February Update 2023

Hi everyone! Hope you’ve all had a great weekend. I wanted to make an update post to let you all know a little bit about what’s been going on in my life, what’s coming up this month and what I’d like to accomplish for the rest of the year. Without getting too into it, January was definitely not the most fun month for us over here at the old Bonerbob house, so updates were slow and I wasn’t able to get as much drawing done as I wanted to in general. The most obvious result was December’s comic coming out pretty late, hopefully it was worth it to you all though! Despite getting off to a rocky 2023 I have high hopes for the rest of the year in terms of new comics and art, and there are a few new things I’d like to experiment with this year.

Since February is going to mark the first month of brand new content on this Patreon for 2023 I want to take the opportunity to slightly adjust my monthly work schedule and how I release projects. So throughout February I am going to be releasing a bunch of polls, because some of the adjustments I want to do will be determined based on feedback from you guys. Regular monthly fanart polls will also be back this month, and with fanart polls I’ve never really been great at sticking to a consistent framework in general. I don’t mind having them flexible to some degree but for this month it's not gonna change much as what I’ve been doing more recently. This month will have 2 polls relating to one theme divided between male and female characters, originally I started doing fanart polls that way because I wanted to draw male characters more often and knew deep down if they shared spots on polls with female characters they would most likely rarely (if ever) get picked, this is just kind of the nature of nsfw art. However even I understand limiting fanart polls to being segregated by gender can be pretty limiting for numerous reasons, especially when it’s just male or female genders. In the future I’ll leave it open enough so fanart polls can be themed around concepts and themes that aren’t solely gender focused. More info on this month’s polls will come soon!

You may also be wondering what the plan is this month regarding comic projects. Well something I find is always best to do as a way to follow up a larger story or character focused comic is with something a but lighter and more focused. I have an idea for a short little Amy and Jan comic that would be adorable as a Valentines themed comic, but I also want to devote some time this month to develop some new characters and self-contained stories. So I think this month I’ll probably end up doing 2 shorter minicomics rather than one larger normal sized comic. Expect some concept art and of course more polls soon to cover the topic of new characters.

So like I mentioned previously I do want to make some adjustments to how I do comics as well. Some of the changes will be based on results of the polls I put up throughout the month, but what I mainly want to accomplish is 2 major things:

1. Increase the overall quality of my work

2. Prevent creative burnout

I am not necessarily unsatisfied with the level of work I put out currently but where I really would like to get to is at some point be at a place where I am producing higher quality looking pages, and what that would probably require is for me to focus less on pushing out comic pages at a fast rate. Making comics is still something I really want to keep working on long term and I want to be putting out my best work as often as possible. This is also where burnout comes into play, as I’m sure many other artists can confirm, the burnout is real. I think for me working on the same project for extended periods of time is surely a big contributing factor so I think for a while I’d like to see if releasing shorter scaled projects with a higher frequency will help. Now for those of you who do actually like longer comics or bigger scaled stories I don’t plan to never do them again, but I’ll probably space them out more, or in some cases maybe even work on some as back-burner projects over the course of several months while simultaneously working on smaller scale stories. Hopefully this ends up being great for me and also for all of you guys in the end as I will be spending less time stressing out over me taking so long to release finished work and you’ll all get more frequent updates in general. Once I put out those polls I was referring to earlier you’ll understand but I also want some input from you guys as to what kind of stories you want to see more of, especially in regards to tone and characters.

Another thing I’ve been looking into recently, and it’s something I’ve expressed a lot of interest in publicly multiple times before, is getting physical stuff released of my work. The first thing that comes to mind is obviously getting my comics printed in some kind of book, and trust me I’ve looked into quite a few options right now so let’s just say it’s something I’m extremely interested in doing at some point. I’ve also considered doing some kind of monthly swag related feature through Patreon, I know that some other artists offer bonus things like monthly stickers and such through higher tiers. If that’s something that there is enough interest behind I’ve considered doing something like that as well, but yeah it’d have to be something enough people want tbh.

Aside from all of that, I want 2023 to be the year I make the best artwork of my career so far. Despite occasional rough patches I look back on 2022 as overall a really good year for me in terms of output. I want to say thanks to everyone who has graciously donated and supported me over the last few years so I can continue to make this kind of stuff. In many ways I am literally living a dream that at a certain point in my life I never would have thought I’d be able to live. I also want to thank you for reading this long-ass fuckin post, if you in fact did manage to make it through what I’m sure is a ton of rambling on my part. Truly you are a champion if you managed to make it to the end here. Anyways, that’s most of what I wanted to say, so stay tuned I have more updates coming out of the pipe real soon!