One hundred and FIFTY pages!

Okay I’m ploughing through the final Lithium comic, like a … plough through a … ploughable … yoghurt? Also, as I’ve been producing it and going through the Lithium lore, I was pondering this whole thing about the Narnia series – you know there’s all these references to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe…

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Fast slow fast slow slowfast

  OK ok ok hold on hold on I was racing through the comic but my workplace decided it was a good time to shoot cannonballs at me and sure I can dance around like the furry guy in Kung Fu Panda 3, but it does rather put a crimp on one’s ‘extra-curricular’ productivity, it…

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Middle managers can do one

Okay, get ready for a mini (and fairly overdue) rant. As you may have noticed from my comics, I think about things, I have thoughts, one might even notice … I do have a brain. In fact, in the real world I’m a pretty well experienced thinker, paid reasonably well to be a multi-faceted specialist…

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Free from fear.

Last summer, one or two guys messaged me with warnings galore about how I shouldn’t dare make any kind of political comment in my upcoming comic because all my fans would desert me and nobody would read my comics anymore, and I’d lose literally half of my readership. I mean clearly I ignored the warnings…

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Beauty sees beauty.

One of my favourite writers, Richard Rohr, made some interesting observations about Homers Odyssey, and you see a little of my discussion of the same themes in OHB comics 7 & 8, as well as Lithium, and … well, all my comics let’s face it. Rohr points out that in the Odyssey, Odysseus leaves Ithaca…

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Boobies and boo-boos

Comic update: I’ve finished the flipping renders! I know, smashing through it. It comes in at around 130 pages – just some speech bubbles to do and then BAM! It’s gonna be next Lithium out! Woop woop! Excited about this one, had a little read through just now, did a little giggle and a little…

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Good and bad. Goodbad. Badgood.

Someone mentioned recently that they dig my references to ‘both-and’. Thanks; yeah I think we [society] miss that stuff so much – a quick look at Twitter will reveal that nuance and paradox are not exactly commonly understood. Then a friend messaged me this link on the who’s-bad, who’s-good thing: https://thereforenow.com/2011/09/the-tax-collector-with-the-pharisees-speech-in-his-pocket/  It’s interesting, that. And…

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Twinspiration

Okay … inspired by a little plot-wrangling in a recent comic … ahem … I’ve gone off on a bit of a SIDE MISSION to start making this comic that everyone said they wanted, back when I did a concept comic poll last year. You remember the one. It was a comic about a young…

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The quiet project

Now and then it’s good to clear the ol’ noggin and work on something completely different. I had planned to plough through Lithium 8 and get it out before Christmas (have completed the first few scenes), but looking at timings and stuff I think that’d just be a bit stressful. So I think I’ll do…

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Less light

It’s interesting [to me] how, if we fully light a scene, it can look fake and boring. But if we remove lights, leave lots of shadow, it all sort of pops more. I think Caravaggio was probably onto something. And maybe that’s one of the things that makes ‘vintage’ porn so much more interesting to…

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Oh look, a blog!

Hello! I know what you’re thinking; “Wow, this is a futuristic blog, full of wonder and joy, I shall bookmark that MF tout de suite!” And you’d be right; go with your instinct, I’d say. This will be the home to two free comic series which intertwine: the ‘Lithium’ comic series, and ‘One Human, Being’…

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A bit of a boob

Being the genius that I am, I just messed up like 20 renders by not noticing that one of Charlie’s boobs had a custom morph applied when it shouldn’t have – it looked like it was being squidged by an invisible ghost. Anyway, so here’s the patch. Thought it was funny. Basically, tons of singular…

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Cover preview …

Well. Well then. Huh. It will be out this week. Probably not tomorrow or Thursday, but definitely by Friday! Wahooooo! Another thanks to the people who bought me 3D props a few weeks back – a few of them make it in near the end of this comic. Couple of haircuts, a jumpsuit and a…

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Railed

Just thought I’d pop in and say hello HELLO. In the picture above, Jack is helping Skylar with something. And yes, the door is breaking, click-click CRACK goes the poor door frame but don’t worry, for it uses futuristic safety glass and nothing can break that stuff, no not even young Jack’s thrusty efforts. New…

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Slight delay …

So I have this lovely friend, without whom I wouldn’t have been able to do these comics. They … basically … and don’t judge us on this … they pinched a render machine from their work for me. I know, it sounds bad, but the thing is it was an old mainframe piece of kit,…

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How to use a bath.

