I started making stickman comics back in school with my friends. We all had our own characters and stories, and it was just a bit of fun. For some reason, I kept making comics long after the other guys stopped. The comics took a more serious and professional form, and what you see on this site today is where things currently stand.

I had many little stories and hundreds of ideas for more, but the one that survived and became a big meaty beast was this series I’ve since dubbed ‘Meridian Six’. That name covers everything I’ve worked on that fits into the one universe of characters and events. In 2017, I scrapped everything I’d made since 2006 and restarted it, with the intention of making the style more accessible to new readers, to spare them having to grind through a bunch of pencil-drawn stickmen to get caught up on the story.

I thought it’d be neat to keep to the same storyline with a few edits here and there, to honour the original idea. That story is ‘Cold Reset’, and it’s my longest running work on here by far. I’m gradually getting back to the point where I left off in 2017, and the style has evolved quite dramatically. But I couldn’t be happier with where it is.

Stick around and join me in this journey as I build this weird and wacky world that lives rent-free in my head.

NOTE: This entire page from 2006-2022 was written in 2022 – statements about my ‘current’ thoughts and feelings are from then. I’m writing this note in 2024 after spotting a few things that have changed since, but I want to preserve the information as it was 2 years ago.

So, way back in 2006, when I was a little kiddo in school, my friends and I got into a short-lived fad of making stickman comics on our break times. It was a fun social thing that we all just did for a good while.

We each had our own characters and storylines, and at first it was all very silly. I made bizarre one-off strips that didn’t make sense and parodies of things like Star Wars and James Bond, which made even less sense.

I was always an arty kid since I was like 2, so the style of my comics gradually upgraded to characters that weren’t stickmen the more time and effort I put in. I got sucked into the world a little bit.

My first comic featured two cops – Brandon and George – battling a sombrero-clad criminal called Amigo. Sound familiar? The three would get into shenanigans in each comic and eventually they’d all face off against a weird vampire guy called Jack, who led an army of robots. Or something.

These early stories were more humourous than serious, with stupid things happening all the time, and plenty of in-jokes that others wouldn’t get. The aim within my friend group was just to make each other laugh. And laugh we did!

I named this series “Cops & Robberz” – yes, with a Z – and that started off a (now) overwhelmingly huge world in my head.

C&R was getting bigger as the months went on. I’d carry a scrappy, folded piece of paper around school in my pocket – my latest comic – and I’d work on it here and there when I had some time in and out of class. I always remember the out-facing part of the paper getting all smudged in my pocket so when I unfolded it, it was already ruined. This was part of the reason I later upgraded to pen. I know – big step!

I started, for the first time, a story that would span more than one or two comics, with an idea to set a story in the year 4000 and feature time-travelling versions of my characters meeting their future selves and fighting futuristic bad guys. My ideas for it were bigger than I could handle, and so I only ever made like 3 chapters of it. I still have those original comics, so that’s pretty cool I guess.

I also produced something called ‘The Feature Length Trilogy’ which was a concise but complete story across three parts. It was the first time I’d finished a longer story. That’s neat!

I next wrote a story called ‘Game On!’ and it featured Amigo in an Assassin’s Creed style Animus, being forced to enter a Matrix world and catch a bad guy. It was chock full of references to videogames, silly humour, and some cameos from my other characters.

It was also partially coloured with pencils, and it looks pretty good! Some of the ideas from this have stuck with me over the years and I’m semi-planning on working them back into the new line of comics in the future.

I went on a holiday to Spain to stay with my grandparents for a few weeks soon after this, and I took my huge chonky binder full of comics with me so that I could work on them out there. I think by this point, I was pretty obsessed with making comics. Didn’t take me long, did it?

The story I made out in Spain was called ‘5K’ and it was a sequel to – you guessed it – ‘4K’, which I still hadn’t finished, but I knew how it was ending, so I just skipped ahead. 5K was even more time-travelling and went even further into the future, where the world was a barren wasteland and people lived underground. There was a struggle between the surviving humans and the invading aliens.

These aliens hailed from a planet I made up called ‘Dincorta’ and so, naturally, the aliens were called Dincortans. I had a lot of ideas for implementing Dincorta into the story, and I never got around to it.

