Splorers notes / 10.12.2025
Ducks are starting to line up...
Hey gang!
I thought I’d jump on here to give a quick update on Splorers. The last time I was here, I was at a point where I was printing off a few rough pages for inking, which has now officially started!
But, before I get too ahead of myself, I’m keeping in mind I’ve still got a lot to do for the remaining portion of the comic so for now inking is that little sweet treat I get to do for a bit when I don’t want to think to hard whilst still getting something done.
If you’ve been reading my updates for the last few months, you’ll know I’ve been trying out various things to keep progress moving. Writing in notebooks, thumbnailing in sketchbooks, even scribbling roughs at actual scale but I’ve found that while it’s been good for progress, it’s a little too chaotic for my brain to handle so I’ve been doing a bit of house-keeping and bringing some order to the madness.
Last week at my usual “Tuesday night comic nerd pub meetup” (that’s the official title), my ol’ muckers Lloyd and Ellis were busy hatching their plans for the next part of their Black Rider comic. Lloyd was scribbling thumbnails on his iPad as he was going and it made me realise how inefficient I was being with my own process.
I decided to tea-leaf the idea quickly throw together a template with some thumbnail pages and started to fill them with pages I’d already roughed out (such as the page you see above), as well as very scribbly sketches along with scratchy dialogue.
I’m still working fairly loose at this stage, but having all the pages laid out like this is giving me a good overview of the story as a whole without having to continuously switch files to jog my memory.
As of this writing I’ve got 12 pages thumbnailed so that’s roughly half the comic in good shape. I’ve got another Friday off this week so if I can get closer to completing all the thumbnails I should be in a good position to get more pages printed ready for inking over the Christmas break.
I shall report back next week some time with an update, I might be in a better position to come up with a proper production schedule.
Before I sign-off, I just wanted to put a shout-out for the ACP “Drawn Under the Influence” anthology which went on sale this week. I teamed up with Ajax Alden Meres providing art for a short story he wrote which was a fun challenge to work on, because it had no dialogue.
This is a charity book so all proceeds from sales goes to The Cartoon Museum so if you can, please grab a copy and share the link far and wide with friends. It’s printed through Amazon so its available in many countries, just search for “DUI4” if you’re outside the UK.
Right, that’ll do for today. Go out and make something, anything, just don’t use AI ;)
