This has been an interesting year for me. At the start of 2022, I was in a deep funk. I turned sixty in January. The past 6 years in this country have been mentally exhausting, just keeping up with all the madness on the news, and the Covid pandemic wreaked havoc with both my illustration career and with my musical side hustle. I’m still working on various book publishing projects, but the quicker turnaround clients have been drying up and blowing away for years, and this year was no different.

However, in April, in order to improve upon my weight and health (a troubling doctor’s visit in February convinced me), I began a walking regimen, which began to show positive results after a few months diligence. I wanted to put the same obsessive attitude towards my flagging enthusiasm towards work. For years I have been wanting to do more comics, so I made an additional goal of doing a daily strip, just to see what happens if I keep it up for a length of time. Perhaps I might improve at it just by daily repetition.

After several months of this routine, I began to see my enthusiasm begin to slowly return to my illustration career. I began to take a bit more interest in my assignments, and started applying new skills I learned doing the daily comic to my paying work. I end the year 2022 with an improved mental attitude towards my work, and an enthusiasm for comics that has been laying dormant for decades.

The major jobs this year were: A coloring book of ‘Literary Horror’ for Dover, a series of illustrations for the book “Saving Earth” for MacMillan (a sample pictured above), and the annual ‘Witches Companion’ for Llewellyn. I also spent a great deal of time working on a series of ‘Academy Award Caricture Posters’ (see the menubar for samples of this self promo assignment) as a way of keeping busy, but ended up abandoning it after doing about a decades worth. I also did several “Who Was” books for Penguin.

A disturbing trend towards a this new A.I. technology has given me pause with regards to posting so much of my work on the internet. I haven’t personally been impacted by this yet, but I can see how it could be a problem in the future as the technology improves. Which is why I am going to be making a few changes this year with regards to what I’m sharing on this blog. I’m thinking of expanding my Patreon site (the one I currently use for my comic strip “Mose Goes Walkies”), and adding a bit more of my illustration work (plus extras, like rough sketches, behind-the-scenes commentary, and time lapse videos). In fact, this week I’ll likely be posting my usual “year in review” samples on the Patreon site. We’ll see how this works.

The band is floundering on life support at the moment (we had a few gigs in the past year, added a new band member), but rethinking the music business is also a big priority.

Hope everyone had an interesting past year, and wishing you all the best in the coming year.