I'm Not Good at Suspense in a New Star Buster Atom!

Almost done this first episode! Very exciting. I maybe could have made this part a little more suspenseful, but uh... whatever!

Doing this comic has been pretty good for me these last few months, both in terms of getting good practice, and keeping myself in a good mood most of the time. No clue if anybody is reading (either here or on tumblr or DA or wherever), but I hope anybody that is in enjoying so far!

A LATE UPDATE IS STILL AN UPDATE IN STARBUSTER ATOM!

Super late on this one, but that's largely due to having an absolutely awful week or so. Not gonna get into the details, but it's tough feeling like everything you own is breaking down, and you can't do anything right!

ALSO! Did you notice the way Fox's mecha arm switches hands!? I sure didn't.

Some Bird Force Nonsense!

Bird Force, my awesome game idea that I can never seem to finish, has been an enduring shadow over my thoughts for almost two years now. Although I may not have the time just now to focus on bringing this vision to life, I thought I'd at least share a little art and keep the dream alive!

I'm also just trying to draw as much as possible these days, for both practice and personal satisfaction. For how much I love Bird Force, I've produced surprisingly little art related to it, and my recent Star Buster art has been coming along so well I thought I'd branch out a little. The composition is a little more ambitious than the previous digital stuff I've been doing, and I'm honestly not great at drawing birds, so this was a fun project. I literally hated the way it looked until the minute it was finished, so I guess it can be cool to see how something can come together.

Uh... that's it I guess? More Star Buster next week!

The Heat is On as Star Buster Atom Continues!

Another busy week, kind of, so another last minute page. Still, one a week is better than none a week, right? I happily just wrapped up a job that was pretty demanding and time sensitive, so the stress is off for a little while at least, and next week should see a normal set of pages for the update!

I also managed to do a little bit of colored art this week, so please enjoy another cool promo piece for Star Buster! I'm really having a blast working on my digital work, and I think my recent stuff has been really moving into an interesting direction.

That's it for now!

An Explosive Turn in Star Buster Atom!

I've been really busy with work related stuff over the last week, so I had to do a short one this week, but hopefully this bodes well for next week!

It's been eight weeks of updates! Of course, some of those have been longer than others, but still, I'm pretty pleased to have two months of productivity under my belt! I think I'm nearing the end of this particular storyline, so I'm fairly excited. This will be my biggest comic undertaking since Janken, which was really only eighteen pages over the course of like, a year, and barely told anything resembling a story (although that was definitely the point).

Hope everybody is enjoying the ride so far (if in fact anyone is reading this), because I'm definitely having a good time making it.

Moral Dilemmas Abound as Star Buster Atom Lurches Onward!

Another relatively short update this week. Didn't use my time very responsibly last week, and ended up having to do this more or less last minute. Still, I'm glad I took the time to really think about what I wanted to happen in this week's pages. There's very little planning at work here, other than a vague overview of the events, and I think that's actually been a good thing, as it allows me to change and adapt the events, tweak the tone and pacing etc. as I see fit. I always liked the image of David Lynch just deciding major things on the set of Twin Peaks while filming, and so I try to keep myself open as I work. I think this works out well for me.

I did a punch of warm up type sketches of various DC heroes last week, some of which turned out quite good. I wanna do maybe one or two more, and then I'll probably post them here just to add a little color!

That's it! Seeya.

Star Buster Atom Barely Continues with a Minor Update!

Okay, so I had a pretty hectic couple weeks with freelance work, personal things, and weather disasters, so I didn't get much done in terms of the comic. That said, I didn't want to post nothing this week, so this week's scene is short, kind of a little aside. I like drawing the snack shop girl. She's a cutie, plus I like the idea that random acts of kindness can mean alot more to the recipient than you could ever expect!

Also, here's a slick color illustration I did just for fun! Maybe a cool cover or at least chapter title type thing, and the first time Adam and Stella have shown up IN FULL COLOR! WHAT!?

Okay, that's it.

Explosive Action as Star Buster Atom Continues!! Yea!