Regardless, I started using Dincorta as my username for pretty much everything I made an account for, and still to this day, it’s my online pseudonym, and the one I use in my contemporary work. If you ever wondered why that name, that’s the story behind it. It’s also great because the name is never taken by anyone else, so if I try to sign up and it’s already taken, it just means I already have an account with that place.

Please don’t steal it.

Yep, it’s that old.

With both ‘Game On!’ and ‘5K’ having clear and full endings, and looking at how far I’d come with my story and characters, the earlier comics were leaving a lot to be desired. I decide it’s time to go back and write a proper feature-length storyline showing the origin of my characters, how they met, and bring a more serious tone to it. I’d revisit older villains, draw from older set-ups, tweak what I had already, and this could be a great intro for people who wanted to read my stuff. Cold Reset was born!

Except, at this point, it was called ‘Alphopolis’. Named after [REDACTED CAUSE OF STORY SPOILERS]. You can see the old Alphopolis II cover art as a poster in Brandon’s living room in the remake of Cold Reset #2, fun fact!

I upgraded my methods and equipment, now going over pencil guidelines in fancy fineliner marker pens, then scanning each page into my computer and uploading them online. I got my first website for the comics around this time, which I believe was with an ancient website builder called Piczo. A quick Google shows me it’s still going to this day, doing pretty much the same thing.

Alphopolis #1: The Mission is completed this year in its original form – still just a grid format stickman comic, but now inked in pen and lettered with maximum care.

I swiftly moved onto the second chapter of Alphopolis, limiting myself to 22 pages per issue, as I was working in small booklets I’d produced and stapled together.

My planning for each issue only went as far as a general script, and so a lot of it was guess-work and chance. The cut-off point for the chapter was therefore wherever the booklet ended, and I had to make it feel like a resolution. It worked out luckily!

I played around with shading for the first time, using cross-hatching in pen. It basically doubled production time, but it looks all the better for it.

I got so invested into the story by this point that I spent more time writing and brainstorming the story than I did actually drawing it – something which continues even to this day, but I am actively working on improving things!

My brain is always 30 chapters ahead, and so I tend to get somewhat bored with the ‘older’ stuff that is presently being drawn out. I think my productivity would be 500% more efficient if I could just draw all the chapters out of order!

So, at this point, the full scope of what Alphopolis would/could be was in view. I had a middle, and an ending, and I knew where everything was heading, and so I was very excited to draw it all. I was a little optimistic when it came to just how quickly I could accomplish this.

It’s my final year in school, and exams are all around. So, work on the comic slows down. However, I do manage to twist my Art exam brief around to enable me to produce Chapter 3 as part of it – don’t ask me how that worked, but it did. Chapter 3 was completed in just a few weeks. I had to upgrade from stickmen to qualify for the brief, however, and so I used the crossing of the portal in the story as an excuse to completely redesign each character and make them cartoony – and I’ve only built on these designs in the decade since. The way they look today is a direct result of the Art exam. Funny, eh?

Alongside Alphopolis, I’d come up with a bunch of other stories set within the same universe, branching off with various side characters. There was one focusing on a character called Mr. Smith (featured in the very early comics as a helpful scientist character, based on one of my friends) and the story was that he’d figured out how to suspend himself in cryo-stasis for a few thousand years. He wakes up in the future and his archaic expertise turns out to be what the future needs to battle an ongoing threat. This would have eventually tied into comics like ‘4K’ and ‘5K’ so that more of the main cast just happened to be in the future. This story was called ‘Meridian’, named after one of my favourite episodes of Stargate SG-1 (a huge influence on me as a kid and more than likely has subtly worked its way into elements of the story even today). I ended up scrapping this story entirely, but the name stuck around, as you well know. It evolved to become the overall title of the universe of comics – Meridian Six.

You’re getting all the inside knowledge today, aren’t you?

While I’d initially upgraded to 3D/cartoon characters for the sake of the Art exam, I ultimately decided to keep the new style for the rest of the story.

My thinking was that in their own universe, the main characters existed as stickmen, but in this other universe, they were 3D, so in my head that made sense. I vow, however, never to go back to stickmen!

I started work on Chapter 4: Renegades. This was a long one, covering around 40 pages when it was finished. It was 3D, it was shaded, it was detailed, and it was by far my best work on Cold Reset so far.

I stopped stapling booklets together and worked on great quality A4 paper. I would then scan these, enhance the blacks and the whites, and then upload it to my new website. I had my own domain name for the first time.

