If you’re a Clip Studio Paint (formerly Manga Studio) user you may have encountered Frenden before – he has a range of brush tools for Manga Studio (and I really recommend picking them all up, but at a minimum the pencils. And the inks. And the paint ones. Oh heck, get them all).

One problem is, though, that there are – at the latest count, 450 different brush/pencil/paint tools. 

Which is a lot.

Now, I’ve always been a proponent of the school of one-size-fits all. Pick your inking tool and stick with it. 

On analogue the best one-size-fits all tool is a brush. If you use a dip pen you’ll either end up doing very scratchy inking (and maybe using a brush to fill large areas of black) or you’ll be mixing and matching tools – which tends to slow you down.

On digital, even though you can have lots of faux brush tools, I still find that you need a few different tools to get all the lines you might want. 

Somewhere in that 450 toolset are the perfect three that will do everything you want.

Here’s what I’d do, once you’ve imported them (following the instructions) create a nice new blank document and then go through each tool one at a time. When you find a tool you like drag the tool up to a blank area in the subtool settings, this will create a new list of subtools including just that one brush.

(Just click and hold the brush you want to move, then move it to the area that’s blank – I’ve labelled the area in the above image)

There it is added – I dragged the Sumi brush up and now I have a new group of subtools called “Sumi” containing just the sumi brush.

Right clicking the name of the subgroup gives me the “Settings of sub tool group…” option – really a slightly overlong way to say “Change name of group”

And I can change the name to ‘Favs’

And I can repeat the process, dragging out every single brush tool that I like in to the favs, quickly burning through 450 brushes to get to the half a dozen or so that I like.

And that’s it. I intend to do far more stuff on Clip Studio Paint in the future, including revisiting old articles I wrote for ImagineFX as well as old blog posts that are sadly long gone and new things. 

If you’d like to read these and other deep dives into comics and storytelling, sign up for the backstage pass! There’s 25 EARLY BIRD patreon passes available at $5 and once they go, it’s $10 (I’m a monster, i know!). 

I generally don’t do the crunch thing. That is: last minute deadline work ’til you drop.

Partly it’s because I’ve always been pretty fast – whether that’s down to my art style or laziness I guess we’ll never know. I have a set tempo I work at and that’s it. My lines come out at that speed.

My speed also doesn’t reflect the quality of the work – that’s an entirely separate metric, I’ve done amazing work fast and terrible work slowly (in fact, more often than not that’s how it goes). I’ve also often poured much more effort in to work that is later described as lazy than work which people are just aghast at the detail (that work I usually do on the phone on autopilot – as long as I have the structural points right the rest is just a kind of intense phone doodle).

Actually, let me address the elephant in the room that you won’t be able to see because, really, it’s my particular elephant.

If you describe an artist as lazy without knowing them or their work ethic and spending the time with them when they did the work – then you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

If you describe an artist as only putting a few hours or minutes in to a page without knowing exactly how much time they spent on the work – then you’re showing yourself as entirely ignorant and again you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

If you call an artist lazy because he’s drawn 45 pages in a month and you’ve not seen those pages so don’t actually know how good or bad he is? You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

(And guess what? those two months where I drew 49 and then 45 pages? some of the best work of my career. The following month, where I drew 6 pages? some of the worst.)

I’ve drawn three amazing pages in one day, and drawn some frightful pages that have taken upwards of 10 days to complete.

Maybe for some it’s a very simple equation of time=effort=quality. But for most artists it’s really not.

God, I wish it was that simple though.

The reality is, when you make your money drawing comics, sometimes your “talent” is the ability to finish a page even though you hate every line you draw.

Sometimes the talent is just keeping your head down and moving on even when every part of you screams “I hate myself, why am I doing this?”

It’s not fun, but that’s the job.

Anyway, my point.

I crunched last night, worked til 3am, on stuff which I quite like actually (TANKS! EXPLOSIONS! WWII!) and now I’m just a hollow husk of a man, no point doing anything. Too tired.

I won’t be crunching again.

There’s an idea that seems so blindingly obvious that I can’t shake off notion that it’s happening and I’m just not aware of it. And it’s this:

A comic shop loot crate service.

Simply, you subscribe for a monthly direct debit cost (say £20) and the comic shop sends you a box full of things – mostly comic things, but things inspired by your choices rather than being specific to what you’ve asked for.

So, for example, you might fill in an online form that asks “Favourite Genre” / “Artist” / “Writer” and, the shop will then fill you a box full of stuff they choose, and every month the box changes (but with some caveats)

It could contain a number of current title runs based on your choice of character/genre/publisher.

It could contain some back issue runs (based on your choices/relationship to the current set of main titles you’re receiving)

It might even contain the odd graphic novel.

Or possibly some tat.

And, hey, every twelve months you’ve been subscribed maybe you’d get a free longbox to put all of those comics in!

But it would be mostly about comics.

For me, I’d be subbing based on comic creators. So, Mike Mignola might end up getting me few months of Hellboy, or BPRD then switch it out for something else and every so often I’d be pleasantly surprised to find an old Mignola strip that I hadn’t expected in there.

Or I’d add Alan Moore to my list of creators I’m interested in, maybe that would end up with a sub to whatever Alan is currently doing, plus a sideways link to other horror genres and maybe some small press surprises.

The idea would be, comic shops get a fixed income and a potential way to get rid of back issue comics that are still great comics but are just sitting in bins, subscribers know how much they’re paying per month, and get a box full of comics – some they’re expecting, and some they’re not, but that they’d still enjoy.

Of course, I’m not stupid, this would be risk and a headache for any store that’s doing something like this, but it’s a service I’d love to see and one I’d actually subscribe to.

If you’ve any thoughts, leave a comment – does this exist? Is it a stupid idea? is it plainly genius but no-one is doing it? LET ME KNOW!

Fire and ice.

Trying to figure out the best way to publish comics/multiple images. Patreon seems to limit image posts to a single image – which is a bit of a pain. So here’s an attempt at getting a comic on here. While we’re in the soft launch period stuff like this will be available to everyone, once we (ie me) get are (er.. my) act together we’ll (me’ll) put this kind of thing on one of the paid tiers.

My twitter experience is starting to reach the point where … well, it has no point. Like most, it turns out, I’ll tolerant a large proportion of a service I use being full of nazis*, as long as it can still do something FOR ME, but really lately it’s felt like it doesn’t do anything for me at all.

(*I know, I know, this paints me in a terrible light, in my defence, I’m not the only one, and it’s not like I follow any of them)

Having inverted the point of blue ticks (previously: sought after awards for notable/famous people, now anyone daft enough to pay so they too can have their replies highlighted on a trending topic showing just how much they’ve missed the point) to the stage where previously you might have spotted a blue tick and thought “Oh, someone worth following” to now “Oh, someone I should block” and having toyed with the idea of preventing the block from functioning. Gradually, I’ve found that the promise of a 15,000 people reach (roughly my follower count) really only ever reaches at most 100 people. To be fair, this was always true, twitter’s potential and actual was always a bit of a ratio and lately I’ve started to see people who I’d’ve followed finding themselves blocked from the ultimate free speech platform for … criticising the ultimate free speech platform.

I’ve now locked my twitter account. It’s still there, but like cutting the blood supply to a skin tag in order to kill it, it might take some time for my account to die and in the meantime I’m likely to keep prodding and poking it in a sort of morbid fascination of what exactly will happen there.

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I’ve been trying to get out and walk a bit lately, as you’ll be unsurprised to find out my physical fitness is just dreadful. I was always fairly fit (working from 14, lugging giant boxes around I’d never walk any where I couldn’t run to) and never needed to consciously exercise because it was all happening at work, but it turns out if I don’t consciously get up and walk my body is more than happy to turn into sludge.

So me and my pal Jim have been going for short walks (his fitness is way way ahead of mine) First couple of weeks have been… not great. Muscles in my calf have quite hurt, which is a weird experience – as I still myself fit for walking, much in the way I still consider myself in my twenties – a sad dream belied instantly by looking in the mirror.

Using the apple health app on my phone I’m aiming for a modest 250calories of exercise per day – it’s about 5k steps (I know, I know, it’s nothing) and I don’t always get there. But I should.

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I’m wondering if we’ve finally reached peak enshiffication yet? That term, coined by Corey Docterow to mean the process where a company ends up sucking first its users dry then its suppliers until the point is reached where users no longer want to use it but they’re trapped, having built a web of important connections trapping them and their valuable data in the hands of the enshittified company.

Docterow’s naming it is useful – in most fictional magic naming something means having a power over it, and I think there’s a logic to that. You can’t discuss something if it’s too nebulous for a conversation about it to mean anything. But you give it a name and the name sticks then suddenly EVERYONE knows what you mean. Now you can go: “Wow, google sure sucks now” “Yup – it’s been enshittified”.

What I’m wondering is will this became a bulwark for companies to stop that from happening. So many companies can be profitable and work well, but they’ve sold their souls to shareholders who want to maximise every single penny at the expense of the customers, other businesses and ultimately the company itself. In the 80s that kind of hedge fund management/vulture capitalism was the bad guy, and now it’s sort of lauded, we need to think of it as a deeply unhealthy thing when someone swoops in a says “I’m going to make this company a unicorn to maximise value” at least now someone can say “sure, if we can avoid enshittification”.

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It is something I think about a lot, but it’s depressing how much more important who is President of America is than who is Prime Minister of Great Britain.

It’s coming time to update my passport, and genuinely I’m considering getting an Irish one. I’ve never ever considered it before, but it makes a lot of sense from a purely practical standpoint. Possibly I’ll end up with both. We’ll see.

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So a couple of years ago now, I got a quick little scan done on my kidneys (the problem wasn’t there, and in the end the actual reason for it turned out to be nothing) which turned up a small – 3cm or so – mysterious growth on my left kidney … cancer! but cancer with a little tiny c. Almost cancer with a subscript c. Caught so early as to be no threat to anything. Anyway, eventually they operated (they froze it off with needles, so couldnt even call it an operation) and it was fine. So now I get a check up once a year for the next 10 years. If they hadn’t caught it by accident, chances are they’d’ve picked it up in a decade when it might have been too late (once a cancer like that shows symptoms then you’re body has it all over the place). Any way, wen’t off to a “hub” today to get my bloods done (quick needle, couple of millileters of liquid gold later and that was it). But, it was in a thing I’d never heard of, so I was “What does Phlebotomy mean?” “Oh it’s just the word that means this is where we take blood”. Ok.

Tomorrow, in my old man is falling apart adventure, emergency dentist appointment – because man have I got a sore tooth. More tomorrow!