Have to make sure I can draw Beryl’s best bud Moneesha in this revised style. Like Beryl, I want her to look prettier than she did in my previous style, but I don’t want to let her to lose her ethnic attributes. That is, I don’t want her to look like a white girl with brown skin. I think that’s as insulting as anything.

Plus, I’m trying out some paper—it’s not quite as high quality as the paper used for Beryl yesterday, but it’s close, and more importantly I’ve got a pad of 40 big sheets on hand! Like yesterday’s entry, this is a test, but a test I’m very happy with. However, I am seeing some things I need to look out for.

As for Moneesha’s surname here. Er, I might have cited a different one for her, earlier, but it doesn’t really matter. She’s on the run, and she’s always changing her name to keep one step ahead of the Evil Forces on her tail. :D

I hope you find her prettier now, anyway!

Two things happened: first, we got a new AC to replace the main unit that conked out last year. We’ve been sweltering with just the backup and a fan, and last week the backup started blowing hot air while the temps outside topped 110F.

When we got control of the temperature in the house, I could finally get some work done without it immediately turning into crap.

Second, I got some advice about adding ammonia to my india ink to make it flow better. I don’t have any ammonia on hand, so I had to try Windex. And you know what? It helps! Pure ammonia will probably work better, though. That plus the cooler temps in the house means I can use flattering lines for Beryl, instead of resorting to the usual crappy art pens.

Meanwhile, even though I felt I had come to peace with my usual cartooning style, I had another incident where readers seemed not entertained so much as repulsed by my work. I aim to keep things looking interesting. I guess I make things look too interesting!

So for Beryl and her friends, I’m going to be aiming for a more pleasing line, like in the new illustration above. It’s actually much easier to ink her extra-large breasts with a brush. You really don’t want to try drawing a large, smooth orb with an art pen. You will get angry.

And oddly enough, this version of Beryl is starting to look more like the real-life Beryl that I knew in high school. It may just be that extra warmth from the line.

Now some important notes. I want to work back towards not leaving so many notes on the site, but I’ve been in something like a spiral of doom. I apologize, spirals of doom are difficult to deal with, and tend to consume everything in their path.

I’ve been trying to escape the spiral of doom with an art sale. I have found that there is some misunderstanding about this among my readers, here. This year was not supposed to be like this. Everything’s been working against me, month after freaking month. During the winter, the city threatened us with $100 per day fines if we didn’t clear away a huge strip of foliage on one side of the house. Right now, I’m not making $100 a month. So I didn’t have any choice: I spent most of the winter pulling out trunks and tearing down vines, with nothing but a rusty pair of hedge shears and a hacksaw. The job had a deadline of weeks, and I spent weeks mostly outside all day, freezing and cutting and sawing and pulling. In February, I developed a huge, debilitating head pain that wouldn’t go away for most of the month. Now the summer has ruined me, because I have not been able to function in the triple-digit heat. I’ve been trying to keep going by getting up in the middle of the night to work, and even the nighttimes have been furiously hot in the house.

This stuff hits me hard because I have yet to recover from my earlier disasters. I had just returned to my own living space, after a year in limbo following a painful eviction, during which time our storage unit was ransacked (meaning, valuable things taken, and not-so-valuable things smashed and strewn on the floor).

This here is not a plea for donations, it’s a plea for understanding: this stuff hits me hard because I can’t afford to do anything about it, yet. I couldn’t get any more tools to work on the yard; I couldn’t replace the big AC last year when it needed replacing; the list of things I can’t do right now is really endless.

With the new AC in place, as of late last week, I now have an opportunity to get going again, but I have to think about the best way of doing this.

I mentioned before something about going to an all-text adventure with illustrations. I had already been thinking about bringing back my old fantasy series that way. But I think that’s too much of an extreme; I think there’s a smarter way to do this.

I’ve been visiting a very popular fantasy comic that updates once a week, but updates more of a full page comic. I’m thinking that maybe this is the way to go with Tanktop and my other fantasy comic, plus text stories.

That way, we can get some eye candy every week that will be much better than the stuff I’ve been trying to push daily, and I can work on the “novel” versions, as well.

I also have to figure out how to get some revenue coming in, instead of begging you guys for donations all the time. I don’t like doing that.

Our current status on bills: another miracle, we got the water turned back on, and we’ve made arrangements with the electric company to spread out our high summer bills. Maybe we’ll make it through, after all. Take that, spiral of doom!

I apologize for the lack of activity, but things have gone from bad to worse. I’ve been holding an art sale over at Elf Life, because I need to raise money fast. \$200 just to get the water turned back on, but now everything else is piling up, too.

Elf Life has been on hold while I decide what to do with it, but I have over ten years of nifty art piled up. It’s terrific stuff, but I just can’t find any buyers.