I wish I had some screenshots of how it looked back then. If I ever find any hidden away, I’ll throw them on here.

You can see from this sample page to the left that I was putting a lot more detail into these comics than I had in the past…

I remember painstakingly drawing this one building by building. You can also see all the original 3D designs for the main cast at the bottom. With Cold Reset’s third chapter now split into three separate chapters now, you’ll see ‘Renegades’ in Cold Reset #5.*

*Future edit: You’ll now see ‘Renegades’ much later than #5 – eek!

I started my University course, studying for a BA degree in Computer Animation – not necessarily what I wanted to do, and I could go deep into my feelings on that course looking back, but that’s not what this is about.

Anyway, I had to upgrade my digital skills for the sake of the coursework, and I got pretty familiar with Photoshop while I was studying this course. So, of course, I had to apply these skills to the comic.

When Chapter 4 was finished, I got to work on an almost fully digital Chapter 5 (the linework was still in pen and scanned in at this point, but I began colouring the comic with grey tones).

I still colour Cold Reset in grey, but I add purple shading to give it a bit more of a visual aesthetic. Also, I love purple. This year, the series makes the full switch to being called Meridian Six – ‘Cops & Robberz’ is no more!

Alphopolis #5 was retitled to Cold Reset #5, and it consisted of a short intro scene, and another short main scene. I imagine when I get back around to this chapter, I’ll either scrap it entirely, or it will merge into Chapter 6.

Time will tell!

‘Threads’ has now been adapted into the title of Cold Reset Vol. 2, with Vol. 1 being called ‘Cops & Robbers’ (sans the Z) in honour of the old days. ‘Threads’ is another title shamelessly swiped from Stargate SG-1.

I’m really spilling the beans here, aren’t I?

The higher intensity of University work this year meant that my comic fell a little bit by the wayside. I had a lot going on in my personal and educational life, and something had to give.

I would also say that spending 100% of my time around like-minded and creative people caused me to compare my work a lot to others’, and so I started putting a lot more effort into my artwork. I think this did and still does lengthen my drawing process now. I’m basically taking the comic super seriously as early as 2014.

Chapter 6 eventually happens this year, and it’s my best one yet. It was 100% digitally produced, and I never looked back on the old ways after this. Quite a way we’ve come, huh?

When I first started working in digital-only, I was working with super hi-res canvases, and I found it frustrating and almost off-putting, because at such a high resolution, the pen picks up every jitter, every wobble, and the lines just didn’t look as good as the pen scans.

In every comic I’ve produced since Chapter 6, I’ve scaled way down to quite a low resolution. It’s only noticeable when you zoom in, of course, but it gives me the same control over my linework that I always had in the pen/paper days.

It was a small but effective fix that likely stopped Cold Reset becoming a traditional-only comic. Whether you think that’s good or bad is down to you, but I love digital now.

Looking at this comic, it appears this was before I started using purple shading too. Interesting!

2015 was the year things started getting a little rough in my personal life. I would still say I’m finding my way back to myself from what I was dealing with in this era. I changed massively as a person, and I definitely retreated into my own head this year. I spent more time writing and planning than I did drawing, and so no major work was finished this year. Chapter 6 was still my latest offering. However, I had a lot of new plans for where to take the comic next, and I posted it a lot on comic-focused sites online, hoping to get some eyes on it.

The lack of response I got from potential readers hit me pretty hard, and I grew pretty self-conscious of my work. Was it that terrible? Was my artwork trash? Was my writing cringey? I was in my head a lot, and it was an unhealthy time all around.

I started resenting my old work – how could people enjoy my latest and best work without knowing the story? And yet how could they begin the story with such horrendous stickman garbage to wade through? This was where my desire to remake the older chapters of Cold Reset in a more updated style came from. But this year was not the time for much more than thought…

In the meantime, I was mainly going over old ground, and spent a lot of time making alternate covers and various promo artworks for comics I’d already finished. To the right is an example of a uniform series of alternate covers I produced for each chapter. This one was my favourite, but they all feature George in the centre, with various situational backgrounds around him. Maybe you’ll see the others one day.

My mental state impacted my studies a great deal, meaning I had to redo the final year of the course or fail it entirely. And with how much I’d fallen out of love with the course, this was an unwelcome grind. I saw a bunch of my friends graduating together and going off to pursue their own dreams, and here I was, in Uni for another year, surrounded by, essentially, strangers.

