dupe

do you still think about it, page 3

first page - prev page - next page 

i need to go back and add navigation links...

this page seems to have not much going on except for mirroring a sequence in drop-out, but what it's mainly supposed to establish is tension. it sets th...

do you still think about it, page 2

first page - next page 

EDIT: i ended up changing the first 3 panels because the closure structure in them was really sloppy in multiple ways. it just wasn't as easy to tell what was happening as i wanted it to be, and it had a continuity issue with the way sugar walked at the bathroom door.

so, page 2  continues to add build-up to later in the comi...

november 2021

hi everyone. i have not written an update post in a couple months, although i've been posting and updating.

i think it's just slipped through my fingers, i know last month mawkish's next ACTH test was on the first, so it was a very chaotic day. yesterday, i spent like 8 hours retrieving her cushing's medication because the delivery i was supposed to get 4 days ago was delayed and then delivered to somewhere else entirely...

let me use that as a transition. my hand has been feeling better, but i've definitely progressively slowed ...

do you still think about it, page 1

next page 

EDIT: i forgot to upload this on friday!!!!! the dark red did not look nice, so it ended up being something more neutral for the black. colors/markings have not been rendered literally in the dark, so sugar's got some odd spots, but she looked more cohesive that way.

here is the start of the next side comic. it will be about sugar as she goes about a Normal Day. we're going to say it takes place about 6 years after the e...

soft-pedaled, page 15 (end)

wow, this comic is finally done! it's filled my stomach with dread for years, and now it's, in some capacity, done. i'd love to go over it at some point and clean up felix's markings, because he was redesigned halfway through.

this ended up being a separate page largely to help add some details; for this one in particular, showing izzi moving her parking placard onto the rearview mirror. she Technically Qualifies for one because of her heart condition. felix does not have one. nonetheless, izzi parked in the handicapped spot because fe...

FaD strip: the breakup

i've been wanting to draw this one for a couple of months now. unfortunately, periods of extreme stress are known to make chronic dissociaters dissociate their personality more, and i was going through a lot of new stresses at once -- moving out on my own for the first time, having a friend who felt the irreconcilable need to "fix" my touch and sex aversion and lack of a desire for a relationship with her after her mother passed, the hand injury, my ex-wife telling me that she was finally separating definitively and moving away because she h...

patron-only stream starting

i unlocked subs-only streams on twitch after realizing they require 90 separate days of streaming from an affiliate to have that feature, and have been doing patron-only streams for a hot minute.
this image will be a notice for regular work streams. i will probably also need to come up with a copy paste for the text field...

today i will be working on soft-pedaled's lines and flats, and writing scene 7's rough draft in the catharsis script.

https://www.tw...

august 2021

hi everyone. perhaps you noticed i didn't update on the first. my hand has been hurting a lot after the art done in july -- it actually started hurting in june, after A LOT of requests combined with commissions to deal with my dog's vet bills and making side comics. july is when the pain became completely omnipresent and breaks or tylenol or ice or heat or all of the above weren't making it tolerable anymore.
my doctor said to rest it and wait for it to be better, and it still hasn't really made any progress in not hurting. i talked to he...

FaD strip: male privilege

hi. first of all, my hand has been hurting from the commission work on top of comic work last month. i rested it for 2 weeks, but it's still in pain, and i couldn't really rest it while moving all of my stuff to my new apartment. (it's only myself living here, by the way, so... i get to decide when i move from oklahoma, lol)
still, i felt like i was going to explode if i couldn't draw some personal art. i used to make so many fad strips when i was on adderall. the desire is there, but the energy and time isn't.
i will need to ...

unfinished FaD strip: integration

here's another strip i never finished, from 2019. i really wish i had had the time to finish this one, but it was so lengthy, and the topic itself is anxiety-inducing for me -- i had a hard time finding the appropriate headspace to work on it at all. notably, there's no script, because it was just seared into my brain for a long time; i thought i would finish it before it started to fade.
the strip was to be composed to of 5 sections, with 3 pertaining to integration in "the past" and 2 pertaining to using self-harm to cope with and contr...

