Hey folks… maybe you have been where Roy has been but not been forced to attend a monastery that treats social media addiction. Boy, sometimes I wish I knew where one of those monasteries were, you know?
Anyway… as I might have mentioned before, this strip was done almost ENTIRELY in Procrete on my iPad Pro. I cheated a little bit with the borders and coloring but everything else was procreate. Still experimenting with trying to do hand-lettering in procreate. The program really wasn’t designed for that but fir the most part, I don;t think that the lettering is looking all that bad. It’s still readable, right? Just gotta keep practicing.
Also, I wanted to talk about an idea I had ever since the baltimore Comic Con ended this past weekend. I had a blast being in the Kids Section again this year but after the show, I got inspired to try and do some major things with this strip – mainly because of the Kids corner and some other more serious stuff I have talked about on the Webcomic Alliance podcast.
Capes & Babes is evolving and it may not be to everyone’s liking. I want to do more “morality plays” with the strip – thanks Steve Conley for helping me better define what and where I want to go! In this day and age of mixed marriages, fights over public bathrooms and a general “us versus them” mentality we seem to have so much of these days, doing a strip featuring a werewolf that’s dating a vampire, a hippie mummy, an ACTUAL illegal Alien, a fluid zombie that desperately wants to be a Broadway dancer – not to mention a male nudist, the strip is absolutely ripe for all kinds of “morality plays”. And I completely understand some of you won’t be happy with that and have even told me privately whenever I have touched on… delicate issues.
This is one of the many reasons you haven’t seen an update from me in a long, long while. I have been in a creative purgatory thinking about all of these things… where I feel my passions are going… trying to make some kind of very, very small difference… maybe at least give some people a different way of looking at real world situations and possibly give them something to think about. I keep mentioning the classic Star trek episode, “Let that be your last battlefield” with Frank Gorshin as my gold standard. I think of classic MASH episodes as well…
These types of stories and messages – or whatever you want to call them – are such a delicate tightrope to walk. And quite frankly, they are INCREDIBLY HARD TO DO. I hate doing “political strips”. I actually hate being one-sided. I want to hear other voices, other opinions and give them a chance too. I don’t know if that’s possible but that’s one of my goals. But at the same time, I don’t want to alienate many of you that have supported me, befriended me and even helped me since the start of the strip so I wrestled for a long time how to solve that very tricky situation. After the baltimore Comic Con though, I think I might have a solution.
Capes & babes isn’t really for kids. It never has been. But Roy is beginning to get a small little following in various kids corners but I was always slightly embarrassed having a Capes & Babes banner up in the kids section. So, coming home on Sunday night, it hit me… Spin off! Make a “Roy the Werewolf” site where all the strips on there would be non-political, non-morality plays, non-message, totally sanitized versions of Capes & Babes. This way, for those that don’t want to read any morality plays, there would still be a place for you to go where you can enjoy Roy without feeling you need to boycott the strip because it’s going in a direction you don’t like or you feel uncomfortable with.
Plus, I can create a new banner for conventions and be perfectly okay directing mom, dads and kids of all ages to Roy the Werewolf instead of a more mature content Capes & Babes.
