There’s a slight delay in the release of the next Bodysuit 23 update! Sorry about that!

With just a few days left in the year, I can finally complete my “Artwork of 2019” image! Some months were difficult to find representations due to there being a lack of content outside of comic work, but overall I think I did well this year. Of course there’s lots of room for improvement.

For those who only check this site and don’t see my other art, you can check out my galleries over on deviant art and pixiv! And of course you get to see stuff earlier on my patreon, including the occasional abandoned sketch idea that I don’t bother posting elsewhere.

I forget if I announced it much outside of Patreon and Twitter (since twitter I can just toot out a message and throw my phone at the wall with 0 effort), I’m currently working on Gros Durs 2! And by work on I mean it’s mostly finished in the writing aspect and I’m currently working on the artwork for it. For those who would like to read it right now without any artwork, you can join Patreon today and start reading! And for those who want to see the progression of the art as I make it, that’s being posted on Patreon as well.

Despite the story being twice as long as Gros Durs 1, I decided to go with less art this time around. I wound up overdoing it with the art for the first story, and the more I worked on them the more I didn’t like how they were turning out. Worse, the art was scenes that didn’t need art depicted at all, whereas scenes that should’ve had art in retrospect did not. With that in mind, I’m being more careful about what I draw, along with putting much more effort in each piece. I think this will result in a higher quality product in the long run.

Once Gros Durs 2 is finished, I still want to create a physical edition combining parts 1 and 2 into a single volume book. But before I can do that, I’ll redo some of the art for part 1 to better fit with the artwork done with part 2. I can’t give a time estimate on how long that will take, as you’re all aware that I’m pretty slow when it comes to getting shit done.

On that note, MGD Episode 7 has been sitting at a standstill due to the increasing difficulty in writing. Who knew tying up loose ends in a story that makes sense while also entertaining is difficult!? Hint: everyone. Not only that, but for those who were paying attention in the credits for Episode 6, my previous story/content editor has finally had to bow out of the project. This has led me into a nasty predicament. Despite that, I refuse to give up on finishing MGD. There’s other long form stories I want to work one, but I’m forbidding myself to start any of them until MGD is over and done with as a means of motivating myself to keep at it.

I’ll let you all know when there’s more to talk about.

And on the off chance you have $10 lying around and really want to see what all of MGD Episode 7 that currently exists, the most recent draft is floating around on the Bodysuit 23 discord channel for the $10 backers and up. Though I must warn you: it’s pretty fucking rough.

Looks like the buttons broke/disappeared despite the code not having changed. Well RIP. Guess I’ll have to look into what to do.

Edit: From Squarespace:

“Thank you for reporting this. I can confirm this is related to an issue with the search functionality on our end. We’ve reported this to our Engineering team, and they’re currently prioritizing the issue.
Please keep in mind that there are many moving parts we need to address before we roll out a solution. We thoroughly test all fixes before they’re released to ensure they don’t affect other Squarespace components or customers.
As a result, we can’t guarantee how long it will take to fix issues like the one affecting your site. Also, because of the volume of requests we receive, we can’t always follow up personally when the issue is resolved.
That being said, customer bug reports are an important part of how we continue to improve our platform. If you come across any other unusual behavior, please let us know.”

So until then, it’s out of my hands. Hopefully they’ll get things fixed soon so it’ll be easy to read the comic again. Until then, the easiest method to read it will be my pixiv and deviant art account.

Edit 2: Seems to be fixed now.

Was in the middle of doing the roughs for Patreon tonight when a chimney fell on my car. Kinda lost the urge to work on much for the rest of the night. Because of that I decided to go ahead and delay it everywhere for the time being. Sorry about that!

Edit: Apparently a tornado was about 3 miles from me.

Because of the anniversary stream last week (and Cooper not checking the storyboards at the time) there wasn’t an update last week for Patreon, so now you must suffer their pain a week later. For those curious to see the commissions from the stream, you can check them out here.

Anyway, go watch O Maidens In Your Savage Season on HiDive. It’s really fucking good! It’ll make you laugh and cringe and feel sorry for the protagonists all in the same episode!

Come celebrate the 5th anniversary of Bodysuit 23, where I’ll be doing “Pay What You Want” sketch commissions and stream anime raging from decent to garbage! It’ll be happening over here: https://picarto.tv/Megazone23pt2

Hey guys! I’m running a poll right now to determine the pinups for the chapter break! I’m running two polls where the winner of poll 1 wears a bodysuit of the winner of poll 2, and so on! All it costs is $1 to participate! And you can vote for as many characters available in the poll! Come swing by and make a vote!

Also Dog is currently in the lead spoilers!

