On thing you can say about 2021, is that it was a year that certainly occurred. Or did it? Sometimes it felt like watching an excruciatingly long movie that wouldn’t end, but other things seemed to breeze by us so quickly that’s it’s hard to remember what happened. Well, it’s time again to try to remember. The world is still in chaos, but I’m going to try to find things that I liked about it anyway.

Favorite Game – Monster Hunter Rise No big surprise that this was my favorite game. It’s the game I spent most of the year playing and had a great time streaming it on Twitch. Rise has many familiar elements for Monster Hunter veterans like me, but plenty of new additions that make the game more exciting and appealing. The way the game combines new and familiar elements with its ninja aesthetic is great. It’s exactly the kind of Monster Hunter I wanted. The downside is that after awhile, there seems to be less to do, but the upcoming Sunbreak expansion should remedy that.
Favorite Book – The Toys of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe I have multiple collections of different things like toys, games, and movies, but I don’t have all the money or all the space to collect everything that I’m interested in. That’s why I love to collect books like this. I can’t collect all the MotU figures, but I can own this book that has everything I’d every need to know about them all right there. It’s full of great photos and comprehensive info, so it fills the gap for me and is a lot of fun to leaf through.
Favorite Toy – Shogun Masters Skeletor Well, I just said that I can’t own every Masters of the Universe thing, but of course I had to own this one! It wasn’t cheap, but I knew there was only going to be one shot at this, and it seemed like it’d be wrong if I didn’t buy one. They combined two of my most favorite things together, Skeletor and Japanese robots. It’s like they made it especially for me, and other people who know me have said as much. In fact, I have to wonder if perhaps I manifested it into existence myself. This large figure is now my pride and joy, and I can’t imagine my shelf without it.
Favorite TV Series – Squid Game What can I say? This was the show of the moment, and I was curious enough to check it out. I was hooked, and if you saw it, you probably were too. It’s intense, with graphic violence and high stakes, life-or-death scenarios, and it’s truly captivating. The performances were certainly heightened in a way that I wasn’t used to as someone who has only seen a few Korean productions, but I enjoyed that. Everyone in the cast had a very unique, expressive, recognizable face, which made it feel like watching a cartoon, but in a good way. It helped to soften the harsh subject matter.
Favorite Anime – SSSS Dynazenon Coming from the Gridman Universe, Dynazenon combines the trials and tribulations of being a young person in modern times with robots fighting monsters over the fate of the world. Truth be told, it leans much heavier on the drama, with most of the mecha action lasting but a brief moment. But the characters were interesting and the story had some unfolding mysteries that kept up the intrigue every episode. And when we did get that mecha action, it was very cool and dynamic, with a finale that paid off and delivered the goods.
Favorite Movie – Godzilla Vs Kong A long awaited rematch decades in the making, delayed numerous times, released during the pandemic, featuring two of the most iconic characters in the history of film, carrying the weight of the future of the Monsterverse franchise on it’s back. This movie had a lot of live up to, and on the day it was released I certainly felt the collective relief from the entire world when people found out that it was actually a good movie. This became my comfort film for the year, the movie I watched when I just wanted to feel better. I don’t care what insipid complaints the critics had about this movie, the characters were great, and the fights lived up to hype!
Favorite Person – Mark Hamill From the heights of the stars themselves to the depths of Arkham Asylum and everything in between, Mark Hamill has seemingly done it all.  You never know when he’s going to show up next, and it’s always a pleasant surprise when he does. We even heard him as Skeletor in 2021! And he has proven himself to be a big hearted, down to Earth guy the entire time. He clearly loves his fans and uses his status to have fun. But when it comes to the not-so-fun realities of the world we live in today, Mr. Hamill always keeps it real. I know everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I can’t imagine not wanting to be on the same side as the guy who played (and sometimes still plays?) Luke Freaking Skywalker.

So that’s that. I still look back at 2020 as the dumpster fire I said it was, and while 2021 certainly had many of the same challenges, I feel better in general about it than 2020. There were plenty of things worth enjoying, and I am very lucky and grateful to have been in a position where I could keep up with a lot of what I was into. Clearly we’re all still struggling with the way the world is today, but at least this kind of stuff gave me something to look forward to, or at least offered a bit of inspiration.

Sayonara.

I took some time to add a few more pieces of artwork from the backlog to the Illustration page! Check out my drawings of Splinter, Godzilla, Rattrap, Doctor Doom, Optimus Prime, and… Jack Skellingtor?

The Optimus Prime one, based on his appearance in Transformers War of Cybertron: Siege, became one of the best pieces I had ever done and got some attention on Reddit and other places I posted it. Now it’s finally up here. This is the kind of thing I was hoping people would commission me to make more of but I sort of moved onto other directions as I am often prone to do. Now I feel like I would rather make silly drawings than cool drawings, but I can always be convinced to change my mind.

Of course, you can continue to see my latest art on my DeviantArt and NewGrounds pages, as well as sketches, works in progress, and other stuff on my Tumblr.

I’ll be busy working on something else as I gear up for Toronto TFcon in December. I don’t know how much more art and other updates I’ll be able to do until after that, so I wanted to take care of this stuff first. See you on the other side. Or anytime I’m on Twitch.

Sayonara.