Our first go at a fight scene in this series! Finally! My intention was for this comic to be a healthy mix of action, comedy, and just plain storytelling, so I hope that's what I've done so far. I'm mostly pleased with the look of these pages, which called for me to really pull out the ol' bag of shonen tricks, something I haven't really done in years, except for maybe Janken!!, so it was kind of a treat to do.

I keep saying I have other stuff ready to post, and then I don't end up having it done to a level I'm happy with. I'm NOT good at this stuff. I did finally get a copy of Rodea the Sky Soldier, which I'm having a pretty good time with.  A little rough around the edges, but the fundamental pleasure of the flight, exploration and combat shine through with some practice. I'm playing the Wii U version first, though I've heard the Wii version is much more natural. That doesn't surprise me, but I'd rather get the most out of the Wii U version before trying out the allegedly superior Wii game.

I've been tossing around the idea of doing some less visual story telling here occassionally, so I'm playing around to see if any of my terrible ideas from the past might turn out to be good terrible ideas now. Ultimately its probably best that I just focus on Star Buster Atom in terms of narrative stuff, but who knows.

Anyway, hopefully I'll have a couple pages ready for next Monday. I actually did have all the pages ready to go yesterday, but I didn't want to cheapen the spirit of the holiday by hawking my comic all over the internet.

Electricity Abounds as Star Buster Atom Continues Again!

Moving right along!  I'm alarmingly caught up on my page backlog now, so this next week might be tough! I guess we'll see if I can make it or not!

I wanna post something more substantial text wise later this week, but we'll see if I find the time.

Impending Conflict in this week's Star Buster Atom!

15 pages! Not bad considering it has been only a month or so! And that's four weeks in a row without missing an update! Go me!

I also finished working on another itty bitty thing I wanna post later this week, but I'll try to space things out. Maybe a general update on what I'm doing tomorrow or Wednesday!

Star Buster Atom Continues Against All Odds!

Here it is! The comic THEY don't WANT you to see! Just kidding! Enjoy!

Human bonding over salty consumables, surely the keystone of social order. Consider the very real fact that every week I am statistically less likely to keep posting new pages, and yet I continue. Let's see if I can make this magic happen for a whole month!

Are Mondays a good day to post this? I thought it might be nice to have something fun to read at the beginning of the work week, but maybe a mid-week pick me up would be more fun? That will be a convenient excuse when I can't make next Monday's deadline, don't you think?

STAR BUSTER ATOM Continues! Indoor Scenes Occur!

This scene is just a bit shorter than the last, but there's probably more actual text, so whatever. I'm shooting for around 3 or 4 pages per scene, but we'll see how things develop.

I'm staying pretty busy with freelance work this month, but the holidays are always a little hectic I suppose. I've also spent probably too much time playing Xenoblade X, which is an absolutely gigantic game. I have a pretty strict code about not bothering to fight anything that isn't a legit threat, so most of the side missions aren't really of interest to me, which I guess makes levelling up a little harder, but whatever. I also downloaded Metabots for GBA over the weekend, which is a surprisingly hard RPG considering its target demographic. I've never played a Medabots game before, though I always watched the show, and I'm glad its available on Virtual Console. I hope this means Natsume might consider bringing one of the many 3ds Medabots games to North America! We'll see I guess.

I'm trying to see if there is any other type of content I can post here during the week. I'd rather not do another comic, since I don't want to get distracted from Star Buster, but there has to be some other kind of weird content I can put together, narratively driven or not. I'll experiment and see what happens! Maybe some kind of weird RPG type thing... hmmm... I have an idea... actually... anyway! That's all for now!

NEW COMIC! STAR BUSTER ATOM!

I deeply regret how little I have posted here lately. While it's true that I'm spending alot of time doing freelance work to pay the bills, it was definitely my intention to increase the frequency of my posting here on Doki Doki. As of last year I was doing pretty well with content, but that sadly slipped away from me. I very much want to change that and get back to using Doki Doki Arcade.

With that in mind, I spent several weeks preparing a new ongoing feature. Learning some lessons from Heckbringers (which I definitely want to revisit someday), I've changed the structure here to be somewhere between Janken and Heckbringers. Slightly shorter chapters, slightly more frequently!