Edit: Poll’s Closed. Second Poll up: https://www.patreon.com/posts/29072362

It’s out over on Amazon, Google, and right here on my website! For those who haven’t been reading or don’t know about it, episode 1 is still free to get a taste, and the Episodes 1-5 bundle is stil available for a discounted price, but not for long!

Never cared for the period after the 4th of July, since that’s when stores bring out all the back to school shit. When I was younger going to school it was a reminder that summer vacation was halfway over. As an adult it’s not a reminder that half the year has gone by already. Time moves way too fucking fast sometimes. There’s plenty of shit I wanna get done but have been super slow on, and eventually time’s gonna run out and it’ll never get finished. I say this, but then I’ll hop onto reddit and waste hours reading askreddit and the news. Nobody but myself to blame.

The positive side is summer stuff is now on clearance. I bought a bunch of foam glow sticks for 49 cents each. I plan to dump them onto my sister who will no doubt find a fun thing to do with them.

As you can see I took off from working on the comic this update to do jack shit. Just staying home and doing nothing. Except a dentist appointment yesterday and visiting family for a 4th of july/celebrate brother-in-law’s birthday early. And some commission work. And putting on these tire guards or whatever to prevent water for going up in my car’s engine.

Anyway, see ya Monday!

Here’s a snippet of panel 3 with and without text for you to use.

Last Tuesday night I got started with cleaning out my ears, which I never really bother with until it gets to the point of there being too much earwax. The way I typically do it, as I’ve done in the past, is start with earwax remover solution. Problem there is there’s so much earwax that it just melts it into this barrier in my ear. Thus I go at it with q-tips to get rid of some of the wax. Takes a few days to go about doing that.

Issue is when I got my wisdom teeth removed that halted that process. So I stuck around with a clogged up ear that didn’t really get unclogged until like Sunday, where I proceeded to start the process over again on the other ear.

Anyway turns out this was all a terrible idea and now I have an ear infection where it felt like a nail was stabbing the inside of my ear until the eardrum broke open the damn a tiny bit. The other ear also has a bit of an infection too.

Worse was I went to the doctor today because I was pretty sure I had an ear infection and the pain kept me up late last night. I used up two hours of PTO and went during lunch time to get it checked and hopefully get some antibiotics. The doctor checked my ear and was like “Nah, I don’t see an infection. Might just be sinuses. Here’s some nasal sprays I recommend.”

I go back to work, where the nail driving pain returns, where blowing my nose resulted in a super sharp pain in my ear along with leakage. I was like “Okay, yeah, this shits definitely infected.” Thought about waiting until tomorrow or Friday to go back to the doctor’s office, but my Mom rightfully told me to just call them and explain what happened.

I called up, told the doctor, and I was able to just show up and skip the waiting room. Another doctor checked my ears and said “I don’t know how they looked earlier today, but they sure don’t look good now.” With that I was finally able to get a prescription for antibiotics. Got ear drops along with pills.

Also antibiotic ear drops are fucking expensive.

Moral of the story: clean your ears regularly. If you wind up waiting to long and it gets clogged, go to a doctor and get them to fix shit instead of you.

What a fucking week.

Hey guys! I’ve made posts about it on patreon and Twitter already, but this morning I went and had my wisdom teeth removed and not in shape to get much work done. Things will be back to normal next week!

Now, whenever I see a biography/dramatization of a real person, I try to go in with the mindset that I’m watching a fictionalized story. Some parts are probably based on actual events, but usually when you stick close to real events there isn’t much of a story, and movies love to portray people that might not accurately reflect the person in real life. One example being Saving Mr. Banks. While Tom Hanks does a good job playing Tom– Walt Disney, he plays him more as a lovable character than the businessman Walt Disney truly was.

(If they ever make a biopic of Hayao Miyazaki they better portray him as the angry old man who yells at clouds while smoking a pack of Cherry cigarettes and being highly disappointed at every person working under him, because he’s far from the lovable grandpa people love to draw him as. Also would be super fun to watch him talking shade on Osamu Tezuka and Hideaki Anno.)

Anyway, back to Tolkien, the way the film is done is constant flashbacks throughout his life leading up to his time as a soldier in WWI, showing glimpses at the things that would eventually be used as inspiration for Middle Earth. There’s also cool imagery with mixing fantasy with reality, especially during the combat scenes. Seeing people get shot to hell while shadow creatures go about the battlefield, culminating at a giant warrior from hell looking shadow standing before Tolkien. It’s pretty neat. The music was really good too, with these nice orchestral movements. You can find the soundtrack on youtube or wherever. I particularly like Fellowship and Helheimr.

