HijiNKS ENSUE Is 8 Years Old, And It Is Ending

Eight years ago today, I posted the very first HijiNKS ENSUE comic on this website. Roughly (if not exactly) one year from today the comic, as it currently exists, will come to an end.

Short Version:
When I rebooted HE in 2012, I had ideas I wanted to get out and stories I wanted to tell. Once those ideas and stories are out in the world, I am going to put the comic to rest (or at least on an indefinite hiatus). Staring today HijiNKS ENSUE will update once a week is, on Mondays, and it will end in about a year is on hiatus while I work on how and when to end it properly. I will be launching a new comic that will run 4 days a week on June 1, 2015.

Long Version:
When I started HijiNKS ENSUE in 2007, it was just a pop culture commentary strip
. I put myself and my friends into it and tried anchor the gags around this core cast of characters. That turned out to be mostly a mistake for the kind of humor I wanted to do. The writing I did back then wasn’t about characters. It was about jokes and ideas. Trying to shoehorn every joke into coming out of these 3 characters’ mouths turned out to be very limiting on my writing. That’s when I started just doing strips “out of universe.” If the joke was about a movie, I would just draw the characters from the movie. Then, when that strip was done, I’d bring the characters back. Sometimes, I wouldn’t do either of those things and I would just do a geeky pinup/mash-up. This actually wasn’t a HUGE problem until I started experimenting with story lines.

The non sequitur humor and the on-going story lines both using the same characters eventually seemed very schizophrenic to me, and probably to you. I was taking far too many liberties with what exactly HE was, and the audience got confused and shrank accordingly over time. So I decided to give up the gags and tell a story about my life, my family, parenting, etc. I wrote an outline for the basic story lines I wanted to address in the first year of the rebooted comic, finished about three of them, then sort of accidentally went back to writing gags using my characters (only now the characters were myself, my daughter and my wife). The difference is this time the gags weren’t about specific episodes of TV, instead they were about things going on in my actual life. The strip almost accidentally became a hyperbolic auto-bio comic without me noticing.Continue reading

HijiNKS ENSUE Is On Patreon!

The 6 year anniversary of The Experiment is just around the corner and, as of yesterday, I have officially begun my next phase of it… it being The Experiment… ANYWAY I STARTED A PATREON! 

HijiNKS ENSUE Patreon

It’s just like the monthly donation subscriptions I’ve always done with Paypal, but now you don’t HAVE to use Paypal, and I have a cool backend for managing rewards and such. It’s also got a bit of Kickstarter peppered in for good measure, in that there are rewards tiers for donations and milestone goals that unlock more comics, more content and more awesome along the way.

Don’t have time to read all of this? Watch the video I made explaining everything. It’s only 3.5 minutes and my adorable Kiddo steals the show.

HijiNKS ENSUE Patreon Video

Pledge at $3, $5, $10, $20, $50 or $100 a month and you will be supporting me being able to do what I love for a living: Making comics.

Continue reading

Video News: The Experiment & Global Geekend!

I’ve posted a new Experiment Video Blog over on my YouTube channel (SUBSCRIBE HERE).

Screen Shot 2013-10-29 at 12.15.24 AM

 

It also contains my method for dealing with a scratch on your Wacom Cintiq or other expensive, draw-right-on-me tablet PC type device. It also works for regular, non-monitor digital drawing tablets.

 

You can also watch the full stream of the Google Hangout I did with Jack Conte Of Pomplamoose and Patreon (a neat new way for content creators to get paid just to create content  by the people that enjoy it) for Global Geekend/The Daily Elixir.

Geekend Hangouts - S2 Ep13: Global Geekend Finale w/ Jack Conte And Joel Watson

It was a great conversation about making it as a digital artist, and I’m a HUGE fan of Jack’s so I highly recommend listening to what he (and sometimes I) have to say. Pomplamoose had a huge effect on my original plan for The Experiment and I owe Jack a great deal for the inspiration that he provided when I was trying to figure out how to be professionally unemployed giving comics away for free.

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5 Year Experimentiversary

Today is the 5 year anniversary of The Experiment. That means HijiNKS ENSUE has been my full time job for the last 5 years. That also means it’s the longest job I’ve ever held. What I’d like to say is, “Thanks for sticking with me and making it possible for me to do what I love for a living. Without your support I would still be in some soul-sucking, creatively bankrupt job, but instead I get to do exactly what I want to for a living. It’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done and I’m humbled and honored that I get to share it with you.” And while those statements are EXACTLY true, they are not the whole truth.

I started The Experiment with the goal of  being extremely transparent about the successes and failures of trying to turn my passion into my job in the hopes that someone else would read about my experiences, be inspired to do their own thing and hopefully not have to make all of the same mistakes I’ve made. Over the last 5 years I’ve heard from at least a dozen people that started “experimenting” for themselves after following along with my adventure in self employment/ dream fulfillment. Other than being a father, I think that is probably the most important thing I will ever do. If even one person allows themselves to lead a full life of risk and passion and reward and danger and all of the things that are the antithesis of punching the clock, being miserable and constantly waiting for things to get better because of something I wrote or said or did, then I’ve left the world a little bit better than I found it.

If you are a fan of The Experiment and would like to see it continue, please consider making a donation, buying something from the HE Store or Sharksplode or checking out my Amazon Wishlist. I am quite literally 100% dependent on the kindness of strangers. It’s a weird job, I know.

If you want a ZERO DOLLAR way to support HijiNKS ENSUE, please post a few of your favorite HE comics to your site, blog or social media outlet of choice with a few words as to why you think your friends might enjoy reading HE as well.

Hearing from other “experimenters” is certainly one of the most positive outcomes of this whole ordeal. But transparency isn’t just about sharing the positivity. It’s also about sharing the hardships, and the uncertainty. Continue reading