Hello? Anybody out there?

If not… oh well. Hadn’t posted on the blog here I a long while, much less posted a new comic is ages. So what is going on? Good question. Deserves a good question. On the home front… pretty much none of your business. :D  With the comic however… well… that is pretty much your business.

I have thought of quitting on Suspicious Minds more than once over the past year. For various reasons. None worth going into any length about. I did talk to some other artists that I very much respect their opinions on the matter. The long and the short of it is SM will continue through the current story arch to a decent conclusion. I am going to do my best… which granted may not be good enough for some, to get a bulk of pages done soon to get things back on track. (Warning they may only be in black and white though.)

At the end of the story, I’m going to see where I am at personally with SM. Then I will decide if the project is worth the energy to continue… or if my energies would be better suited by starting something new and fresh. (I have always been honest saying all along that “Suspicious Minds” was an artistic experiment and a way for me to play around digitally and share some drawings.)

That experiment has been fruitful in many ways. I feel that over the course of “SM” I have grown as an artist (though some could argue I really haven’t), learned more than I care to know about php, html, scripts, and all that other coding nonsense.

But by far the greatest thing to grow out of creating the comic has been the many friends I have made through it. Those who read it, the other artists I met along the way, and of course being accepted in the Eyeskream Wecomic group. It was there where I have had some of teh most fun, and I would argue have done some of my best work… or would you call it play?

The opinion that affected my decision to finish up SM more than any came from Bryan one night recently. He was asking why I wasn’t drawing the comic anymore. I explained I hadn’t updated in a long time. He said he knew… and that he “missed drawing with me on the kitchen table.” Yup one sentence was a sucker punch to the stomach. It hadn’t occurred to me. All that complaining I did about having to draw on a kitchen table, how uncomfortable and frustrating it was to pull everything out each time and put it back up again… I had forgotten Bryan (Ben or both) was sitting there with me. I was missing the forest for the trees.

I got caught up in the pressure of trying to get an update up, fix the code on the site, advertise here, post something there, guest art, etc…. that I forgot about how all this got started. With me drawing with the kids in the floor and posting them online for the fun of it.

I think over all… that is the direction that I need to follow. Sometimes the best advice is being given to us… we just have to be humble enough to listen and be honest with ourselves.

-Mike