This is a story I have been kicking around and working on in various forms for a very long time, so please enjoy this first scene!

The plan is to post a new scene every Monday, and I have at least 3 weeks ready to go, so I think I'll be able to keep up with this. I don't want to say too much about this yet, but make sure to check back in the future for more!

Update Dump of Ultimate Guilt!

Sooooo... I know I said I was going to be posting more, and that I was going to have more free time. One of those things turned out to be true! But I swear, I haven't been not posting because I haven't been doing stuff! I just haven't done anything finished enough to show off. Sad, but true.

So what have I been up to? Well, Mario Maker got me in the mood to hit game development again, and with a vengeance. I actually put together a little Castlevania style platformer that was shaping up nicely, but honestly that will take a very long time before it is actually done. A finished stage as a demo isn't out of the question, but even that would be a little ways off. I'll dump some of the graphics and screenshots up here in the future, but that is a story for another time. Here's a mock up of th first boss fight, just for fun!

I also did a crap load of work on Nova Phase, the 5th issue of which will probably be done this week. That means it will come out like... in February probably, but whatever. It will be good to be close to completing the series' run, and some of the art in this issue is pretty awesome. Maybe I'll post some spoilers. Maybe.

I've also been trying to take steps towards finishing some other little projects that have been sitting around. It is my genuine intention to do one more chapter of Janken before doing an Amazon e-book or something of the whole thing. The cover is done, and the "last" chapter is thumbnailed, with a few pages even penciled, but that's it on that. Here's a look at the updated cover and logo.

A lot of my down time has been spent basically practicing my digital work, including lots of inking and sketching. Some of these turned out pretty cool, so I'm posting them here for fun!

This one was a concept design for a comic my old collaborator on Heckbringers was thinking of doing called Dragonomics. Not much to say about that yet, but could be seeing more of this little rascal in the future. He's up to some other stuff, which I will post about a little later this week.

Anyone who follows my blog knows I come back to this guy every now and then. I'm working on a small project involving him that is going really well so far, but I want to have a bit more of it done before I post it here.

Another one that comes and goes pretty frequently! I don't remember why we stopped working on this game, but I love the designs from it and I'm trying to find some place to use them here. Ideally something that wasn't a full blown comic, but I guess we'll see.

I've got some other stuff brewing, but this is the major stuff. I'm also finally biting the bullet and sitting down to remake and ultimately finish the original Bird Force in a more reliable program. There were was supposed to be a pretty involved story, and a handful of characters that never made it into the version I posted here because I was terrified Construct would collapse and I'd lose what I actually had done. I'm working in Multimedia Fusion to program a definitive version of the game with all the features I initially imagined. It's going well considering its literally been one afternoon of work. Hopefully more on that in the near future!

Okay! That's it! I'll probably be posting another small comic later this week!

More Weeping Pines! And Some Site News...

Working on several things to post here over the course of October, but for now, enjoy another page of Weeping Pines! This poor kid may not be prepared for what's in store for him.

Not a good start to his adventure... is this comic terribly paced? Could be, But I'm working on it.

Anyway, made a big decision this week. After a year on the job, I decided to leave my current employer to pursue personal projects, and return to freelance work. I've found myself absolutely overflowing with ideas over the last twelve months, but left without any time to really execute any of them. Although I learned a great deal on the job, the truth is that I desperately want more creative fulfillment out of my work, and I just didn't feel like I was going anywhere.

What does this mean? Well, I'll probably be posting here much more frequently. Although most of my time will initially be spent finishing Nova Phase (finally), eventually I want to really focus on my own comics and games, even if only to bolster my body of work so as to make getting more interesting jobs easier. I have a fair amount of goofy stuff to post here for October, including some game related stuff, some stickers, and some more comics. Should be a fun month!

I'll also probably be hitting deviantart again to drum up some more traffic on my work, so keep an eye out there too, I guess.

Also, I got Mario Maker! My levels are probably too hard, but I try to make genuinely thoughtful little puzzles in them, so maybe I'll post the codes up here this week.

Okay, that's all for now!

An Unexpected Return! October is the Season for Horror Comics!

