Alright, because it's the halfway point in this series of daily recommendations (since the game plan is 366 days of recs), I thought I'd do a little self-promotion (which means little since you can read my stuff for free right here instead of paying glorious dollars for the privilege). These are seven comics I did since I started doing stuff like this a couple years ago.

Apart from these, I also have a children's storybook/graphic novel that I think is pretty spry and people don't seem to get tired of when reading to their 4-year-olds (which is a nice compliment.) I'm also working on a couple full-length projects.

Anyway, these are all over the map in terms of subject matter and style — though I do set up shop pretty squarely over on the indie side of the tracks. Hope you'll find something you enjoy. ALSO: At least three of these have NSFW bits, but if you're reading comics at work, you probably don't care anyway.

Click any of the header images to read comic.

Golden Rules masquerades as an argument for the innate depravity of the human soul, calling on the testimony of millennia of moral philosophers. It wants to be a tour de force indictment of the human spirit, a shameful indication of how bad we all are at heart. But really, that's just veneer (probably) and it's real aim is to shame men into cleaning the seat after they pee on it—or even better, maybe not peeing on the seat at all!

On Valentine's Day 2014, I knew I wanted to do something for my wife and two young kids. I was at Starbucks. It was 1:30pm. I had a blank 4" x 4" booklet of blank pages. I had 'til 4:30pm to come up with something. This was my result. I finished with ten minutes to spare.

On 1 October 2014, I saw people begin posting drawings for Inktober 2014. Inktober is an annual celebration supplanting October with a challenge to artists and illustrators. Each day of the month, creators draw something. Using genuine ink and genuine paper. Especially for those of us accustomed to illustrating in digital formats, the temporary return to physical media can be exciting.

Anyway, I decided on October 1 to take part myself. So I took a sheet of 11" x 15" paper and drew a little mountain in a 2" x 2" square in the corner. This way I could do all my little drawings on a single sheet and wouldn't that be neat. A friend, Cameron, saw the mountain drawing and asked if I would be doing a comics story. I said No and Of course not. And then I thought Wouldn't that be something?

So I sat down, and within a half hour, I thumbnailed a 31-panel story based off that mountain. Each day in October 2014, I revealed the next episode in the story. Here's the whole thing

Re•Pro•Duct is a graphic novel about robots and people and the nature of being written by Austin Wilson and drawn by Logan Faerber. I illustrated a 6-page back-up story, which you can find in here. This story is about a robot who only appears in a single panel in the main story, sitting on a bus that the main character boards.

Fidelity, A Sex Dream was my edgy indie comic to give me street cred. Not really. I just had a funny sex dream and thought I'd draw it out.

Free Horizon is another collaboration with Austin Wilson and David C. Hopkins. It's provided as an example of the comics content they hoped to provide monthly to Patreon backers of their long-running (now defunct) comics/graphic novels podcast, Hideous Energy. Look 'em up!

Gene Luen Yang Means A Lot To Me was commissioned by Christianity Today to accompany an interview they ran with Yang to celebrate his MacArthur grant.

2017 was a tough year. Coming off a long recovery from shoulder surgery, I hadn't done any comics in ages. In March, I had an idea for a graphic novel so set out and wrote a script for ~250 pages and thumbnailed the whole thing. Really rough thumbnails. Right at the end of that process, I got a bad concussion and lost the next six weeks. Not just six weeks of productivity but also of memory. By the time, months later, that I was able to return to the book, my chicken scratched thumbnails made little sense and my memory loss had affected my understanding of what I'd written. I wouldn't be able to do that book without substantial reinvention. That was deflating so, stuck in a funk, I didn't do anything. Then I had a surgery on my foot to remove a rare tumour. That plus moving plus having a new baby all meant that, production-wise, 2017 was kind of a wash.

Not wanting the entire year to be a blank spot, I decided basically on September 30th that I would write and draw a 31 panel/page comic for Inktober. One page per day for the month of October. So the evening of the 30th, I wrote a script and gave myself a plan. And then I executed it ^_^

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