There’s a little bit of Tanktop art offered there, too, including a sheet of miscellaneous cavegirl art that I posted for sale once before with no success. I’ve also done some preliminary sketches of some “dirty” drawings, but I just don’t have the time to produce a lot of new art all at once.

Anyway, shifting through old art and pushing the sale over the weekend has left me just where I started, and I don’t have anything new to post today. All I can do is ask for help—take a look at the art sale. Or is there anything in the Tanktop, Texas archive you might be interested in? If you haven’t before, donate for some wallpaper, or just to be a pal! Please hit that donation button!

Meanwhile, I’ve opened up a new Tumblr blog for Tanktop. This is so I can eliminate wasted time and effort maintaining a blog on this site, separate from the comics and stories. Also, we want the social interaction—the lack of traffic on our sites has been killing us! Tanktop hasn’t really gained a foothold anywhere, which is part of the reason we’ve been struggling along making no money, and going from bad to worse.

This week is going to be dedicated to raising revenue, one way or another, because it’s the low revenue that ALWAYS causes me to get derailed like this. All week, I’ll be producing art specifically for sale as originals and prints.

So—Beryl Thunderstrom has revealed in her interview on Catwallander that she’s had a career as a plus-sized model on the side. Meanwhile, plus-sized model Marquita Pring confesses she pads her hips to look bigger.

She also said that the plus-size modelling world is more close-knit and friendly than the so-called ‘straight-size’ industry because the community is smaller.

Beryl can testify to that, too, when we can get back underwear, er, underway with the comics.

About production

I apologize, but we just are not in a normal, stable situation. And we’re still having some production problems, despite trying different ideas to get things moving. The heat’s been murder, lately. We’re on something like day 24 of 100+ degree temperatures, and only have two small ACs. The heat is getting to me, and I’m not getting enough decent work done in the time allotted. And then every week there’s some big event that derails everything.

I need to get some upates going. So I’m going to have to take a chance on annoying some of you with some text updates—stories, scripts, and ideas. I could use some feedback, anyway.

The following is some sample literature, and not very long, from a proposed Beryl book that I mentioned a while back, along with some of the sample illos (that you might have seen already). I think my idea at the time was to write the story, and solicit donations for illustrations as we go along. What do you think? Do you think something like that might work? The idea appeals to me, because I desperately need more up-front funding for production. Updating a webcomic is too damn speculative. It’s turned a wretch like me into a, er, wretcheder wretch. :/

In any case, if you have some extra money sitting around, please hit the donation button. Maybe I just need to ask more frequently. Maybe I need to post large messages in between the comics that just say “PLEEEEEASE!”

Cavegirl and the Brainbone

The cavegirl Beryl stood gleaming, tan and naked before the sun, her hugely disproportionate breasts falling bestraddle as her torso curved back, while she raised the skull on high. The rays of the sun flared behind her, practically blinding her people, down below.

“Behold, oracle’s brainbone!” Her voice was unnaturally amplified, thundering so everyone in the valley could hear it. One day her family would be called Thunderers, great warriors of reknown. There was no question why she was the leader of her clan. She was not the smartest, nor the bravest, nor the most comely of the tribe. But she was the out-and-out loudest.

“Oracle not dead; spirit live on in brainbone. Oracle make promise. Guide tribe out of stone age. Prepare for trials to come.”

Her simple words rang through the valley, and the clouds rolled quicker. The very earth hummed with anticipation. Her mammoth breasts tumbled wildly with every sharp gesticulation.

One of her clan leaned over to another and whispered. “What the hell?”—“Beats me,” the other replied.

The sororal clan was congregated on the slope. The other cavegirls were not interested in what Beryl had been doing inside the caves, but habitually stuck together in packs, for safety’s sake. Every so often, a member of the ugly man tribe would stand at the border of their territory, stroking his beard. But the cavegirls were always ready with sharp sticks and rocks.

What the ugly man tribe wanted was anybody’s guess.

Beryl’s clan were all hideously deformed, outcasts from tribes up and down the continent. They lacked the thick, protective mats of body hair other more desirable females had, and were almost completely bald, apart for curls and tresses emanating from the tops of their heads. Their bodies were not sturdy nor sufficiently block-like, and instead curved grotesquely in the most unexpected places. Many of them, like Beryl, had monstrously overdeveloped chest globules and wobbly posteriors. Their jaws were not strong enough to split stones, but sat demurely behind squibby red lips.

And so there they were, in their prehistoric condition, naked and exposed to the elements, more animal than human: some sitting, while brushing each other’s hair; others engaged in ritual repetitions, jumping and running in place to ward off demons that caused unsightly bloating and bulges about the midsection, and thickening of the limbs; others in huddles, telling each other exaggerated tales about other members of the tribe while playing games, using specially marked stones and sticks.