2023 was a strange year. It felt like I was working harder than at any time in my career, but with stagnating pay, and more of an emphasis on ‘larger book projects’ rather than ‘quick turnaround work’, my income has been steadily shrinking for the past decade.

This was the first complete year that I’ve been doing a free webcomic every day, and it may have contributed to the feeling that I’m ‘working harder for less’. However, I’m having more fun doing this ‘Mose Goes Walkies’ comic strip every day than anything else I’ve ever done. A highlight for the year was winning a ‘Festival of the Arts’ award for a comics story that I featured in March about our hike on the John Muir Trail back in 2019. (The book for this story is available on my ‘Mose’ website)

The workload this past year was mostly made up of publishing assignments. I did a coloring book of New York City landmarks (a sample of which is pictured above), a Fantasy Mixology book (sample pictured below), plus several ‘Who Was’ books for Penguin (see bibliography for further information, and one sample from “What Do We Know About Alien Abductions” is pictured at the bottom).

I also did a series of illustrations for an illustrated edition of ‘A Farewell to Arms’, which was a follow-up to my ‘The Sun Also Rises’ from the previous year. I also did what was probably my last series of ‘Witches Companion’ interiors early in the year (one sample of which is pictured below). This was a long running annual assignment that seems to have undergone some changes from the publisher, and now are using more reprints and less commissioned work.