Since starting up the blog I’ve been spending some time this week cleaning up the website, fixing links, and archiving old comics that never got an archive page. What I’ve learned doing this is that memory is a tricky thing.

In my previous posts, I talked about becoming burned out. This most certainly happened, but my recollection of how it happened is skewed. It was skewed by burnout itself – and the depression that followed it.

In my mind, I got fully burned out on comics at the end of 2020. But going through and archiving my old comics, I see that I was making comics steadily for most of 2021, which is kind of incredible because I was doing a ton of other stuff in 2021, such as making this goofy homebrew Power Rangers video. It wasn’t until 2022 that I truly slowed down on comics, but that had more to do with physical health issues than anything else!

2022 was a real low point for me. I was suffering from joint pain all throughout my body, from the top of my neck all the way into my fingers and toes. Just holding a pen or stylus hurt and I seriously questioned my future as an artist, and consequently whether I had any future at all.

I think, in my mind I stopped comics in 2021 because that served the narrative that “Depression Brain” would have me believe in. “Depression Brain” is a state that I have observed in myself and numerous others where we frame everything in the least flattering manner, where we shoot down any suggestions or attempts to help, and where everything is bad, has always been bad, and always will be bad. In my mind I had built up my lapse in routine comics uploads far longer than I had because that would reinforce the narrative that I was a failure or that my situation was hopeless.

But going through my old comics not only showed me that the narrative that I gave up on comics in 2021 wasn’t true, but it also got me going back through my old art from this era of supposed reduced productivity. Some of it I posted to social media, but much of it I did not.

I find it amazing that I evidently continued to make art despite dealing with many other challenges during this time.

Here are some of my digital works that I think are of quality. They would have been sketched on my couch during some afternoon with my beautiful partner.

This is by no means every digital piece of mine from the 2022-2023 era, but also not shown are the pages and pages of sketches and art pieces I made in the real world, as well as my many other art obsessions from this time period, such as my custom pens and the posable art models I built.

Like I said in my previous posts, I was constantly drawing and creating, but it was posting that I truly lost confidence in. And that loss of confidence poisoned my mind and skewed my view of just how much I accomplished even when I wasn’t feeling my best.

So hopefully this reminds you to look at your perception of things and give yourself credit for anything your Depression Brain has selectively edited out of your recollection to serve its twisted narrative.