Antares Complex

Hey everyone,

I hope I haven’t kept you all waiting too long, I’ve been keeping content flowing elsewhere in the form of art streams, stream recordings and random art that I’ve been posting to my patreon for early access. The next issue starts next mondayt:

What I’ve been doing during the hiatus is like every time, I am preparing the next issue to be posted! …To be more specific, with previous issues I was learning and created pages in very … slapdash ways. As the comic has been going since 2011 I’ve improved and learned better more competent ways of doing things. But even still with the latest pages they’re not ready to be posted.

What I normally have to do is:

• Add text, format it and word balloons.
• Add any missing effects (laser effects, glows, blood etc)
• Correct any problems with the page. (wonky line art, missing lines, missing/layers turned off)
• Finalize the cover artwork and fit it for the actual comic cover. (scale it, add logo issue number etc)
• Do the credits page up & back cover
• Size the page, tag them, export for web: (scale the page down to fit on a site & compress so downloads are fast)

I know this doesn’t sound like a lot, especially for the time I give myself during the hiatus (2-3 weeks) so…I know what you’re thinking. “Mike, put down Sonic Mania and get your lazy ass to work!”. Well, okay that’s a valid point. But seriously, as this is a full color comic I need a little wiggle room in terms of being able to get pages out. Each page takes a while to make on their own and when they are heavy on action or special effects they take longer to do.

Basically, the hiatus really does let me catch up and have a bit of breathing room to finish pages, get in some art for other projects or fun, lessen any potential burnout…and play Sonic Mania. Ahem! I’d like to go into the process of how I make comic pages more but that’s probably better for another blog post that hasn’t gone on as long as this has.

I hope you’ve all been enjoying the comic so far. I’ve really been working on improving it in SO many ways over the years I actually had to go back and do a major overhaul on previous pages before to make it all more …standardized? I dunno.

Anyway, if you’re enjoying the comic I encourage you to support the comic via patreon. A few bucks gets you cool extras, your name on the donation wall, and the donation page of the current comic as well as early access to comic pages, artwork and stream recordings.

If you can’t, that’s cool the comic will always be free! But, consider it if you’re feeling generous:

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