Last month the HijiNKS ENSUE Patreon went over $1500, which means 4 new comics a week is in full effect! This is the 1st new HE comic for this week. Here’s hoping I can keep it going. At $2000/mo we hit 5 new comics a week, and that’s when I flee to the desert and hug a cactus until a family of rattlesnakes makes a home in my skull.
I’ve been planning to draw the final panel of this comic for several months now. It is my favorite image of David Willis that I have ever drawn. I cannot say that this has really happened 100% as depicted above, but I also cannot say that we’re totally doing this the next time we see each other. I expect our money will get mixed up, and then we’ll have to sort out which money belongs to whom the way our founding fathers did: By adding up who has the most Transformers and giving all the money to the other guy.
Conventions are a weird thing. They cost a ton, they drain you physically and mentally and they usually destroy whatever productivity or momentum you had going on with your regular work, but we (cartoonists) are compelled to keep doing them. I can honestly say that 80-90% of the drive for doing conventions is getting to see my comic-friends. Sometimes the money is good and it comes just when I’m not sure how I’m going to pay the mortgage, and getting to interact with readers face to face is a real treat, but the friendships are the thing I would feel like I was missing out on the most if I stopped going.
Being a traveling Internet cartoonist is like carrying on a dozen or so long distance relationships. Sure, you can text and skype and stay in touch via Twitter and Facebook, but you don’t really get to build new memories or new shared experiences until you’re getting kicked out of a hotel lobby together because that particular hotel doesn’t allow drunken pizza parties at the coat check desk at 4am and WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU ANYWAY TO TELL ME WHERE I CAM… WHERE I CAM… WHERE I CAN AND CAN’T HAVE A PIZZA PARTY DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO I DRAW BRO ARE YOU EVEN A INTERNET?!
Anyway, it’s a fun time more often than not and a necessary recharge for the relationships in my life that happen one weekend at a time, four to five times a year. I have to pack a lot of living into that single weekend in order to feel like my con-friends aren’t so far away once I get home. Hotel lobby or not, we ARE having that drunken pizza party, dammit.
I miss Eli.
He'll be back soon enough. Joel is almost home.
That happy go lucky mexican scamp. I miss him too.
Such goofballs. We need MORE of this!
#webtoonistlife
Oh lord, this is so true. I'm not even a comic artists but I started making a lot of internet friends back in the early 2000s. I even met my husband in an IRC chat room for anime. After a while, you go to conventions and all not to look at the Cool Stuff or watch the panels, but to see friends you don't normally get to see. It's rough.
I so want to see the last panel done with Joel and Willis in real life (but with Joel as the one with his shirt off)
Wait. Who took the picture?
They propped it on a dresser on automatic. You can tell by the framing. 🙂