And here’s chapter 1 of the next Doctor Baer book in sticky note thumbnails (my first guess at how the pages will look). I’m slowly adapting to teaching full-time and squeezing in time for personal projects. I found myself stopping and breathing to shut down the anxious little goblin sitting on my shoulder, shouting that I should maximize every minute. I’m hopeful that in the coming weeks I’ll find some kind of comfortable rhythm.
I’m sharing the entire process of making this book, including audio essays on my experience making it, over on my Patreon for Teams Pickles and up, by the way. You can sign up here!
I’ve recently finished a draft for my next Doctor Baer story. My plans are to serialize it as a webcomic, so I’m free to share as much of the process as I want.
Another development piece for a short Doctor Baer story. In some of the stories featuring Baba Yaga her house is surrounded by a fence capped by human skulls, whose eye sockets glow eerily. I’m playing with that image to see what it might look like if Baba Yaga had some sentient skulls who assisted her similarly to how the Wisps assist Doctor Baer.
I’ve also updated the runes on Baba Yaga’s mortar. In the previous drawing I was aping some approximations of ancient Slavic script, but I remembered that I was sitting on a mystical alphabet I designed over 20 years ago:
Which appears at least twice in Two-Faced Statue.
Baba Yaga’s mortar got updated with these runes:
I’m not telling what it says. But I do plan on releasing a lot of Doctor Baer merchandise with this writing on it, so observant readers will eventually figure it out.
I’ve still got a lot of work to do on the outline, but my goal is to begin thumbnailing by the end of August. I’ll share what I’ve got as I go!
Once I got somewhere interesting I moved to Blender and built a crude 3d model:
Which I was able to import into Clip Studio Paint and position in the perspective I wanted:
And from there I penciled overtop:
And then inking, coloring, and etc.
I’m excited to be playing with new ideas for the characters, but anxiety is starting to build. If I want to create and serialize a brand-new Doctor Baer story next year, I need to get most of the writing done before the school year starts. Come late August, I’m working full-time as a teaching artist, which means I’ll have 1.5-2 hours per day to work on this at maximum. I’ll need every one of those hours to pencil, ink, and color the pages, even with these handy 3d models.
My hope is that the deadline will force me to commit to some ideas and get some momentum going. I’ve found that’s my only ally when it comes to writing/thumbnailing. It just takes so much to get it going.
But little pieces like these give me a promise of what could be if I just put in the time to work on it!
Story one: the pub date for The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue has been pushed back for a third time. It’s now coming out in Fall 2024.
Story two: I’ve been teaching myself Blender so I can design some 3d model vehicles for upcoming Doctor Baer stories. You can output a Blender file to Clip Studio Paint as 3d material. Within Clip Studio Paint you can manipulate the model to set it in just the position you want, and you can even copy the rulers from that model into a drawing layer.
Here’s the blender file:
The bike I designed myself. The gorilla skull was purchased from Turbosquid.
But who are these characters, and why should anyone care? I mentioned a while back that I was working on an outline for another Doctor Baer story, and that I wanted to put these mercenaries in it.
L to R: Shenandoah the barbarian, Dick the gizmoteer, and Kobros the creep.
The news about my book’s pub date got me thinking of getting something in motion sooner than later on another Doctor Baer story. Between the time of this writing and October 1st, 2024 are approximately 300 workdays, not counting holidays. Given my fall/winter schedule I can comfortably commit an average of 1.5 hours per day towards a new story. That puts me somewhere between 75-100 pages finished by the time Two-Faced Statue comes out.
Rather than have a half-finished graphic novel, I’m thinking of creating a shorter standalone story that I can serialize online leading up to the book’s release. It would certainly be a more compelling way to remind everyone that I have a book coming out next year.
So this image sums up my excitement around making lemonade out of this latest setback. I may not get to see my book in print when I had hoped, but I can use the wait time to come up with an exciting story with a giant thug of a cat, a two-headed cobra, and a little gadgeteer monkey who make life difficult for Doctor Baer.
Twelve years ago I sat down to do a live stream (I think on Justin.tv?) and drew a bunch of 3×3″ sketches on bristol. No expectations, no purpose, just drawing whatever came to mind. This was one of the drawings.
Not long after that I challenged myself to create a minicomic from scratch in about a week. Just an hour or two a day. And this bear drawing helped inspire the character of Boulder, one half of the titular team of that minicomic:
I was making a lot of different kinds of adventure comics up until that point. Silver and the Periodic Forces, Switch Runners, The Replacements. They were all fun and imaginative stories, and a lot of fun to make. But I think this is the drawing where my interests shifted back to something I loved as a kid, which was drawing what C.S. Lewis called “clothed animals” stories. And my style started pointing to what my friend Dan Mishkin described as “action whimsy.”
(special thanks to my buddy Zack Giallongo for the name idea!)
It’s been a packed summer of camp workshops, A2CAF, and events surrounding the Facing Feelings: The Art of Raina Telgemeier exhibition (curated by my wife Anne!). So I’m slowly catching up on correspondence and getting back to drawing.
Most of you know that I love using the utterly mercenary toy marketing of the 1980s as a design constraint. Especially Hasbro toys like the Transformers and G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. I was sketching Count Fishravin the other day and thought about those Robot Cuttlefish I drew some months back:
I took this as an opportunity to try learning Blender a little more. This vehicle was designed on paper, constructed as a 3d model in Blender, then imported into Clip Studio Paint. CSP’s 3d tools allow you to import an .obj file and manipulate it like you would any included 3d materials. So once imported, I was able to position the model in any angle I want–then copy the rulers to a penciling layer.
I penciled more details onto the model and printed them out on watercolor paper. I inked on paper and took the drawings back into Clip Studio Paint for coloring.
I thought it might be neat to include some electric (ELECTRONIC) eels for the tendrils on front of the cuttlefish. Though I’ll admit this does evoke a bit of the design of Sky-Runner, the main villain’s vehicle from SilverHawks.
It was a fun experiment that led to more Blender skill acquisition. I might use this in a future story, I might not. But I know I’ll be building more environmental elements in Blender going forward.
Penciled in Clip Studio Paint, inked on watercolor paper, then painted in Clip Studio Paint using Ray Frenden’s terrific watercolor brushes (affiliate link).
I’ve been working on several ideas for a new Doctor Baer story, and one that’s in a third draft stage involves introducing the famous slavic witch into my animal world. This is the working design.
I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of material on Slavic mythology and fairy tales, and the ambiguous witch keeps me fascinated. Neither good nor evil, she stands for the wildness of nature itself. Containing all the sublime terror and joy of participating in life. Naturally that would make her a cat in an anthropomorphic comic!
But I’ll let some of the sources I’ve been using tell her story. Here are some good listens/reads on this character and the archetype she falls into:
NSFW but lively and fun discussion on the Deviant Women podcast:
A thorough discussion on the Mythillogical Podcast:
This was another fun one! I talk a bit about how comics opened up for me when I was 13, plans for a possible 2nd Doctor Baer book (and how I made the first one), and how I think about writing dialogue.
But this was my favorite moment from the live stream:
Avoid disappointment and future regret! Follow me on Twitch to find out when I’m streaming next.
