Comic Report #24.1 - A Small Detour (Patreon)

I didn't get as much comic work done as I wanted to this week. I had to finish up a work commission this weekend, and when I finished that I realized that TCAF had snuck up on me and is in fact this weekend, and I'll be driving up to Canada tomorrow.  I know that sounds disappointing but keep reading: I have a surprise waiting in the paragraphs below.

For what work I did get done on this page I'm reminded about the problems I created for myself in designing the Mayor of Tombstone.  I designed him as a wrinkly gremlin of a man to give him that impish deceitful sort of look, but I also gave him beady little dot eyes. I don't remember if I typed about this or not, but drawing eyelids and face lines in my painterly sort of rendering style where the eyes aren't actually orbs but are instead little abstractions is difficult, and I ended up simplifying a lot of what I originally did.  I had drawn his eyebrows with pointier ends but while inking this page I realized that squaring them off made them a lot more expressive, so overnight he apparently trimmed his eyebrows a little bit and that's just canon now.

Okay so the bad news was I didn't get a lot of work on the comic done this week, but the good news is I got something new and fun to share!  TCAF is coming and I wanted to have some new piece of merch to help promote the game, since it's the first time I've ever been invited to a show for my gamedev work rather than as a cartoonist who also has a game.  Because my trip is going to be gamier than usual I modified an old engineering design I did for papercraft dolls and made a little miniature papercraft game art box kit!

I drew references from old box art designs (a lot of them used a blue background/gold foreground color palette, wouldn't you know!) and I liked the tone of the copy on the back of an old Sunsetriders box so much I decided to adapt it to my own game! I'd originally thought about making a print to sell, but my name and my work do not have enough commercial value to command any sort of market and this is something I've come to terms with over the years.  The way I manage to sell things instead is to add gimmick or novelty to my work.  When people see a print of mine they walk by, but if I have a papercraft assembly kit with hand-drawn visual instructions, suddenly the work has a tangibility to it and the novelty of "I haven't seen that before", and so I can actually sell to people who aren't familiar with my work.  The above box art would have made a fine print, but I did it one better:

Here's the assembled box with a quarter and a dime for scale reference! They're about the size of something you'd get from a modern blindbox, which was what I was going for, and they're designed with an internal framework so they're sturdy and not just a flimsy folded box! They're meant for display and since I don't have access to a 3D printer, cardstock will have to do.

Okay, so at the top of this post I said there'd be a surprise.  These are meant to be TCAF exclusives, but you guys have been kind to me over the year or so we've been on this site together, so I want to give you something tangible.  If you want a papercraft box art kit, send me an email at reiley [at] deadwinter [dot] cc with your mailing address and I'll send one out to you when I get back from Canada! Put something about patreon and box art in the email title so I know it's you.

Thank you again for your kind support and patience with my work, you guys mean the world to me.