I Make Comics About A Fantasy World Where Everyone And Everything’s Weapon Of Choice Is A Sword (23 Pics)

As a kid I grew up on Mark Kistler's Draw Squad, which taught me the fundamentals of cartooning. When I got a bit older my work started getting heavily influenced by Pokemon, Dragonball Z and Yu-gi-oh. I think there are still a wide range of anime influences in my work. Even though people often compare my work to Scooby Doo or Tin Tin because of the simple faces, I don't really consider those strong influences on my style. My comics started out as traditional lineart, colored digitally with a mouse, which is the way I did several short-lived comic series - but after my mother and brother bought me my first Surface 4 drawing tablet a few years ago, that's when my comic career online really started to take off. With a drawing tablet I can work anywhere, any time, with a lot less steps between creating the art and finishing the coloring process. A little sketch can be online within seconds of me drawing it.

To create a comic usually takes about 2-3 hours, from concept through to lines, coloring, shading and finally lettering. My sketch process is usually very rough to save time. I think I enjoy the lineart stage the most. All the other bits are just work! The longest step is usually doing flat coloring because I tend to go crazy and add a lot of small details. When coming up with concepts, working within some simple constraints like "everything has to be about a sword" might seem restricting, but in reality, the opposite tends to be true. You can begin to experiment and bend tropes while always having a clear goal. I think the hardest part is how many ideas I've had to scrap because I couldn't quite make them swordy enough.

By design, my comic series is quite chaotic and the series isn't told in any particular order. This gives me a lot of breathing room to explore some alternative ideas if I get stuck on a particular joke or story arc. I generally avoid burnout this way so I can keep working sustainably. Because I have a full-time job outside of my comics, doing about 3 updates a week is all I'm committing to currently.

I've had someone describe my comics as "a brief moment of joy on my timeline". I think social media has become quite a stressful place, where you can just doomscroll for hours being shaped by the most negative outlooks on a range of topics. If my comics can break that up a little, I think they've served their purpose. My Instagram was originally just a place for a mixture of art and selfies, it was only when the comics started taking off on Reddit and my following count started to climb rapidly that I rebranded it into a dedicated comics account. I've since made a new account for selfies and other comics and if that happens to take off in the same way, I might have to do the same thing all over again.

What motivates me as an artist right now is building a financial foundation so that I can go into making comics full-time. Swords has had a lot of unanticipated success, but I still have deeper, long-form stories that I want to tell, that I started years ago. It was that string of failures that really made me appreciate at the very beginning that Swords was something special that I should keep working on, from the way people reacted to it. Those other stories still live on in my heart, though! I want to work on them too!