It's that time again, year's end (no card this year) where I look back on what I accomplished, what I didn't and try to make sense of this whole thing. There are more entries than 2012 but I fell short of last year by quite a lot. I started the year with pages of Ghiroy and City Silent and both of them petered out to a dribble then a stop. Ghiroy is still the least popular thing I've ever done and honestly, it's more work than it was ever meant to be. I love drawing the characters, but it was only ever meant to be a quick and dirty little D+D comic. I never seemed to be able to keep it down to that; it always got more complicated, they style kept changing and I was redrawing a comic I'd already started twice before. Will I come back to it? Maybe. Answer hazy, try again later. City Silent... that's a whole other thing.

I am disappointed that my drive for that comic seems to have really come so close to a stop. I don't really know why I had this huge, six month hiatus on it. I really do hope to get back and finish it. There's a lot of passion in that project and I do want to see it through, even if no one ever reads it. I still think there are pages where I achieve beauty. And there's really nothing visually like that I've seen. I feel like I'm breaking ground but no one else seems to think so. We'll see.

This year saw the return, briefly, of Harlon. That strip worked for its time. I have no regrets about making the new ones, don't feel I need to add more. It took the place of Biograph this year and that's fine. Biograph and Harlon are nearly the same thing. Might or might not so more journal comics next year. Often, I just don't feel I have anything to write about.

What DID happen this year was that I kind of went nuts on portraits. Part of that was finding the show, "Portrait Artist of the Year," on YouTube. It's a British competition show on painting, something we'd never get in the States. And it really did inspire me. I did a whole bunch of portraits, especially towards the end of the year. I made a lot of prints which are now hanging in my house and I think they look good. I'm still experimenting which is healthy, moving from abstract to more representational. The only sad part is that I think the portraits are things my mom would have liked. She never cared for the comics or the abstract stuff.

I did tons on the iPad and it's become my go to tool. I still had the pencil and pad out here and there, did one inked drawing, did a couple large sized paintings with real paint. I got some clay and tools and will be playing about with sculpting as well as, again, I found videos that inspired me.

On top of all this, I've continued to do the podcast with my best friend. Before 2020 is half done, we'll hit the 100 episode mark which, to me, is pretty great. We don't have a lot of listeners but we have some. At the very least, it's something I get to do every week with Max. It's worth it just for that. I'm also still gaming and in one of those games, playing a Bard, I've written two 'songs' which aren't horrible. I think they'd actually be considered filk songs which... I'll just leave that there.

So 2019 was not the most productive year I've had. I still think there's some pretty solid work there and, as long as I'm moving forward, I'll be content. Here's looking ahead.