Well, I WAS actually posting on the tumblr pretty frequently as of two weeks ago. I even had drawn a bunch of monsters and managed to keep up with the whole daily monster thing for a while. Of course that kind of consistency couldn't be allowed to continue. The universe just had to intervene and make sure that any endeavor of mine had to be interrupted ASAP, so as to prevent it from getting any kind of traction. In this case, the universe took the form of an ill conceived update for the tumblr app that resulted in tumblr simply shutting down everytime  I try to post a picture. Oh well.

Now that I've gotten that little bit of ludicrous self pity out of the way, on to more important things. Today I resolved to sit down and do something to post here, which I haven't done in a very long time. I had a few options in terms of what to work on, I suppose, but what with the Halloween season right around the corner, I thought it would be most appropriate to get a a new page of my barely started venture into horror comics! Without further prattle, I present a new page of Weeping Pines:

Can you tell how much I love drawing that face? Can you? I seriously considered jumping to a different scene altogether after the car crash, but screw that. More nightmare face guy. Or girl, maybe. Hard to tell.

In other news, I'm interested in trying to make some episodic game content for this place. Working on a Halloween themed mini-RPG, sort of like a western take on Yokai Watch, in a way. I'll post some of the assets later. Hopefully before Halloween. Maybe...

Also! Did some pencil work for a potential comic, partially for fun and partially to help build a better portfolio for that kind of thing. Who wouldn't want to read a mainstream comic penciled by yours truly? Don't answer that. Anyway, I might post some of that later too.

Okay, that's it! Maybe more Weeping Pines this week.

Tumblr Halloween Fun: Monster Collection!

I know I'm a horrible slacker that hasn't posted here in forever, but I promise I'm a busy guy. Kind of. Whatever.

Anyway, I have actually been using the Doki Doki Arcade tumblr an awful lot lately. As I mentioned long ago, the tumblr is basically a sketch dump where I post cool doodles from my notebook, the kind of thing that mostly gets lost forever. If you dig my art at all, and want to see the stuff that eventually becomes the nonsense I normally post here or on Deviantart, then definitely check it out. Especially because I am actually doing a thing. A cool thing. Yes.

Whether out of some misguided desire to extend the Halloween season at every opportunity, or out of a recent madness involving playing way too much Fossil Fighters, I've been drawing ALOT of monsters lately. Initially it was just a fun way to warm up, but as I was driving to work this week, I had an idea; what if there was a monster battle game that played off of ACTUAL monsters as its theme? Sure, Venusaur or Metal War Greymon are kind of monsterous, but they're not exactly scary. I'm talking like, horror movie creatures done up like adorably collectible little imps. With that in mind, I started doing a daily doodle, every day a different monster, leading up to Halloween. No clue what I'm gonna do when I'm all done, since I should end up with like 60 distinct little nightmares to play with, but stickers or cards are definitely possibilities.

I'm gonna post the first three here right now, because I just can't post anything without a picture or two, but definitely check out http://jmatchead.tumblr.com/ to see more as the days go by.

 First up is an adorable Frankenstein's monster style creature. Part Android 8 from Dragon Ball, part Viktor from Dark Stalkers, I love his everything, but his mismatched arms and electric power are definitely his strong points.

 Next up, a frantic Wolf Man style creature. Inspired mostly by the original Universal Lon Chaney Jr. look of just a hairy guy, but also has shades of the wolf guy from Shining Force.

I wanted to subvert all of the mystique that vampires have accrued over the years and make this guy goofy as hell.

Can you imagine catching these guys and having them battle for you? That Frankenstein, which I am now realizing should definitely be named Frankenstrong, would have some absolutely sick attacks.

Anyway, definitely check out http://jmatchead.tumblr.com/ for more monsters! Tomorrow may just be a mummy!

A Little Ja-Ja-Ja-Janken Update!

I know that I wrapped up Janken a VERY long time ago at this point. Things are busy. That said, I go crazy if I don't work on something fun for myself, so I spent a little time putting this together tonight. I need to fix up some mistakes in the dialogue, and I really would like to do an epilogue or something to give a little closure to the story, and maybe a summary of the events of the hundreds of chapters I skipped to get to this conflict. Could be fun. Need time.

