Bye-bye, 2020! Hi-hi, 2021. (Patreon)

Proper reflection on 2020? Alrighty.  

1) This year "Protector" was released. All five issues + TPB of it, and even the pandemic could not kill it - although many other non-Corona factors had tried, and successfully contributed to the increase in gray hair for the entire   team - up to the forced title change to "First Knife" just a week before our TPB was sent to print. The new title turned out great, but I don't know how we got through it at all!  

2) In terms of art style, I seem to have finally entered my "Louis Wayne" period. Expect fractals in the new year, I guess! 😆 Jokes aside, searching for textures, materials, patterns, shapes and anti-shapes within my lines is why I lift my favorite Pentel Tradio pen again and again. More and more often I ask myself - how can I draw something so that it is actually interesting to me? And so I increasingly turn to things that are atypical for me (a whole series of Gundams ??? From me ??? A year ago I would not have believed it!), to interpretation or illustration of existing material instead of "original content".  

3) For example, my search for aesthetics and visual language for "Dune" helped me to come up with the look and feel of mine and Artyom Doomov's "Yesaul" for the "Dagger Dagger" anthology (space Cossacks!) And now "Yesaul" is, perhaps, my own favorite comic I've ever made (that is, until we get to the second "Knife", of course 🤞🏻🤞🏻)  

4) 2020 was a year of huge disappointment in the comics industry - not only for me, but for many of my friends, too. Fortunately, we can still work together (see "Dagger Dagger") and our audience is, hopefully, still there and growing. As for the "big" comics industry with awful distributors, conservative publishers constantly  throwing  authors and editors under the bus, professional corporate bootliсkers and aspiring professional snitches who see their vocation in protecting comics about sad guy named Eddie or war criminals experiencing midlife crisis, the industry where the biggest event of 2020 in the medium was a pretty useless publicity stunt from Keanu Reeves.... Not to sound too mean, folks, but it doesn't really feel that friendly or chill anymore.

(And no, Comicsg*te is still bullshit, no reaching for unhealthy parallels, please)  

5) The number of followers on my patreon has... doubled, it seems? For this I should also thank "Dune" - last Summer interest in the series of my drawings  brought a lot of people here. So - grand thanks to everyone who is reading this now (͡ ° ͜ʖ ͡ °)!

6) One more question I asked at the very beginning of this year: "What if I release two issues of Slavic Nihilism this year instead of one"? Unfortunately, everything turned out quite differently: both next chapter of "Chernobyl" and the eschatological mockumentary/comedy "Congregation" stalled hard. I feel very ashamed in front of two other authors who finished their comics for the anthology back in the first half of 2020, and I promise that in the first half of 2021, everything should finally happen! 🤞🏻🤞🏻 

 And that, perhaps, is it. Thank you for the past year. On to the next one!