Once again, it’s been too long since I did this. Adding new artwork to the Illustration page should be a simple process, but it gets tedious and takes longer than I think it will, so I only do it once in awhile. So I’ve got plenty of stuff to put up here, and I’ll get to the rest of the backlog eventually, but for now, let’s take care of these six.

I have added artwork of Miles Morales, Harley Quinn, He-Man, Hordak, Bumblebee, and Devilman. This artwork is all from the bygone era of 2019 from the brief period of time when I was taking suggestions for artwork from anyone who subscribed to me on Twitch. It was a fun time when I experimented on a lot of different styles and techniques, but eventually had to stop doing that when I found I was spending more time than I should have on those drawings. Fun while it lasted though!

I’ll try to do more some time soon, but hey, we’ll see. In the meantime, you can catch most of my art and other updates on DeviantArt, NewGrounds, Instagram, and Tumblr.

Sayonara.

Once again, we have reached July without a TFcon. Hopefully the rescheduled December date will stick, but until then, let’s get together online one more time for another Virtual Convention panel!

“Beyond Transformers” is a panel about the other branches on the Transformers family tree. From the formative toy lines like Microman and Diaclone to some of the wild and weird robots from Takara that arrived after Transformers became a thing, there are a lot of cool toy robots which many fans might not be aware of, but are related to Transformers in one way or another. There are a lot of weird characters and surprises too. For this revised and extended edition, I’ll be combining the panel I preformed at TFcon 2019 with the panel I did in 2017 to create the ultimate in depth look at Takara’s extended robot universe!

The panel happens on my Twitch channel on July 11th! As was the case with my previous virtual panels, everyone is welcome, even if you’ve never been to a Transformers or anime convention before. You do not need to have a Twitch account to watch, but you will need an account to participate in the chat room. I won’t be interacting with the chat much during the presentation itself, and all notifications and redemptions will be turned off during that stretch of time. But we’ll have some time to chill from 5:30pm EST before I start the panel at 6, and then we’ll do some Q&As (and maybe an unboxing too).

Later that night, join my Discord server for a surprise. Did you know that this weekend is Ultraman day?

My previous virtual panels were a big success and a lot of fun, and even though they are obviously not a substitute for the real convention experience, they did at least help to scratch that itch of not being at TFcon. I hope you can be there, and please help to spread the word by posting about it on your own blogs and social media platforms. I am all about creating those “You had to be there” moments, and so there will not be any recordings or VOD. Don’t miss it live!

You can also check out the Facebook event page if you are into Facebook and use it to share that this is a thing that’s happening! Hope to see you there!

Sayonara.

Page One of the Frankensketchbook. Started drawing on June 17th 2020.

One year ago, I was feeling like I wasn’t satisfied with the kinds of artwork I was doing, and wanted to just break out of the rut by drawing a bunch of weird stuff all together for no reason. At the time I had been looking at a lot of images of various Japanese toys that I found online and was really struck by the unbridled creativity and wild designs found in the myriad of wonderful vinyl monsters, robots, mutants, and other characters I saw. Inspired, I wanted to inject some of that into my own work, and not just digitally. It had been awhile since I had kept up with regularly drawing in a sketchbook, probably because I didn’t have one that didn’t have most of the pages already drawn in. There was one sketchbook that was pretty much ruined when many of the pages got water damaged before I ever got to draw in it, but I resurrected it from the dead by transplanting the remaining unused pages from other sketchbooks into it, creating a powerful new sketchbook that would serve my purpose. Frankensketchbook was alive!

I drew on the first page during a live stream on my Twitch channel on June 17th, the night of my birthday. And it was a wild night! I was drawing in front of one of the bigger audiences I ever had, comprised of a fun convergence of people I knew from different places. I went into it without any plan other than to just draw whatever strange characters sprang to mind as I drew them. There were no thumbnails or anything else of the sort, just drawing aliens and kaiju and whatever other weirdos as they came to me.

Villains

One Million Ninjas

Monster Princess

I’ve drawn more pages since then, getting back to it every once in awhile when I’m tired of drawing digitally. To add some focus to each page, I’ll make everything on it fit a loose theme like villains, ninjas, monsters, and so on. Instead of doing a full month of Inktober last year, I did one page in my sketchbook featuring different characters representing the 31 official prompts. Sometimes I will base the page on whatever theme is going on in the art community that month, like March of the Robots and Mer-May.

Inktober 2020

March of the Robots

Mer-May

WiP KaiJune

So now it’s been a whole year since I started the Frankensketchbook. On my birthday this year, I was at it again, working on the next page, and it was another fun stream with a lot of people. I was a little disappointed in myself when I realized that this was only the 8th page in the book after the year of working in it. But when I figure there are like a million things on each page, I guess it’s ok that I haven’t drawn a million pages yet. I do want to take my time and make finished drawings about stuff that I enjoy.

While all the pages have been these big complete compositions full of characters, I can’t treat it too preciously. The pages are getting beat up along the way, with curling corners and wear & tear around the edges. I probably shouldn’t have been drawing all the way to the very edge of the paper. Still, I want to fill the Frankensketchbook with more weird and wacky stuff. It’s been a fun creative outlet and people seem to like to watch the traditional art process. Maybe someday I’ll do something with the artwork and use it in a larger project.

You can watch when I work in the Frankensketchbook, as well as other art other stuff, on my Twitch channel, and keep up when I post drawings and other things like this on my Tumblr.

Sayonara.