Bodysuit 23 #828 (Patreon)

Hello, hello! How've y'all been?

I went to the doctor's office on Friday and got blood work done, then walked across the street via a sky bridge and got an x-ray done on my chest. Then Saturday I went to the transgender clinic and got another round of blood work done! I get a call from the clinic on Friday to go over the numbers, then a call early next week to go over the results from the doctor's office, and THEN I'm off to see a heart specialist on Monday the next week! Whew!

Since scaling back my dosage of spiro I've been feeling marginally better! Not 100%, but now the shortness of breath is much less of an issue. Still, it'll do me good to get everything checked out in the long run. For all I know there could be a different issue at play!

Now that I've been taking things easier for a bit, I've been feeling really good. Sure, I still have plenty of work to do, but I'm feeling immensely better than I did a month ago. Instead of feeling stressed by being on a never ending treadmill of being behind on comic work and trying to get shit done, I'm taking the opportunity to push myself and experiment more!

And today's page is the result of said experimentation! A while back Cooper had mentioned he thought I should lean more into using blacks for shading to help give more dimension to my art, so I decided to take a stab at it on this page! Still trying to get a handle on how much and where to use black, but I really liked the end results. Going forward I plan to incorporate it into all future pages. On top of that I wanted to get away from the way I've done panel layouts for Bodysuit 23. They were boring and bland. They were ALWAYS boring and bland. Every once in a while I'd try to push myself, but the method I did paneling always made it a pain in the ass.

So I completely abandoned how I did paneling!

The method I used for creating panels for Bodysuit 23 would not work with Kat. And after a year of drawing Kat with much better results in terms of interesting panel layouts, I went "why the fuck am I not doing this in B23?" Cooper told me I should do panel layout studies, so on top of using Future Retro Hero Story for style practice, I've now set out to redraw every single page's layout from volume 4. Idea is the more I do it the more I'll start seeing the patterns and get a better idea on where and how to use certain panels. This will ultimately make Bodysuit 23 much more fun to read! In theory! Hopefully!

Halving the pace of updates sucks, I know. But I promise you that I'll take full advantage of this less stress workload and apply it to making Bodysuit 23 look way better than ever before! Then once I resume its original release schedule it'll be as if I spent time in the hyperbolic time chamber and come out all super powerful and shit with some badass looking comic pages!