Look, it’s very simple … okay fine, I’m procrastinating from Lithium by developing the Backyard twin characters, and I’m procrastinating from that by making another *checks notes* twenty pages of the Colony comic, and now I’m procrastinating from that by blogging about procrastinating on it. But yesterday I read through the Colony script and it’s…

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Religion

Someone recently commented (fairly) on the latest Lithium comic; “It might have gotten a little too on-the-nose about the religious subtext. I understand that religion has been used to harm others and that’s horrible but faith can just as easily lead to peaceful, loving persons. I respect you trying to say something but it just…

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Extras.

Anyone who’s written anything knows at some point you have to make up new stuff. This is one of those times, and to be honest it’s quite good fun! We’re fitting a legacy/origins storyline into the Star Trek universe, which coincides with the STFW universe too, but at this stage (this stage being 2020, as…

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Pedestals

So I’m going to be in central London most of next week, doing some silly project.  Meanwhile, I’ll also have my laptop with me, and I’ll also be doing a very very serious project. With boobies. I’m doing that thing where I … actually I’m not sure how to describe it. Maybe part of reality…

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Bleak scifi scenes! Yeayyy!!

Gotta love the unlimited scope of scifi. This is development of a scene I’m working on; a sort of body-processing plant, complete with glowing fluids and plenty of leftover females. Why? Well, developing the ‘dishonoring humanity’ theme, we need somewhere to be the lowest-of-the-low, you know? Like, somewhere where toxic males are parading about, ruining…

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Brainfart

Dear Sir or Madam, why must our brains be like this? Why must existence be so painful at times, and so wonderful at others? Could we perhaps find a happy balance, a chummy harmony to dance the days through? I’m feeling a little of the black dog yapping at my heels rn, spending a little…

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Awkward moments, silly stories

Okay, I’m enjoying putting this latest thing together. It’s a little silly, and forms a kind of chronological root to the whole STFW / Lithium universe thing. And you can probably see a little resemblance to Lithium’s Jack in the image above. So quick update: I’ve done 106 pages, think there’s maybe 50 to go,…

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Trouble downloading? Get the comic here!

You know when you log into your email and you have a hundred emails from people asking for permission to access a *public* document, that the system isn’t working. Google Drive is a nightmare for some people, they accidentally delete shared folder contents (apparently), and can’t find the download link for PDFs (apparently). And if…

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Quick question

Okay, do me a favour – take a look at the draft cover for the next Skybloom comic (this might not be the final image I choose, but it’s a strong contender):   …   …   … okay? Now the question is – out of context and without knowing what positions they’re in –…

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Gimme 2 mins …

Just uploading the next comic. ikr? That’s what happens when you fire a shit-ton of top-secret work at the internet; bulk updates baby!!! Hey I don’t seem to able to reply to the kind comments you guys have put on the blog (thank you though; hi Ixes et al!) – but keep it up, I’ll…

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Eeeehhhh!!

Okay, Colony comic’s neeeeearly here! It’s 142 pages, all but the last 10 or so have speech bubbles all done. I just need to take my time reading through and making sure I’m happy with the way it’s going in terms of ethics/vibe/easter eggs, things like that. So a little about it; I’m really pleased…

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Complexes

Here’s a little video showing the complexity of the new spaceship I’ve been working on. Yes, it’s madness. This is a quick zoom through the wireframe, from the spherical dock / airlock chamber at the bottom of the ship, through living quarters (figures lying in stasis rn), up the ladder to the completely indecipherable cockpit,…

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Oooooh it’s sunnnyyyyy!!!

It’s SUNNY? Madness, madness, it can’t be, don’t tell me the world keeps revolving and the seasons and the dawns and the new growth never gives up?!?! Splendid. Quick update on Lithium 8: it’s humming along nicely. In fact there’s only one and a half scenes left! In a comic of a zillion scenes that…

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Rendering!!!!! Hooooly smokes

I so want to share tons of renders here but it’d all be spoilers, so it’s … hard. And wet. Oh heck, this next comic is going to be pretty good.   You never know, you know? You have this idea in your head, and this script in your hands (and by hands I mean laptop),…

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The very generous person.

Once upon a time, there was a Very Generous Person. They had an absolutely *enormous* penis, presumably, and one can only imagine a rapier-wit, devastating jawline, and thick, lustrous hair to boot. They got in touch with me and offered all sorts of 3D things.And then … they bought me all sorts of 3D things!…

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Why are my comics free?

I (very) often get asked this. Why are they free, what’s your patreon, how can I send you money etc etc. The reason I give them away for free is because life is about substantially more than accruing as much money as possible. I live comfortably enough and I am content with who I am…

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Argh whyyyy

WHY must real life rear its ugly/beautiful head so bloody often eh EH??? It seems if we try to care and love, then we are choosing a difficult, narrow path indeed! The more I understand the path, the harder it seems to get, what the hell is going on?!?! At this rate I think I…

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Comics are awesomeeeee!

