August recap – Scratching paper, cottage time and the end of a season

Good afternoon, friends! I hope you’re having a nice “second half of the summer”, aka “should I wear pants today?!” period of the year. It’s one of my favorite season, honestly. You can often catch me whispering “would you look at that nice light” towards 4 or 5 in the afternoon, like an old painter from Baie St-Paul.

August has been all about things falling into place. The rest of the year is pretty much set for me, starting with the real start of production for Utown. The progress Excel sheet has been made, the page tracker printed, the tests are done, so now it’s time to get into second gear and churn out pages. Rendering in black and white halftones is fantastic. I went from taking between 2 and 4 hours to colour one Nuclear Winter page to just about 40-45 minutes to letter AND do the shading on a Utown page. It’s… so liberating.

I also took a 4-day vacation with some friends, in what is now our traditional annual cottage getaway. For a long weekend, I left my phone in my bag. I took no picture of the event, made no idyllic Instagram stories of the glistening river and took zero selfies of me #livingthecottagelife. It was a good break from the ceaseless need (guilt?) of having to promote everything because of business business business! We played a lot of Telestration. It is the best game of all time.

A podcast I listen to sporadically called “Beyond the To-Do list” had host Erik Fisher saying how life has different seasons (unrelated to the Earth’s rotation or anything). Nuclear Winter 3 is coming out September 4th, in just a few days, and this led me to think on how the whole Hiver Nucléaire season is really coming to its end. Signing and touring for the third book has been quieter than for the second volume, for all sorts of reasons. The English release didn’t cause much commotion, for other reasons. With the third book out in English, that makes it the sixth time I need to do promo for the same series and yeah, I’m running out of steam a little bit. It’s time to move on I guess! Starting new projects is where the fun is, isn’t it!

Lots of things are coming in the next months, but since this is a recap, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I hope you guys have a great month of September! As always, follow me on Patreon for more regular updates!

Here are a few things that made me happy this month:

Reading: Sports et Divertissements, by Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard. This author writes the most despicable characters and yet, I can’t stop reading. I love what he does.
Watching: Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus. I’m probably too biased to form an honest opinion on this, but goddamn, I watched it two times in a row. A revamped cartoon is always a treat!
Listening: Comic Lab, my new favorite podcast. It’s very, very niche but hello, I’m the target audience!
Artist: Oooh, I just love what Artyom Trakhanov does. An artist that makes drawing look that easy always amazes me. It’s a real appealing black and white style and I’m all for this right now.