As you have probably noticed, no new comics in the last couple of weeks.  I’m neck deep in Streets of Bedlam at the moment, and any time spent drawing is spent trying to squeeze more illustrations in to that book.

The good news is, Streets of Bedlam comes out next Wednesday, although I’ll likely be making stuff up through Tuesday.  And then Thursday through Saturday is the Show-Me Burlesque Festival in St. Louis, which I’m helping put on and working all weekend.

So.  Comics.  They’ll be back the week of Monday the 21st, at our regular Two Pages Per Week schedule, until the next time my life gets super busy or we finish this chapter and I take a few weeks off.  The good news is, I already have all the line art for the next two pages drawn, I just need to scan in everything and color everyone and make backgrounds and write words and all of that.  But hey, lines drawn.

Anyway, see you all in less than two weeks.

Man that took a while!

I’d ramble more, but late comic is late.

Man, that one took forever.  Originally only the top half of this was supposed to be a comic, and the bottom half of the page was something else entirely.  Then I decided to split the page in to two pages, and add some extra action to this one and flesh out what will be 0123 a bit.

Then yesterday I had a massive allergy attack and was useless all day.  That was fun.

Anyway, comic is done!  I’m surprisingly happy with it, considering usually when a page takes me an extreme amount of time to finish I end up hating it.

New page should be up very soon, Friday or Monday, as it’s already entirely drawn, I just need to scan it and photoshop everything.

Hey! We’re back! Again!

–

I’m still neck deep in Streets of Bedlam.  I’ve got another three weeks or so on it before I can really return to devoting myself hardcore to Clockworks.  But I’d like to put out at least one page a week until I can return to updating twice a week.  (And then plan on me to take a week or two off in the middle of May as life gets extremely busy.)

–

I really agonized way too long over the art and text on this page.  I think in part because the Steets of Bedlam art I’m doing right now is much less cartoony in style than Clockworks typically is, I’ve really pushed myself probably too far on this one.  Still, it looks pretty good.  I was really questioning whether this page was up to my standards, until I opened up Lukov’s first appearance to grab the colors for this page.  Man.  Look how crappy the comic used to look!  Woah.

–

If you’re in or near St. Louis, I’m opening for Beats Antique on Wednesday night.  This is a pretty huge deal and I’m pretty excited.  If you haven’t heard them, the new album Elektraphone is incredibly good, and they’ve been a Shawn Draws Clockworks soundtrack for years.  (There’s also a Monsieur Gaston’s Dance Party on Saturday night, and next weekend I’ll be up in Chicago to DJ.)

–

New comic up Monday or Tuesday next week.  I’ve got it plotted out and sketched, just need to draw everything.

–

One of my favorite shows in recent years was Avatar: the Last Airbender.  If you’re familiar with the show and this comic, you’ll probably know why.  While the elemental magic in the Clockworks setting predates Avatar by some years, I can certainly say the show has helped shape how I view said magic.  If you’ve somehow not seen Avatar, you really need to.  The whole series is on Netflix Instant, and is absolutely worth your time.

Anyway, the sequel series, Legend of Korra, is out soon, and you can watch the first two episodes online at KorraNation.com.  Those of you who do watch it will almost instantly note some parallels to this comic here.  I’ll admit, at first I was worried that people would accuse me of ripping off something that came out a few years after I started this comic, what with elemental powers, a giant steampunk metropolis, propaganda, etc, but now I’m just excited because the show looks amazing.  I think Clockworks is different enough that only really dumb people would accuse me of ripping them off, and I encourage all of you who enjoy this comic to go and watch the show.  It’s pretty amazing.

It’s also pretty inspiring, not in that I want to add more asian elements to Clorencia City or try to ape the show, but in that it makes me want to create my own stuff and share it with you guys.  So that’s good.

Also, Mako and Korra are totally going to hook up.  I am going on record.

–

In other inspiration news, the girlfriend and I saw Distant Worlds: the Music of Final Fantasy this weekend, two nights at the St. Louis Symphony.  It was pretty incredible, especially Saturday night that ended with the opera from FF6.  Absolutely worth seeing if it comes to your city.  I very much ended the night with a burning desire to Create Art.

Sadly for the comic, I do need to spend the next week doing pretty much nothing but drawing  Streets of Bedlam.  There are a lot of illustrations that need to be made, and the book needs to come out soon.

–

See you all next week!

The past two weeks have been pretty crazy.  I don’t particularly want to go in to it all, but let’s just say that being poor sucks, and sometimes life takes precedence over drawing cool comics.

Anyway, things have settled now and there’s a warm and awesome spring out there.  (A new dawn, if you will.) This would be the perfect time for me to settle in and crank out a comic or two, except that I’m rapidly aproaching the deadline for Streets of Bedlam and it’s double plus crunch time on cranking out all of the cool gritty noir illustrations that I’m behind on due to the aformentioned life complications.

So, updates will resume normally in April.  I’d really like to get one or two comics done in March, but no guarantees.  If I do, consider it a cool bonus.

Ugh.  That took forever.

–

First, the news:

For the rest of March, Clockworks will drop to once a week updates.  The Streets of Bedlam artwork is due at the end of the month, and I really need to devote my Draw Cool Stuff to that since Jason is paying me.  Free comics will take a back seat.

Come April we’ll return to two updates a week.

The good news here is that combat pages take considerably more work than comedic or investigative or what have you comics, so this will give me plenty of time to block out the next few pages of action.

The sad news is, you know, half as many updates.  C’est la vie.

–

Man, I just want to take a moment to ugh about this page.  I think I’ve hit that point where something took so long that all I see are flaws and problems.  Hopefully in time the memory of wrangling this page will fade and I’ll just see cool art and maybe a few things that I’d rather fix, but for now the whole thing just looks like a mess to me.

Ugh.

This has happened before, and the good news is I largely can’t tell which pages I felt this way about at one time.   So hopefully this page isn’t nearly as crappy as I think it is right now.

On the other hand, I’m super happy with the title of today’s page.  Ambuscade is  such a cool word.

Anyway…

–

New page up next week, hopefully Monday or Tuesday.

I’ve been infested with germs ever since Tuesday night, and it’s impaired my ability to draw a comic.  I’m feeling better, and assuming my DJ gig tonight doesn’t cause me to relapse and feel shitty again, I’ll be spending all weekend drawing stuff.  So expect a new page either Saturday evening or Sunday earlyish.  And then the next update should still be Tuesday or Wednesday next week.

As always, your best bet is to add the RSS feed.

See you soon!

Comic!

–

Check out these awesome Greenpeace posters, featuring giant industrial robots as Goliath about to stomp on a slingshot wielding David.

http://www.crackajack.de/2012/02/19/greenpeace-becomes-david-fighting-goliath/

(Note: I do not care if you hate Greenpeace or hippies or environmentalism.  I just wanted to share some cool robots.)

–

That’s all for now!  See you all on Friday.

Man, today’s page is easily the most time I’ve spent on a page of this comic ever.  Whew.

This is one of those pages that I’ve had in mind more or less since the comic began, and so I wanted it to look as good as humanly possible.  I think I largely succeeded.  Panel 3 in particular was a ton of work, but I think our heroes look suitably heroic.

New page on Tuesday.  See you then.

EDIT: Here’s a full size version of panel 3, sans word bubbles but with a handy Clockworks logo.  Click to embiggen.