Recently wrapped up a project that had been on the back burner for a little while, but it could be some time before I ever have anything worth showing off on that front, as it is a collaboration and my contribution is pretty much over. I'll see if I can post anything related, as some of the concept art and stuff is just plain cool.

Also! I went to San Diego Comic Con to sign stuff and help sell Nova Phase to people! I met lots of really cool people, some of whom even bought stuff from me! If you came and saw me, thanks! I hope you enjoy your book! And if you're one of the people that just asked me to draw them Steven Universe for free, I hope you enjoy your drawing of Steven Universe!

Oh, and on a much less important but still potentially cool note, I have actually been posting stuff to the Doki Doki Arcade tumblr with some regularity lately. Mostly marker doodles of super heroes, so nothing super exciting, but take a look if you want to see a hastily thrown together illustration of the X-Men that screams "I grew up in the 90's".

http://jmatchead.tumblr.com/

That's it!

Heckbringers Action Continues With Intense Vomit Action!

Another page in a timely manner! It's kinda funny that when I was doing Basurake, I didn't think doing a weekly color comic was really feasible, but now that I'm working a full time job, I'm somehow finding the time. Funny how things work out! Speaking of, I keep saying I'm gonna post Basurake. That will happen someday, just need to figure out whether I want to do it page by page, or in bunches, or what.

Anyway, this alley scene is just about over! And the two principle characters are about to actually interact! Who would have thought this would have taken months to do! Hilarious. Neither character has a name yet, of course, but hopefully in the near future that will change as well. Not next week, because I already scripted that page. That's right! I started actually scripting these! Hooray.

I think I need to get the dvds of Home Movies. Its crazy how much you miss something once its off Netflix. God what a good show.

Last topic! Anybody notice that there's barely any anime for kids anymore? What the hell? Kaito Joker or whatever should get a Saturday morning localization. 4KIDS! WHERE ARE YOU!?

Okay, that's enough. Dinoswords stuff soon, probably. What? Shh.

IS THIS THE END OF WEEPING PINES!? No.

The End! Just kidding, there's gonna be more, but that's the end of this first scene.I'm sure things won't get MUCH weirder from here on. Also a joke, things are gonna get super weird for a little while.

Been keeping pretty busy lately, and have been pretty happy with what I've been getting done. I posted my first sketch on to tumblr, and more are gonna be popping up over the next few days, so keep an eye out there.

Watched like 2 hours of Digimon Fusion on Netflix today, partially to get myself into a solid Saturday morning cartoon mindset while working on Heckbringers, and partially just out of nostalgia for a time when random anime just showed up on tv all the time. Anybody remember Mon Colle Knights? What the hell was that all about? Anyway, man, some of the designs in Fusion are absolutely insane. There's this weird, old timey toy robot looking guy, I think his name was Stereomon? He's ridiculous looking, and anytime any other digimon fuses with him, his innate boxiness influences the look of the resulting fusion way more than it probably should, so anybody he fuses into looks ridiculous as well. Its surprisingly charming.

Started playing Pokemon Rumble World, and I have to say it is quite fun. Pokemon Rumble was never particularly deep, but the experience is a pleasant one, and its FREE, which is cool. Pokemon Shuffle is also surprisingly fun, like a less bullshitty version of Puzzles and Dragons. I've been a sucker for all of the free 3ds games so far, and now I'm starting to miss Rusty's Real Deal Baseball and Steel Diver Sub Wars. God I love my 3ds.

Okay, I think that's enough of an insight into how I wasted a lot of time THIS week. In terms of being productive, I finally sat down to work on Nova Phase issue 5, which is gonna be slow going, but I'm glad I finally got the ball rolling. First 6 or 7 pages are drafted, so I'll probably start trying to get some work done on the final art. I'll post previews of stuff as it happens.

Also, I'm penciling a comic for my brother, and while I can't say much about it right now, I think it's gonna kick ass. I'll probably post some concept art and such later, though I don't know where the comic itself will go. I'll share more details once I have them.

That's it for now. New Heckbringers on Tuesday!