Introducting Larry, the magical talking potato!

Introducting Larry, the magical talking potato!

August 5, 2024

I decided to teach myself Clip Studio Paint this summer. If you’re not that familiar with Clip Studio Paint, it’s probably the #1 app used by cartoonists these days to make comics. Except for me, I guess — I’ve always just used Photoshop. And because I’ve been using Photoshop for over 20 years, I wasn’t too eager to learn an entire new app when I thought Photoshop was capable of doing everything I needed. I’d also tried an earlier iteration of CSP called Manga Studio and found it difficult to learn, so that also made me less than enthusiastic to give the newer CSP a try. But… like… everyone uses CSP these days. Like… everyone. So it has to have gotten better, right? It turns out, there’s a good reason why CSP is being used by more and more cartoonists these days — while the tools it offers are similar to Photoshop, they are better designed for making comics. I still find that some things are better done in Photoshop (editing type, for one), but there’s a lot that CSP just does better (coloring is waaaaay easier). So I’m learning to switch between the two programs and Larry, the magical

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I ❤️ Books — Part II

June 22, 2024

Books! More books! Somebody stop me! I keep buying books! I’ve picked up some fun ones too. Here’s what I’ve been looking at lately. Dwellings I was a really big fan Stephens’ comics back in the 90s. Atomic City Tales, Land of Nod, Jet Cat — I bought them all. And then he disappeared. For over a decade. So I was really excited when he made his turned to comics a few years ago with an all-new series, Dwellings, which has now finally been collected in hardcover. In his return to comics, Stephens has really refined his art style. It reminds me a lot of old Harvey comics — Casper, Hot Stuff, Wendy, etc. I assumed from looking at the art that the stories in Dwellings would contain some amount of levity. And perhaps a tongue-in-cheek “kid lit” approach to the writing — kinda like his old Jet Cat stuff or Land of Nod. Boy, was I wrong. Dwellings is a straight-up horror anthology. The tone is sophisticated, serious, and the characters talk as they would in a modern tv drama. These are “real” horror stories — the kinds of stories Stephen King writes. Grown up stories. But with an

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