Long John

Jason Tudor and Keith Houin’s Vorpal.

This week’s Sketch Friday is a bit of nepotism, I’ll readily admit. The character is named Vorpal, the titular assassin from the comic by good friend Jason Tudor (story & art) and Keith Houin (story).

I’ve written about Vorpal before––and have interviewed Jason on my podcast––and have been meaning to do some fanart for awhile now. Check out the comic, the first issue has finished up and will be available for purchase soon.

When it comes to fanart of comics, my natural tendency is to do what I did for my Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain drawing for Sketch Friday #02, that is a standing character, stiff, and motionless. I could make excuses about it being related to doing character turnarounds from my limited animation days, but I’d be lying. It actually comes down to me being a lazy artist.

I follow a lot of artists on various social media websites, and they produce a lot of fanart of which I am jealous; it’s always so vivacious and dramatic that it always makes me wonder why I didn’t do that. I’m thinking of people like Giannis Milonogiannis, Stjepan Sejic, and Jake Wyatt, among many others (whom I love but can’t remember at the moment). So, in an earnest effort, I decided to actually try when drawing Vorpal to make it more exciting than just a standing-around character shot.

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The last Sketch Friday was a bit of a fun anomaly to witness. It apparently caught on with the Tom Hiddleston fan community (which I wasn’t aiming for) as well as the Crimson Peak fan community (which I was aiming for, though there is a lot of overlap, apparently). I’ll write more about it at some point, but it was the closest I ever got to going viral and it was fascinating to watch the drawing course its way through the internet, bouncing from one blog to the next.

Again, thanks for your patience with regard to Long John. I will reveal the reasons for the full stop at some point, but I’m still working through some stuff before I can actually get back to it. So, it’s not dead; Long John is just dealing with the massive emotional revelation that dropped on him in the last page.