Category: Blog

New Side Piece: Kip Gets A Tip

Posted on November 23, 2024 by Hawkstone

My members and Patreon backers are aware that I’ve been retconning certain scenes that took place in the comic timeline but couldn’t exactly be shown on Webtoon or in print for… reasons.

Manhandled takes place farther in the future than the comic currently does, sometime after the events of issue 6. However, the Emissary Protocol takes place right in issue 3, though it is only loosely alluded to in the main comic.

On the other hand, the events of the Side Piece I’ve just started, Kip Gets A Tip, absolutely are part of the main story of issue 2. You’ve seen artfully cropped parts of it.

Well, paid members are going to see a whole lot more.

I’ll be fitting pages into my schedule in between the main comic and my commissions list, so stay tuned!

And, a little differently from how I usually work, I haven’t scripted it out at all. Apart from the basic plot that Maeve texts with Peter for a bit before catching sight of Veronica through the sliding glass door and flying off in horror, I haven’t plotted any of the rest of the specifics out. So if you’ve got any suggestions, drop them in the comments!

Arachnophobia

Posted on October 26, 2024 by Hawkstone

One day my father-in-law brought in a black widow spider that he’d captured in the front garden, in a mason jar. He couldn’t just leave her: at the time we had a toddler living upstairs. I don’t know why he didn’t just smush her.

I am a moosh for all animals, so instead of leaving her in an unpunctured jar with a few blades of grass, I set up a little plastic terrarium with climbing sticks and a hidey tube and kept her as a pet. My wife named her Becky, the softest, most unassuming name she could think of for a dangerously venomous predator.

Becky failing, or perhaps passing, the cheese slice challenge

Black widow spiders are actually quite shy, but Becky soon stopped being scared of us, and would position herself expectantly under the top hatch whenever I opened it to dump in whatever housefly or stinkbug had unwisely invaded our home.

In the winter I would buy her feeder crickets from the pet store, which was always a fun conversation. (“Oh, what do you have?” “Black widow spider.” “Oh!”) It was a gleeful day for both of us when I scraped in the early formings of a wasps’ nest from under the patio table. Well, I’m not a moosh for all animals.

Becky lived for three years before passing from old age, becoming very much larger and quite a bit older than she would have in the front garden. But while she was still with us I wrote her into the fourth issue of my comic, still funding on Kickstarter!

Cover by Sara “Tlouey” Dudenhoeffer

Well, more or less.

On Villainy

Posted on October 16, 2024 by Hawkstone

Once I started co-creating “real” comics—juvenile stuff I made as an adult as opposed to the juvenile stuff I made in grade school—I’ve always been drawn to the villains. Here’s a few!

(left to right: Diaperman villains The Black Whip, Macrophile, Corporal Punishment, The Slasher, and Fursona. Created by me and Michael McAdam, art by Lisa Redfern)

Heroes are straightforward: they have a laudable goal and lines they won’t cross to get to it. The universe rewards them for trying and it’s all very linear and predictable.

But villains are more interesting and complex—few villains ever believe they’re in the wrong, so finding a way to make their skewed perspective make sense, if only to the villain themselves, is always a challenge.

Naturally, when I started devising the protagonist of my own comic, I made her a villain.

Veronica is mainly composed of a series of flaws; she’s impulsive, short-tempered, violent and flexibly moral. She murders. She lies. She’s promiscuous, and while I don’t regard that as a flaw necessarily, it’s tied into the fact that much of what she shows to the world is artifice, and she rejects romantic connections entirely. She cares about the well-being of exactly one person (not herself) and frankly would be gleeful if her entire home society were to be destroyed by the comic’s primary antagonist. She has the self-awareness to know that she’s doing wrong—and often actively chooses it.

That primary antagonist, for the record, wants to prevent an internecine magical war. And to avenge the callous, offhand death of her husband at the hands of the protagonist. 

You see where I’m going with this: the hero is what we would normally consider to be a Bad Person, and the villain is in many ways a Good Person. Veronica is even devil-themed in appearance and Azrael’s faction are all angel-themed, just to be really subtle and understated about the whole idea.

Of course, when your protagonist is a angry ball of bad ideas it can become difficult to move the plot forward—a problem I solved by outsourcing all the duty, intelligence and planning onto a second protagonist. More on her on a future post!

Because I’m not a monster I’d like to thank everyone who’s backed my Kickstarter so far! It’s running until November 15, so I’d really appreciate your sharing the campaign and inviting others to come aboard on my little story about a terrible person.

Join My Kickstarter, Won’t You

Posted on October 8, 2024 by Hawkstone

It’s been almost a week and we’re at almost a third. That’s not terrible! I’m not mad about it.

Why should you join my Kickstarter? Well, blah blah support independent original work, boilerplate boilerplate.

On a more personal level, though, when I set out to create this comic I wanted to do something that I wasn’t seeing anyone else do. I consider myself a male feminist (I’m absolutely sure on the first half of that and willing to debate the second) and I’d never seen anyone lean into that when creating comics. 

There are plenty of comics that are just dudes. (Or mostly dudes, with a smattering of love interests.) Plenty of comics that are exploitative swimsuited jiggle books.

And a number of comics that are for and about women, made by women. (Which I am an absolute fan of. More of those please.) But never one, as far as I know, made by a man. I’ve never seen a guy load up his comic with all-female characters, change nothing else about it, and run with that, just for the hell of it.

So I did.

The law I set myself was that every character would be a woman, unless there were some compelling story reason they not be. (Or they’re lifted from the larger Twogargs universe.) Heroes. Villains. Extras. Everyone. It’s not post-apocalyptic, the men didn’t die; they’re just not centred.

The Patriarch is male, for obvious reasons, it’s right in his name. Peter Moore is benevolent sexism personified; he’s not a bad person but he pointedly doesn’t understand agency or how to listen. Azrael’s nameless husband is immediately fridged to motivate her.

(I have, however, bent the rule to include two upcoming characters who are nonbinary.)

Does this sound like something I ought to be doing? I’m not entirely certain. It’s certainly something I want to be doing. If you agree that I should, I’d appreciate you joining my Kickstarter about it!

Issue #4 Launched On Kickstarter

Posted on October 3, 2024 by Hawkstone

Let’s assign a numerical value to how much people enjoy my work, that’s fun.

I never have enjoyed competition, either in the abstract or participating directly. The idea of “hey, let’s see who’s best at this” is fine for, I don’t know, track and field—but for anything in the sphere of what I do, it feels far too close to comparison, which is widely agreed to be the death of joy.

Which brings us to Kickstarters. I would just as soon not do them. For pins they make sense, of course, but I can make comics all by myself for basically free. In fact, I can’t prevent it. Sure, I hire cover artists, but that’s mostly so I can gleefully see my characters depicted by artists who are cooler than me—the rest of you can come along on that too I guess

So, of course:

But why? you ask. You just spent two paragraphs and a subhead shitting on the whole idea?

Well, first off, my publisher Two Gargoyles Comics foots the bill for any printing that gets done, so really I should be holding my end up there.

But primarily, comic book Kickstarters are huge right now. They’re the second largest category on the site, as I understand it. My goal for the comic has always been gain readership, not make money, and somewhat counterintuitively crowdfunding appears to be a big way to gather eyeballs.

Which kind of takes the pressure off: whether or not I make the funding goal, I can’t lose. People saw it. That’s why I do all of this.

Plus, I got to have fun making a video!

So check out my Kickstarter, won’t you? And don’t judge me.