This week depression comix was featured on Discover WordPress, a blog maintained by the folks over at Automattic to spotlight blogs either hosted on WordPress.com or using the WordPress platform on their own server. It was a great opportunity and I got to be interviewed. You can read it there if you like, I field questions basically on how depression comix is done, talk about one strip that was popular and another that was difficult, and the importance of maintaining a presence on as many social networks as you can.
I talked offhandedly about another comic I had done long ago, and how it was my first attempt at a comic about depression. When I was asked what the URL was, I realized that there was none, and if I didn’t make one soon I’d lose an opportunity to have it linked. So last week, I tried to get “A Heart Made of Glass” back online again so it would have a more or less permanent URL.
“A Heart Made of Glass” was my first foray into webcomics. It was supposed to be published as a regular comic book but along the way I discovered webcomics and decided it would be better as that instead. AHMOG is an autobiographical comic book about how and why depression took over my life, but I never got that far into it as it was kind of painful to revisit. However, reading it over I can see how it is linked to depression comix, some of the things the protagonist says wouldn’t be out of place in depcom.
I was just learning to draw comics so the art is terrible in many places, but my lettering hasn’t changed a bit in the 18 years since I started. I’m totally glad I got out of the anime style, it’s painful to look at my initial amateurish emulation of it. But what’s interesting to me is to see how I kind of come around full circle – I pretty much do depcom in a similar way to AHMOG, with blue pencils, dip pens, and Ames lettering guides with lowercase lettering instead of uppercase. There was no Photoshop manipulation on AHMOG and there’s none on depcom either. I didn’t realize it until I wrote this paragraph.
If you’d like to read it, the first two chapters are here. There’s also a side story where I wrote a creepy love letter to no one in particular, and soon I’ll post another side story that I did as a quickbook way back “One Man World”. I hope you find something worthwhile in these, and hopefully it was worth posting.
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