It was cool to see Tolkien and his friends/TCBS creating works of art and showing them to one another, encouraging each other to continue and improve their craft, even if their parents/guardians are against it. Made me wish I had a group of friends like that growing up. The actors do a great job showing a great kinship with one another.

I’m also a huge sucker for works about writers. Whether it be anime or live action, something about seeing others and their struggles to write always gets me hyped to sit down and work on my own things. I also wish I could get famous enough someday that Hollywood would make a (terrible) biopic about me, with huge swathes of boring nothing happening as I don’t do jack shit.

Saw Code Geass: Lelouch of the Alive Again Because Money, Babyyyyy last night. It was swell.

At first I wasn’t gonna see it in the first place, but I had a $5 fandango credit from watching shit through AMC A-List, with another one coming after next week, and you can’t stack them onto one order because fuck you, and it was gonna expire before I’d have a use for it for anything else, so I went. It helped that I went with low expectations because I watched both season 1 and 2 through fansubs back when it was coming out and man, R2 was crap. Whereas season 1 felt like there was a plan the writers of the show were going for, R2 felt like they had no idea what the hell they were doing other than “GOTTA THROW A TWIST IN THERE!” Don’t get me wrong, all of Code Geass is dumb as hell, but season 1 was fun dumb. 

The movie felt like dumb season 1 fun, which I appreciated. Probably helped they had a decade and change to come up with something. The fights scenes were awesome, with one being so fucking dumb with the Geass stuff that I couldn’t help but let out a burst of air through my nose.

I don’t need another one.

Laika are the fucking masters when it comes to stop motion animation.

Saw Missing Link twice this past week (second time so I could get my fandango points and get $5 off a ticket for Studio Movie Grill), and the stop motion blows my mind sometimes. I can only imagine the painstaking work it takes to make sure mouth movements match with dialogue, while at the same time characters are moving around. Hell, there’s tiny little facial movements that make me go “they really printed another face just to have that one little mouth twitch?”

The actual story content is alright. As a kids film it works. Just like the two other Laika films I saw (Paranorman and Boxtrolls, though Boxtrolls kinda sucked). If it were a standard CG film I probably wouldn’t give it much attention. It’s very run of the mill. And in a way, it’s a shame in my opinion. Laika has this brilliant style of animation that few others can do, are the masters of their craft, and they use their talents to make something that’s otherwise just okay. I would love to see someone that could pump out a super emotional story like Pete Docter take a stab at using Laika’s animation and create something truly amazing.

This isn’t to say every kids film has to be something up and beyond the standard fare. There’s a place for them in the world. Hell, I want to come up with stories that otherwise would be labeled as such. But man, it feels somewhat disappointing seeing such magnificent art being underutilized like that. Maybe Coraline and Kubo are what I’m looking for, despite never having watched them. I don’t know.

Regardless, it’s a fun film with an aesthetic I enjoy and some funny moments that got a stream of air shooting out of my nose from me.

Also, I’ve listened to this 86 times according to Google since yesterday.

(The following was the Patreon blog post from last week to explain the lack of a comic update.)

I’m mentally (and physically) exhausted tonight. I got about a third of the way through the roughs before feeling I needed to tap out. I don’t have it in me tonight to do the hours long back and forth with Cooper in regards to fixing the line art.

Yesterday I drove over to my parent’s house to work on my car, which has been on its last legs for years now. How it keeps going I’ll never know. I guess it’s the resilience of Mitsubishis.

So anyway, my dad and I work on the car and then I head out around 10 ish pm. As I’m driving down the highway my tire decides to end its life and blow out. All around the side facing the inside of the tire is shredded. Hubcap MIA too. Worse was I was in the fast lane and the tire that blew out was on the passenger side. I should’ve pulled over to the left side median to get off quicker, but there was a decent size break in traffic for me to go ahead and hop lanes so I could pull over to the right median. That way I wouldn’t have my back facing traffic going 70+ mph. Also the right side median is wider. Here’s where I was pulled over on google maps for those curious. 

Some dude happened to pull over to help, but that mostly resulted in him just holding a flashlight for me as I changed the tire. It was super helpful since the light wasn’t all that great there. After I got the tire changed I drove back to my parents to stay for the night as there was no way in Hell I was gonna make the 30 odd mile trek back to my apartment on a spare.

Cue me being awake most of the night and getting jack shit for sleep.

Finally made it home a few hours ago with a used tire to replace the blowout.

Overall it could’ve been way worse, like if I had blown further out where there’s cement barricades running along the median. Regardless, I just want to finish doing laundry and then crap out on the couch for a bit then go to bed early tonight.

God knows how I managed to make it this far!