Tourist Unknown

Well Spa-Con was a blast this year. Got to meet a lot of great folks as well as reaquaint myself with a whole other bunch of great folks. I forget how much I enjoy the bustle of a convention until I’m in the thick of one! Shout out to all the organizers down their in Hot Springs. They do some great work.

Even more exciting is to get to end your first proper Con back with an announcement that you did the art for the posters and branding for next year’s Spa-Con. They wanted retro aliens in hot tubs, and I guess I’m the go to guy for that in Arkansas after Backside Air! I’m pretty jazzed with how it came out. Gunna be surreal to see this on buildings and billboards. Exciting but bizarre!

Also serendipitously in my big week? A new appearance for me on Ozarks at Large. It’s been awhile since I popped up to the local studio and did a radio interview. I go on about Tourist Unknown: En Route, the future of Tourist, and also a bit about the oncoming return of my original comic, Backwood Folk. It’s a good listen thanks to Timothy Dennis doing a great job with questions and editing. Always does a good job making me smart on the air even if I don’t always in the studio!

Howdy from the Ozarks once again. Got a big week up here on Tourist Unknown and figured I’d lay it out a bit! The Gift Store is gunna be having a big launch of several new products this Wednesday! Not next Wednesday, or a week from next Wednesday, but this very Wednesday.

First up, Tourist Unknown: En Route!

This is a 68 page print collection of all of the En Route comics that were published between the newspapers, here, and my patreon. It’s certainly the tallest book I’ve made, and I’m pretty damn proud of it. When working on a series like Tourist you scrawl out every single idea you ever come across. As these things go, only a handful ever come to fruition as a full 20-40 page story. Now, that doesn’t mean those other ideas go away. They usually linger, still quietly demanding the attention of the subconscious. So En Route became a book to exorcise all the scenes and pitches that never left my head but also never became a full book. Turns out though many of them make a sturdy one to two page comic. So damnit, that’s what I did. Then I finished it off with a tidy little finale to wrap it up into a book. The funny result is actually a more accurate lens of how I view the Tourist’s life than sitting in on and watching the totality of one of her adventures. It’s a book where she is actually just flashing through everyone’s lives on these short stays. What impact does a tourist have on the universe anyways? Maybe more than she thinks, but it’s sometimes impossible to see from her vantage.

To go alongside this whole new view of the Tourist Universe is a big poster. People like posters! I like posters! I never make posters anymore, and that seems like a mistake. So here’s a big 22×17 poster of Tourist Unknown: En Route’s wraparound cover.

Next up! The Canary Cage

Sam Schreyer contacted me earlier in the year about collaborating a comic for Good Boy Magazine #3 So we went and made a comic! Sam on the writing with myself on the illustration. Hard not to be anything but ecstatic with how it came out. Our friends over at Good Boy also gave us the go ahead on releasing our comic as an independent mini-comic first. Which hey cool! We went and slapped some covers on it and made a handsome little issue. It was a super fun project to work on, and you wouldn’t be able to tell this is Sam’s first released comic as her writing really knocks it out of the park. I also really tinkered with my style on this one in some fun ways. I think it’s still very identifiably me, but I’m definitely playing with some different tools. It also let me play in horror corner again Which, as you might be able to tell from my Patreon, is a happy place for me. Don’t be shocked if you see more like this in the future.

Give it a look this Wednesday! And then again when it appears in Good Boy #3. Don’t worry, I’ll probably be annoying about it then too.

Final notes on the webcomic!

The contents of En Route that were originally on Patreon will begin posting here the first Thursday of September. Hopefully to entice you into buying that lovely aforementioned print edition.

Now off to go draw something else I haven’t told you about yet! Watch this space on updates on a little something called Otterhead.

Silly as it always it is I try to have a new goal of some kind each year. Not with the strict perimeters of a New Year’s Resolution weight goal, but a vague direction I can slowly steer towards. My big one this year was to stop doing art in a vacuum. Which is to say, work with other people and participate alongside other artists more often. I kinda locked my process into this very solitary thing, which shocking for a man who has spent years off and on living alone in the woods. Turns out it makes a very lonely pursuit where you just end up feeling like you are uploading pages to the ether. Hence my goal for 2023. Happy to say I’ve lined up some exciting collaborations for the year, but those are stories for another time. And those are work things! I also wanted to extend this goal to fun things! So here we are.

An artist I’ve been really digging in the last couple years is Alejandro Bruzzese. He captures a sort of ethereal physicality to all of his drawings. And his range of sci-fi art just really really appeals to me. So when he did a call for art trades I jumped on it.

We each gave each other the choice of three character to pick from. For my end I drew his creation of Neura!

I immediately loved the character. The mix of the mythical and mundane are a favorite of mine. So adorning characters of a godlike nature and physique in modern sportswear is right up my alley. I always feel like it’s an immediate way to sneak familiarity into the heightened nature of sci-fi and fantasy worlds. So here’s my rendition.

For his portion he took on Android Etta. Gotta say I’m in love with it. From the pose to the colors to how puffy he made that jacket.

I think art trades like this are really in a lot of ways an act of translation. What elements of your design are retained and which quirks of your style are replaced by someone else’s particular stylistic quirks? It’s a cool process, and like I noted in the previous blog post it really helps you see your own characters in a completely new way. This is not how I would draw Etta, but this is Etta through and through. I learn more about her when I see her through another artist’s hands.

So in summary, if you want to have some real fun and have the time do some art trades!

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You can find Alejandro Bruzzese at his website and twitter. You should really dive into the Sunday section of his site. It will make you feel like an archeologist of the future and that’s a rad feeling.

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My other 2023 goal is to try and make the blog a much more active part of the site, but this has been a goal for a few years now. So uh, good luck Gus.