Wow, this got depressing, didn’t it? I mean, don’t worry, I’m ok now. But this stuff all happened and it’s part of the Meridian Six story.

I started Chapter 7 this year, but didn’t get much further than a few pages in. I still have those pages ready to go for when the remake catches back up, but they more than likely will never see the light of day, as the art style has far surpassed it. I spent more time planning, but it all felt to be in vain, as I still had a great deal of issues with readers engaging with the comic. The stickman era was a huge obstacle, and it was time to remove it.

A cool addition to my comics around this time was the implementation of 3D work into the backgrounds and guideline process. I wanted to get better at modelling, so here and there, I’d model a room or a certain background in Maya and either use screenshots of it on the comic page or manipulate it to fit into the style a bit more.

I still do this in the latest comics, with plans to take it up a notch in The Black Mist.

University was done with. I was free of education. And I was as directionless as I always was since leaving school. I looked into working as a freelancer on sites like Fiverr and Upwork but it’s hard to get work on those unless you’re willing to drop your prices substantially. It’s ultimately, no way to make a living without one hell of a grind first. I managed to complete a few commissions but I struggled having to work on things that weren’t my personal comic work. Looking back on it now, it was so obvious that I had to double down on the comics and pursue being able to make them full time, but in my head they were never more than a side project.

This year, I decided I’d pause Chapter 7 and turn the clock all the way back to Chapter 1. I was gonna “remaster” the living hell out of it and make sure that people could work their way through the comic without having to deal with the eyesore of the stickman era. What was the point continuing to work on the later chapters when people weren’t gonna be reading them week to week?

I write out a script for the new Chapter 1, staying true to the bulk of the story and the characters, but essentially redoing the dialogue and fixing the plot-holes. I felt pretty great about this new version and got to work immediately.

It was also good because, as I mentioned earlier, I always found it hard to work on comics I’d planned a while ago, wishing just to skip ahead to comics I had freshly planned. This was exactly that, and so production was quick.

At first.

It slowed down dramatically when I started a “job” in a multi-level marketing company – something I took out of a mix of naivete and just wanting to be able to move out of my family house to somewhere on my own. I needed the space and the independence after finishing Uni.

I was in this job for 6 months and it was physically and mentally draining, leaving me next to no time to work on the comic. But I do recall working on it a tiny, tiny bit on my one day off per week.

Yeah.

I left this job and never looked back. But I also don’t regret working there – it pulled me out of my shell a lot, and it gave me a lot of things to think about. I was feeling more like myself than I had in a good few years.

I was finally back on track afterwards, fell into a hospitality job, vowed I’d avoid any kind of progression or career there, and for the most part, stuck to my guns. I took a promotion for the pay rise but kept relatively far back so that when I clocked out, I was actually off the clock.

It got pretty grim in that regard.

‘Gear shift’ is really the only way to describe this. Things couldn’t really get any worse in terms of production, before this, but the remake of Chapter 1 was done, along with a brand new prologue scene made in full colour that didn’t exist in the original version of the chapter, and I was working more on the comic than I ever had before. Like, literally 10 hours a day, every day. Every waking moment was spent on the comic. Until I got a job, of course.

This was the year I started bouncing around hospitality jobs – I had to be able to afford not living at home month-to-month. But I was in a good place overall, living with friends again, able to work on whatever I wanted to outside of work, and my social life was back too.

This version of me and the 2015 version felt like two different people, but I still had a way to go to get back to normal. And if you try to recall how the next couple of years went down in history, you’ll know that normality didn’t quite return in the end…

I revamped my online presence, removed all of the old comics, including the recent Chapters 5 and 6, with the intention of remaking Chapters 1-3 and then eventually reuploading Chapters 4-6 as they already existed.

You’ll notice on these alternate covers above and to the right, there’s a little alien guy icon. That’s a Dincortan, with the same design as in ‘5K’ all those years ago, and I kinda dig it as the logo for if I need to put any kind of official branding on the comics. But I think they look better without for now. Just a little factoid for you there.

Chapter 2’s remake is well underway, and it features a huge and daunting montage sequence that I spend a lot of time and care planning out.

This sequence didn’t exist at all in the old comics, but it was an idea that kept coming back to me, in the shower of all places, and it gradually came together on paper.

I’m still really proud of how it turned out – it has a lot of hidden detail that I enjoyed working into it, and looking at it all when it was done was pretty satisfying.

