shoot After Death project that never got its footing.
A little history.
I started The After Death in August of 2019. At the time, I was still a huge fan of the Inktober art challenge and wanted to try to write and draw an ambitious (in terms of writing) story line using my new little IP babies Spencer and Reggie. So, I had them leave behind the old warehouse in Chicago with plans for Reggie to guide Spencer to a bunch of fun and cool places throughout North America with their destination being New Orleans. You never really see them make the trek in Book One and I thought this could bridge that gap. Well, my eyes are always too big for my stomach and I bit off more than I could chew in terms of story. I could draw the little scenes easy enough, but making it a coherent storyline and lining up all of the locations and researching fun spots for them visit began to take more time than I thought. So, I abandoned the art challenge about ten or so days in.
I thought it’d be fun to share a handful of those images that I had posted way back in 2019. And, never say never, maybe I could mine this idea for an After Death off-shoot in the future. But for now, it remains a failed-but fun-experiment.
Pet Portraits
At the risk of repeating myself, I’m trying to get more legs underneath my freelance table and adding some pet portrait illustrations to my repertoire in order to create another income stream. This week I worked on a portrait of my cat Bergen who passed back in October. And, I finally got to share the portrait of Queso with the client so I can finally share it with you guys as well.
If you like these, I’d love to do a commission of your own fur-baby. Feel free to respond to this newsletter, or email me at brandonhayman@outlook.com and we’ll talk.
What’s Making Me Happy This Week
I got to fanboy out a little bit this week when my custom doodle arrived in the mail from Brenna Thummler. She’s the creator of the graphic novel trilogy Sheets and just released her latest, titled Gumshoe. She has recently returned to her Patreon in a big way and has been sharing inside news on the current project she’s working on that remains unnamed. I’ve talked about this before. But, since she had stepped away from Patreon for a bit, she offered to draw her Patreon members doodles to make up for it. For free. That’s right. I always jump at the chance to get original art no matter how big or small from the creators I love, especially if it’s for free. Anyways, it arrived this week and it makes me very happy indeed.
It’s time to make like Tom and cruise. As always, thanks of reading and spending some of your time with me here in the digital universe that is the internet. I hope you have a great week next week and I’ll see you back here next Sunday.
~b