It has been close to an entire year since I may have lost my mind and started to make my own comic. The contents of the comic, a pile of guts and a ghost who are roommates and need to replace a light bulb that burnt out, doesn't do much in support of my sanity, but I promise there is a rhyme and reason to the method, and as bizzare as the comic is there is a throughline that I think can be followed.

Before taking on this endeavor, I was pretty much stuck to my sketchbook. I drew a few rough comics in it which was all well and good. Nothing worth published and presenting in any serious way. But it was this experience that made me realize that the sketchbook simply was not big enough to execute my own comic. So I went on the hunt for ideas. I started looking through old sketchbooks and came across some drawings and a bare bones outline of an idea about the titular Gut & Ghost, who at the time had a Skeleton friend. I did some rewriting to have the first two pages mapped out and just got down to drawing it on 11x17 Blue Line Art Board. I never scripted the whole thing at once, instead opting to improvise and brainstorm ideas no more than a page or two ahead of the current page I was drawing.

At page 3 I had reached a dramatic stopping point that I felt would work pretty well as a teaser. So I put together a layout for a folding zine using Scribus which is a free open source equivalent to Adobe inDesign complete with a few pages of ads leading back to my Instagram and website. Originally I had tried to sell them for $1 but didn't get too many sales. I then decided just give them to anyone who was interested and leaving them in stores (with permission) for customers to take at their discretion. While I didn't make any money this way, I found that traffic and follower count on Instagram grew, I was getting my work in front of people AND receiving useful feedback on that work. With that in mind I pressed on, completing pages and publishing new editions of the zine as I had more content to share. For the new editions I tried to also make a new cover to signal that there was new content within the pages. On a third pressing I put a full color "secret drawing" which is revealed when the zine is completely folded out (see the foldout zine tutorial to see what I'm talking about). Check the carousel at the top for those images.

Eventually, the comic outgrew the folding zine format finally landing at a modest 9 pages. The story is still bizarre and a little all over the place, but I think I did a decent enough job allowing it to go off the rails, but bring it back down to earth (relatively speaking) to allow for some sort of sense to be made of it. Once I reached the final page count I grabbed some construction paper to help visualize the layout for a stapled comic, used Scribus again to create the layout, went out to an office supply store and bought a long stapler and got a test print made over at FedEx/Kinkos. I used a piece of Bristol Board cut to 8.5x11 as a mock cover. Holding it in my hands, despite being a test print, it feels like a real comic. I did a live dramatic reading on my Instagram over the past weekend complete with bad voices, bad singing, but a really really good time. You can check that out below