This year, I also started the first issue of another idea I’d been mulling over for a good few years. This was something I had been thinking about since the pre-Cold Reset days and I thought I was in a good spot to give it a go.

The art style for ‘Circus’ was similar but different, with splashes of colour all over the place, but generally rougher linework.

‘Circus’ was a sequel to Cold Reset – look at me jumping ahead of myself yet again… – but it was also a standalone thing that I tried to keep vague for the time being, with no references to how Cold Reset ends at all.

I have since removed this issue from my site, as I have new plans for it. But that’s fine, it always was a trial piece.

It also had its own range of covers, as you can see to the left, and maybe you’ll see more of these in the future when the comic makes a return. Although, based on current plans, it’s not gonna look anything like it did…

Cold Reset #2: Disturbance’s remake is finished early on this year. I posted a page a week online, and got a nice, but small level of feedback and interaction from readers on multiple hosting sites. This would be a nice start to an otherwise crazy, crazy year.

My final coursework project for year one of the Master’s course has a brief, and I decide I’m going to make my first actual videogame – by myself. During the game jams at the end of 2019, I learned a lot about game engines, specifically UE4, and I was confident in my ability to learn on the fly through YouTube tutorials. I had an idea for a side-scrolling 2D platformer, with a story to go with it. This project overtook the Chapter 3 remake, but, again, that was okay.

Sleeper-9 was the game I eventually came out with, set – of course – in the Meridian Six universe. I couldn’t seem to escape Meridian Six by this point. It was all I thought about when sitting down to make something creative. I felt like anything I produced that didn’t ultimately serve Meridian Six’s progression was a huge waste of time. There are pros and cons to this, I know. But it’s the way things are. 

Work on Sleeper-9 was swift and plentiful due to Covid-19 and the lockdown that came with it. I was confined to my latest apartment with one out of three of my friends living there with me (the others moved back home as soon as the talk of a lockdown hit the waves).

My friend and I set our PC’s up in the lounge and we used it as a very productive working space – he was a 2D rigger for a local company and was working from home, and I was, of course, a student working on a 2D platformer, now working from home. Between us, we created a very productive working environment.

Then, in June, my dad passed away. Not even from Covid, which was probably the worst part, that we’d isolated from him to protect him, and it never made a shred of difference to how things were always going to happen. Don’t let me bring the tone down, though. This event hit hard, and so, again, it’s important to this whole telling of the Meridian Six background.

I retreated back into a shell, and spent a lot of time living back at home, writing mainly. But I also decided I wanted to make an Elder Scrolls style RPG, using some knowledge I’d picked up in Sleeper-9.

This game’s still on the backburner today, but I got a nice little bit of it done, including character creation, skill trees, combat, and the basic RPG setup. It would be cool to go back to it eventually.

I started working on Chapter 3 and got myself back into a comic-making groove. In October, I jumped on the bandwagon for a social media/Instagram art event called Comictober, similar in concept to Inktober, where artists would aim to produce a strip or an image every day of October, with each day having a theme that everyone worked to. I came up with a neat little Halloween tale set during Cold Reset #2’s montage sequence, and strung together each theme to fit the narrative. Each day would have around 3-6 panels. I spent all day every day working on this, and it was a total success. I enjoyed every minute, and would love to do it again in the future.

Lockdown continues. As does all the legal drama that comes with a family member’s passing. As does University. It’s the second and final year of the course, and I suddenly have a lot of time on my hands.

I re-write and re-write Chapter 3’s remake, working in a whole new sequence and combat section. Work on it is slow, however. Not for any particular reason. This year’s a bit of a blur for me.

The final project comes around, and I have to say, working in a team to make a game over voice chat rather than in person is a way different experience.

It’s actually demotivating, if anything. But the Uni is closed, and all classes are done over Discord now.

I lose a lot of drive to work on anything at all, and it stays this way for a while.

There’s talk of what we’ll be doing for the final project, and it’s essentially a House of the Dead-style rail shooter game, but entirely melee, set in a God of War-style Viking world.

Sounds pretty amazing, I know. It never came to pass.

The entire team fell off, we all had our own stuff going on, and the Uni started getting very generous with handing out project extensions.

I continued working on Chapter 3’s remake, and finished it in March. Or, rather, I reached what I thought was the mid-point in March.