unfinished FaD strip: embodiment becomes the body

i'm going to upload some of the folie a dupe strips i just never had time to finish. i'd like to release myself from the burden of expecting myself to still finish them.
this particular strip was a conversation between dupe and gray where dupe prods with a certain curiosity about why beliefs form -- particularly, why statements initially taken skeptically can become genuine beliefs, why social realities become just. realities. maybe an atheist believes in god. maybe a happy child becomes a miserable self-loathing adult. there's lots of li...

soft-pedaled, page 14

okay, that's the last page of this comic. it's a sloppy ending for a sloppy comic - eased into it with various jokes sprinkled in to kind of take the edge off. besides establishing that felix plans to apologize, it also reinforces his aversion to conflict to imply maybe this problem is not easily fixed. if nothing else, it helps ease into his compulsive appeasing behavior present center stage in catharsis.
i'll try to be positive and say that despite my best efforts, these last few pages ended up being a crash course in getting used to dr...

doodle dump 11

all of these are commissions or paid work of some kind. i've had a lot of fun getting more of them done... i've struggled with commission deadlines for a while, and this kind of affirmed to me that it's mostly because of the comic deadlines taking up most of my art time -- especially without adderall to "fuel" me through overtime. felt like a boost to my confidence as an artist to know i could produce these in a timely fashion.
the only drawback is that crunching so much unrelated art into one period really hurt my hand. i didn't realize ...

soft-pedaled, page 13

this comic has really been unfinished for too long...
i believe the next page will be last. the last thing i want to establish in the comic is the kid at the beginning's perceived representation of felix's child-self/childhood versus felix's trauma reaction in the present. felix needs to understand that they are focusing on the fixed, unchangeable past while their actions in the present can be accounted for and provide a sense of control over a very uncontrollable and unpredictable adult life.
i want felix to come to some of these conc...

july 2021

hi everyone. i hope you're all enjoying the heat wave (TM).

you may have noticed that i posted almost nothing to patreon last month, despite not working on any comics. my dog got very sick at pretty much the beginning of the month. from an emergency room visit to an actual diagnoses, it was about $2000 -- so i took quite a few commissions. a lot of commissions. i have been working almost exclusively on commissions during june, and only finished my last one today.
the other thing, more relevant to the update image, is that mawkish wa...

doodle dump 10

wow. it's been a LONG time since i posted extraneous art here -- september 2020 was when i posted the last one. i'm going to split it up between personal art and art for other people in the next one so that this isn't like, a billion images.

the first chunk here was random, and the second chunk, i realized i hadn't uploaded a lot of the character work i did for leisure? it's a mix of tweaking and redesigning old character designs and making new characters.
i feel bad that my style has less of a twist of realism than it used to when ...

june 2021

hi everyone. happy pride month!

my top surgery is a little under a month out and there have been no complications. most of the pain is gone, and at a month your skin has about 45% of its original strength back (95% at 6 months, the maximum it returns to its original strength pre-surgery).

i spent the month mostly making art i had on my to-do list for my stream and for commission backlog. i'll probably post it in a big doodle dump at some point. this month i'll try to get to some of the other stuff on my list that will be more hol...

fresh meat, page 98 (end)

well, that's it. the comic's finally over, at 3 times the length i initially estimated it would be... but still shorter than 100 pages (and drop-out).

the last 2 pages of this comic were a rapid succession of earlier locations flashed to the reader, with page 97 exhibiting multiple locations within the ward as she's sort of regurgitated out of the structure's inner workings, and page 98 serving to flash some areas which were previously only viewed at night.
functionally, the first 6 panels are a bit awkward, and could have been on t...

post-meat plans

so, i'm working on the last page of fresh meat, which means it's ending this week (hopefully)... which means that most of the content i've been steadily outputting will vanish.

as most of you are probably expecting, i will be going on a small hiatus in may due to the sort of breathlessly awaited surgery. i don't know how long i will actually need to recover, but i'm assuming at least a month will cover it.
after this, the publication of a big comic (catharsis, in this case) will remain on hiatus while i do some othe...

fresh meat, page 97

i wanted the hallways sequence to build a sense of anticipation and tension. the hallways would be recognizable from earlier instances of kim's movement through the ward in color and anatomy -- from the hallway that took her into the high risk wing, to the hallway she passed through for breakfast and admittance into the overflow wing on her first night, to, finally, the hallway where she heard the first hiss of the heavy duty doors. the last hallway would be, hopefully, instantly recognizable based on its green carpet, somewhat asymmetrical ...