Just wanted to say thank you for all the feedback you’ve given on the latest comic, Grace. Comments ranged from “Very disappointed. Your other comics had excellent dialogue – this one had hardly any.“ (lol, btw), to “Brilliant! Telling such a difficult story without text is difficult at best. You are a master of your…

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Render tests

I’m ploughing along merrily, and testing lighting briefly as I zap another batch of 3D wonderment into my computer’s poor render queue, and the little machine winces noticeably at me. Don’t worry lil’ fella, it’ll all be over soon. Couple a’ weeks. Have to admit, I enjoy this phase of the comic creation process; you’ve…

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2020 is MY year! Not yours, MIIIIIIINE!!!

I keep seeing possessive new years resolutions stuff around the place. 2020 is going to be MY year. MINE. My precioussss … I mean sure it’s good to go into the future with a positive outlook, but I kinda think we need a culture that understands fresh starts isn’t just an annual event; it’s a…

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Comic cover image?

This for the cover image of Lithium #3? There’s always this moment when I have to complete a comic and decide what goes on the cover. To be honest it’s tricky because I’m a bit of a perfectionist (it seems … I’m just realising this now … in my thirties), so I have this stupid…

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Last Lithium underway

Okay, whisper it, but … it’s started properly. I wouldn’t announce such a thing unless I meant it – 20 pages now done – and this last Lithium comic has been something of a unicorn due to its slightly not-quite-getting-started status, drifting on and on for some months. As you may be aware. “Ooh, shall…

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Beep beep beep.

Hello! OK so there’s good news and bad news, bad news is I think my rendering machine might be properly bust ~ yes of course everything’s backed up, but the motherboard is literally fried, even though the ram and CPUs are happy; joints and stuff are to blame, and I really don’t want to go…

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An awful lot of gammon

I suppose my problem with racist marches in England, is it’s always people who clearly don’t have any friends who are much different to them. Just a sea of white faces and outfits from Sports Direct. I mean don’t get me wrong, I love Sports Direct, but where we see homogeneity, we see a problem….

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THEMMMMMmmmmMmmMmmm

Can people stop saying “All politicians are the same”, please? As someone who has worked directly with politicians for a few years now, I can say … they are very definitely not the same. People’s real root values vary from one person to the next, and in my experience, true legends constantly rub shoulders with…

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How’s your Pauline?

OK I’ve actually made pretty good headway on the next Lithium comic. Rather than dipping into the blog and writing some nonsense every few days, I’ve instead taken the hours/days I can scrounge here and there to move the rendering schedule forward, and I can honestly say … I think this next comic’s my fave…

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Giveaway #5: polyp elves

As mentioned in the comic, the Rumina character was actually given away years back by a generous content creator – so really I’m just passing on my lighting and materials settings (and some custom body morphs) to make this character into my ‘Rumina’ doll. Two characters included, should be everything you need in the runtimes;…

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Nighttime

It’s weird rendering in 3D sometimes because lighting has to be setup by the render engine to cope with whatever it’s fudging about the real world. So like in this scene I want it to be really dark, just moonlit highlights, but the renderer’s like “NOPE.” and perfectly exposes what I’d intended to be under-exposed….

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Bargain Hunters

“Can you tell what it is yet?” … awww, I used to love Rolf Harris. Whatever happened to … oh. Oh dear. Oh, Rolf. A little too handsy with the kids, eh? Tssss. Aaaaaaanyway, yeah so the greyscale image above is a 3D cross-section that made me chuckle, as I was zooming about the room,…

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J’adore!!!

Holy crapballs, I just found someone’s translated all my comics into French! Zut alors! Wowee, that’s so cool someone’s gone to all that effort, heheh awesome! So here’s some of my favourite bits, en Francais: … amazing, the French for GYEUGG is GYEUGG! Who’d have thought, huh?! Hahaha. Ahh, Baba Yaga. Damn I need to…

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The Eggiest of all the Eggy Eggs

Okay, you know how I like to put film/TV and niche pop culture references in my comics, well there’s also self-referential consistency MADNESS in every comic, too. Here are the top 10 silly ones from Lithium #10 … how many did you spot?!   ^ circled in red is Skylar’s goddamn TOAST which she dropped…

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The famous 24 hour comic

Okay listen, OH WAIT Happy new year etc etc! If you made it this far, collect five ‘cool’ points. <insert worst gif ever /> Sorry for not writing anything for ages but you know, life does that thing sometimes, doesn’t it? And if I’m honest, I genuinely think the next Lithium is going to be…

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Tie fighter

OK I’m writing a proper grown-up blog post that I’ll publish on Saturday, but in the meantime, here’s an old scene file I opened this morning and … added a tie to … Wow, that’s … jazzy, Charlie. What are we thinking there, eh? Who knows, who knows. The marvelous human mind, eh? Never ceases…

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Language, Kenneth!

When I started making comics, I thought I’d upload them to a couple of comics websites, see if anyone would read them, I was hoping maybe like a hundred people might like my work (hey we all need validation at some point). Then after a couple of years it seemed like the work was going…

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Hope for all humans.

It’s weird being a European and seeing this stuff, really. Four years ago a Spanish friend of mine was like “They’ve just voted for their Franco, this is going to be interesting”, and maybe every country needs to do this at some point. We (England) seem to be doing it at the moment as well,…

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Help me tweak the next script!

OK I’ve done 100 pages on the next comic, with speech bubbles and everything, largely because I’d already done 200 renders over the summer and they were sitting there in a folder. So that’s good! Also good: I’d forgotten about them, and they’re flipping hot. Lithium comic #5 is going to be a trouser-breaker. A…

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God is left-handed

Think about it right, God gets to show off the magic in minority stuff like orangutans, seahorses, human knee joints, unusual little cosmic events, moon coronas, stuff like that. So of course he’s left handed, because that means creativity and zaniness [sarcasm]. So of course they’ll be left handed in my upcoming comic [not sarcasm]….

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It’s aliiiive!!!

Good news everyone, my render machine is alive! Kinda. Anyway I seem to be able to get it to do stuff. Mostly. And I’ve taken this opportunity to limit the CPU usage to like 95% because it does seem to die when it’s trying really hard. Chill out, I say. Have a break now and…

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THE SCARAB OF DESTINY

You know how I like to do Easter Eggs, ok? Both chocolate and nerd-reference variety. Well … this is the Scarab of Destiny. Bear with me … Basically, rather than add a single Henchman/Trooper to a 3D scene at a time, I created this Poser file whereby a whole Fireteam is slaved to a single…

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Giveaway #3: bath time

I know what you’re thinking, “You can’t give away that whole scene with those characters! That’s crazy; does Capitalism and the constant accumulation of goods and services mean nothing to you??!!” … and yet here we are. I can and I shall, mwa-ha-haaaa! Get ’em while they’re … nice and clean I guess? Full bathroom…

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Giveaway #4: spaaaaaaceeeee

You know what it’s like, you jet off into space and you forget to bring a SCRAP of clothing! Madness, tssk. I mean, honestly with these giveaways, I’m trying to help people get a leg-up on their 3D scenes; cos you can see how I’ve setup lighting and subsurface stuff on mostly-freely-available characters. Download here….

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You! Speak!

Pictured: hung over. Well, the new comic’s had just under a million hits, and it sounds like people like it, which is great. Extremely great (Nicolas Cage in The Rock reference … oh God I’ve got to stop putting Nicolas Cage references in everything I HAVE A DISEASE HALP). I’ve added the comments to the…

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The big blog swap

  OKAY! So it looks from the stats of this blog like a good number of people can still get in (you’re obviously playing Google’s game; well done you for being patient). So I’m just popping in to give an update here; an extremely kind fan has offered to build and host a Sindy Anna…

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HELLO I HAVE FINISHED ALL OF THE RENDERING

let’s freaking celebrate! I’ve completed the pics for the next comic; and this isn’t just any 50-page weakling, it’s up there with Lithium #7 – it’s like 220+ pages of pure, raw, Sindy. As previously blogged, this upcoming comic is the first time I’ve not tried to explain everything; it’s more dense, more metaphorical, more…

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Working on #7

I’ve finished the first scene for comic 7, giggled most of the way through it, and didn’t need to re-render a single thing, which is always a good sign. Or maybe it means my eyesight and/or sense of quality control is fading … heck, either way, I’m happy. Anyway, here’s some dev renders for getting…

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TWO HUNDRED PAGES

Okay I have a bit of a tradition of choosing vaguely nice page numbers to complete my comics on, like I’d be happy with 56, 128 or 69 obviously, but 53? No. 141? Non. 179? NEIN! So I’m rather pleased to announce that the very final Lithium comic, released by probably the end of this…

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A plethora of body shapes

Well after 8 months of putting my little comics on the interwebs, I can safely say the comics have had in the region of tens of millions of views. That’s quite a lot! Well done, everybody, have a biccie. And with popularity comes interesting information from people all round the world ~ I had an…

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Kinfolk revisited

I realised this week that I have made two major, major cock-ups with Kinfolk! The first cock-up is that I based it in 1795, which was a result of me working backwards from an intended next generation of characters (unpublished concept story), and getting the damn maths wrong! Should’ve been more like 1815! Bum! Not…

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Upsadaisy