Since continuing production on Cold Reset, I decided it had been too long to simply pick it back up where it left off, and so I decided to end Chapter 3 where it already stopped, and move the rest of it into a brand new Chapter 4, which would slot in between the previous version of Chapter 4, making that Chapter 5 now.

Are you with me?

I wouldn’t start work on Cold Reset again until 2022. I did, however, start work on a brand new comic (what am I like?) called The Black Mist – another story I’d had in my head for many, many years, featuring three older characters from the original stickman comics, who hadn’t shown up in any of my comics in almost a decade. It was time to introduce them – Brandon, George and Amigo were great, but they were only half the main cast. We need the other players somewhere at least! I prematurely teased this comic, being too optimistic about when it would be done. I drew a fair few pages of it out, none of which would be released for a while. But the entire mini-story is planned out, a bunch of the first half is scripted, so it’ll be a smooth jump back to working on it…

I had a final project to focus on, and I decided to scrap my group project, which wasn’t happening anyway. I came up with the idea of making a puzzle game, in the vein of Myst and Riven – games I used to play with my Grandad as a kid. He’d keep a little notebook with all his thought processes and environmental clues. I wanted to make a game like that, a game that didn’t hold the player’s hand. This game ended up being Bishop Chapter – set in the world of Meridian Six (yup) but more specifically in the story of The Black Mist! It went deep into Ancient Egyptian mythology, allowing me to adapt my The Black Mist research into something for Uni and for my portfolio that showed off my engine work rather than just more comic.

I was given the option by the University to either accept a deadline extension to an undisclosed time, or defer the project to the following year and redo it in 2022 as part of the next class. I chose the former, wanting just to get the course over with – it was already dragged out over two years, I couldn’t bear three. So I worked to a mystery deadline, not knowing how much or how little content to produce for the game. It was a six-puzzle concept as a base, and if I had to cut any of them down, it would mean having to rework certain models, certain game mechanics… Luckily, I had just enough time by the time the deadline of February 14, 2022 was announced.

Every day of the first few months of this year was spent on Bishop Chapter. It engulfed everything – my personal life, my working life, everything. I came down with Covid over Christmas 2021 and that progressed into an early January flu. It must be said, the Covid was nothing – the double vaccine did its thing – but the flu was absolutely crippling. I’ve never been so ill in my life. It made just sitting up to get out of bed physically exhausting. So, I lost two weeks of both my job, and Bishop Chapter.

It was full speed ahead, then, to get Bishop Chapter done and dusted. I made it, barely. And I was awarded a 1st class honours for it. So that’s pretty cool. I put hundreds of hours into it, so it feels like it’s the least I would have been content with. You can download and play that game in full – check out Meridian Six β over on the Comics tab.

Amongst other things since finishing that Master’s course, I’ve completely overhauled my social pages, and my websites. It’s taken me a long time to get to a point where I’m happy with how the brand exists online.

In reflecting on my academic journey, I finally came to realise that the work I do in my free time is the work I should aim to do for a living. It’s the only way I can be passionate about my job. I’ve seen many friends who I went to Uni with, actually get jobs in their relevant industries, and all of their personal passion projects (most of my friends had ’em) have just completely vanished. I get it. If you spend all day working on drawing or animating for someone else’s project, working in front of a screen is the last thing you want to do when you clock off.

I don’t want that for me. I don’t want to lose my drive for Meridian Six.

The only way I see this going ahead without being trapped in hospitality as a side job for years to come is if I make this my main job. So, as of this year, I have a brand new plan to finally take my work on the road, start tabling at conventions, polish the website, get the brand looking clean, and – most importantly – stick to a regular schedule with the comics. I know full well that you can’t grow a reader-base if you post sporadically every six or seven months.

The ones who find the kind of success I want for Meridian Six are the ones who put out weekly pages without fail.

Series 1 of Meridian Six will be the start of a new era, where I can finally double down on my passion project, with weekly postings of 2-3 series (I’m gonna feel it out first to see if that workload is even manageable for me) and weekly streams on Twitch where I’ll maybe choose a random theme or use a theme generator and make a one-off piece of artwork live on stream. I guess, then, I can use the artwork on limited prints, and build up a range of cool stuff to take to conventions. You know, the usual kinda of merch you find at people’s tables there.

I’m definitely entering into a time of uncertainty, ironically just as the rest of the world is starting to get its shit back together. Should be an interesting one.