fresh meat, page 96 (FLATS)

as you can see, this page is longer than usual... so the shading will be a little bit late. i was also pretty disoriented and tired for half of this week from the vaccine, even though i wasn't necessarily running a fever.
after this are 2 more pages of the comic, and then it's over.

this page primarily slaps down sugar's optimistic argument, and bring her back to her more deeply-embedded beliefs. this is a belief that's more emotionally-driven -- ie, that it's a statement reflecting schematic views based on repeated observation of i...

april 2021

hi everyone. it's a new month.
my surgery was rescheduled, twice, and now hopefully will happen in may. while this is good news in some ways, this is a surgery i've wanted somewhat desperately for 10 years, so it mostly sucks.
why i bring it up here is because that means my hiatus isn't going to begin in the middle of april, but, probably, the beginning of may.

fresh meat has about 4 pages left until it's over (including the one that i uploaded tonight, but still needs shading), so it will likely end close to the time i would go ...

fresh meat, page 95

sugar gets a lot of talking time in this page, as this is consider the "sugar arc wrap-up scene" -- i don't know how much i have to say about it, since it's characters talking, which means a Lot of headshots, and a lot of content that kind of speaks for itself, literally.

kind of cringe, but sugar's arc originally involved a lot more emphasis that this was her Last Chance to get better before she was a lost cause. jack (the mom she is referring to here) is not great with mental illness conceptually, as someone who has an untreated one ...

fresh meat, page 94

okay. there's a lot going on here, but i am fatigued, so i dunno if i will comment adequately on it.

i decided to have kim's grandmother pick her up instead of her mother or stepfather. a couple of reasons: i think that kim's parents are at work and would not want to leave to pick her up.
i wanted to establish that kim's family network is a little more robust than just a small nuclear family, especially since she's an only child. it was believable to me for her to be reared by a multi-generational family, because this is common for ...

fresh meat, page 93

this page is a little longer than usual because it kind of crushed up 3 longer necessary plot points stuck in an ambiguous time territory in the story: kim needed to change outfits, be told that she was being discharged at night, and then kept waiting until the lights went out, where she was told to go to bed and wait until tomorrow.
a lot of beats are cushioned by thematic relevance and a touch of realism to feed them without making them too obvious, but these three form their own scene by crashing directly into each other like a pile up...

fresh meat, page 92 (flats)

this ending is so close i can taste it... what to say about this page... i'm hoping that threading this little slice development will make the sting of a relatively flat drop of carmilla's arc less noticeable. kim not snapping here, and leaving instead, should also indicate a change in the story, even if the conflict still takes place.

for the palette of the hallway, i wanted it to have the same minty teal color as kim's scrubs, like always, but still bright. her colors would be more true to what they actually are, less drowned out by ...

fresh meat, page 91 (flats)

this page was a pain for me. i just don't like carmilla's wrap-up, which i already said, so it's bleh.
this just hits a lot of beats that still need to be hit, like canonizing that these characters are gay, and that kim is bi -- although a lot of kim's reaction to sugar being gay were supposed to hint at that before. to me she reads as a character who has probably not really gotten comfortable with the label yet or met many other LGBT people. in my head, she didn't really have any idea what she needed as a reaction to coming out to other ...

march 2021

hey everyone, this update image is late because i've been very busy for the last few days. even this image i couldn't start working on until around 10 pm today.

this month is the last month before my new top surgery day (which is in the middle of april, not the beginning)... i would really like to try to finish fresh meat before that surgery, so i'm going to see what i can do.

i ended up not doing anything for a q&a last month because honestly, i just couldn't think of a theme. they probably don't need to be forced. i'll try ...

FaD strip: epilogue

this strip is one i had the urge to draw a couple of days ago. the freedom to be spontaneous with my art means a lot to me, and unfortunately i still haven't had the energy and leniency to do this right away, but it was nice to have a sunday where i could whip it out before the urge completely died.

several factors of this comic are a reference to a much older comic from 2015 about a poignant time in my life where i was trying on glasses, and tried on a pair of men's glasses, and instantly felt a connection to how i looked in them, and...

2/28 stream (finished)

today i'm going to be drawing a simple comic about gender and that's it. :)

https://www.twitch.tv/dupereffective/

stream started at 8:17 pm CST.
stream ended at 11:35 pm CST.