That’s the plan going forward. I’ll update you when there’s more to say.

Thanks for your time. If you read this whole thing, I appreciate you, and I hope you now better understand the origins and the journey that this comic has been on, and why I simply must keep making it. I can’t seem to stop.

…

NOTE: This is where I originally wrote up to back in 2022. I’m currently sat going back through the site, tweaking bits and pieces, and I’ve revisited this page in 2024 to add my 2023 section. So… read on?

So, a few things I was hopeful for in the previous years didn’t come to pass. There were various reasons for this that I won’t get into, but the short of it is: I’m very frugal. I very quickly go off my ideas when I find something more interesting. I see it as a good thing because it’s my brain constantly over-analysing what I’m doing, finding flaws and improvements, so I tell myself that whatever it eventually becomes is a refined, peak version of what I originally intended.

Or maybe I just need to twist my arm and stick with an idea for once.

Anyway, 2023… Here we go!

I decided this year that I needed to make more game content. I need to refine my developer skills, get stuck into a game and just bash it out. Spoiler: I’m currently off that game idea and back on comics. But bear with me, because it’s a project I’m still in love with and will come back to.

Evokado!

This is a new idea made up of many older ideas that I’ve been struggling to find a place for for like a decade. My head is a mish-mash of this entire Meridian Six story. There are characters and plot threads I’ve been daydreaming of for years that I may not even get to draw/tell because they need so much buildup. I lay seeds for them every day I work on my current stuff because it’s all connected and all makes sense – eventually.

I’ve tried to write a big chunk of the Evokado! storyline before as a novel – back in 2012-ish maybe? I got impatient and gave up. I tried reworking it as an illustrated novel utilising dialogue rather than prose. Scrapped that too. I have all these old files knocking around so it’s easy to dip into and remember what the hell I was playing at.

Evokado! is also partly inspired by a short story my grandfather wrote in the 90’s that I helped transcribe from a hundred-or-so notepad sheets into Word so that he could get it published. (DM me for the Amazon link.) Evokado! is a continuation of that story, framing my grandfather’s protagonist as the father of my own protagonist – dealing with the legacy of his father and the impact that story had on the world.

So I mashed these ideas all together and I’ve tried writing it and drawing it, eventually deciding it would make an absolutely KILLER top-down RPG in the style of Pokemon or Zelda. I spent a good part of 2023 designing and developing this idea in Unreal Engine, then I got sidetracked with drawing an intro comic for it – the ‘cinematics’ of the game are intended to play out as interactive comics with dynamic panel animations – honestly, it’s gonna be really cool and I’m still super hyped for it…

But I’ve left it up in the air – for now… Because…

I’m getting way too ahead of myself.

My brain is years beyond my hands. I’ve let it run wild with ideas and planning and scheming and writing lore, designing worlds, dreaming up characters and moments and battles across time and space and honestly…

I need to rein it in. Hard.

So. I’ve paused anything that requires putting unnecessary pressure on my poor little head – I’ve paused multiple tangent projects like the Meridian Six RPG from 2020, Evokado!, the ‘seasonal’ schedule of content I talked about last year, multiple other ideas – I was even working on a Meridian Six Design Document/Bible thing that already has a couple hundred pages and was only ever gonna be for my own eyes… I’ve stopped ALL of that.

My focus needs to be more… well, focused.

After attending the Thought Bubble Convention 2023, I decided I needed to stop this planning and page-hoarding, stop posting content into the aether of the internet where nobody’s really looking, and get my stuff straight in the hands of my audience. I need support and critical eyes, and I need to know that my work is doing… something… or else I’m just firing blindly. All of this planning is great – to me. Because I’m the only one looking at it. I need to change that or else what is this all for? Self-fulfilment? Nah, it’s causing me nothing but stress and anxiety.

So my new focus is gonna be on balancing TWO comic series – Cold Reset (my first and truest love), and The Black Mist (an idea almost as old as Cold Reset that’s, again, seen many incarnations in the planning stages). These two comics are gonna see some mad progress going forward, and it’s all gonna be physical first and foremost – comics in hand, art prints, posters – my work is gonna be shown properly for the first time at conventions, and we’re gonna grow this party from a meagre and jaded ONE to… MORE than one.

I’ll leave you with this for 2023, as we move swiftly on into a stronger 2024, and say no more until then: