maintenance postmortem

Getting this blog post out the door before I table at my very first fair, Brooklyn Independent Comics Showcase! If you see this beforehand please swing on by! Entry is completely free, and I’ll be over at table 415. I printed some work for the first time for it, and will have a special combo pack of my games done via Andrew’s Tape Market. But I also will have copies of my first comic Maintenance for sale!

I’d been planning to table at BICS for a while, and really wanted to touch up the comic before putting it to print. I did the bulk of it over 2-3 weeks in September 2025, which I’m honestly still shocked by when I look back on it, given I work full-time and this thing was 21 pages… I’m really proud of what I pulled off, but this was definitely a “get this thing over the finish line” project rather than one continuously refined. Which is really hard to sit with! Ultimately I’ve decided to leave the comic as is, and spend my creative energy working on a new one instead of picking at this one.

Some quick housekeeping—I’m going to revamp the site in the near future, upload some new art, and eventually get a mirror for plastic coquina up in the games section. Also working on a comic and an illustrative project, both of which will wrap up sometime this year. Not a lot to share about those for now, though! But I’ll be sure to make a short blog post when I get the site onto 2.0.

process

I will start the comic-talk off with a bit of a disclaimer… I am a huge believer in the separation between the artist and their work! Whatever I say below I see as distinct from the comic itself, which now exists on its own terms. I’ll offer reflections on its development as well as some insight into some creative decisions, but I’d encourage you all to come to your own understanding of it. It can and should mean many different things to many different people.

I decided more firmly that I would be making a comic back in February of 2025, after Amet and I made our first game together, Hana’s Light. We knew we’d most likely be making another game together in the summer, and in the meantime I felt really inspired to make my own work to better understand who I was as a writer, and of course so I could be a better creative partner to Amet and anyone else we might bring onto our team.

This was also the time I had the dream I mentioned at the end of my comic! I have really boring dreams and rarely remember them, so I was really shocked to have dreamed up very fun and evil yaoi. Deciding to seize on what was both a once-in-a-lifetime chance for me as well as a story idea dropped in my lap right when I was looking for one, I decided this’d be my comic! I tried doing a few sketches to concretize the boys, and that drawing was posted back in March and is now my website header (at the time of posting).

Early sketch of similar but different boys.

I will say that despite looking nearly identical, they are to me distinct characters from the Ollie and Percy in the comic. Hopefully I can reintroduce these two to you all sometime in the future! “Ollie” was meant to be a goat boy, so the comic files are all named “goatboy_xyz”… but instead Ollie came onto the scene, as Percy’s mysterious mechanical doll boyfriend.

Comic work at this point sort of fizzled out because of some personal and professional stressors. I did come up with the premise at this point, though—I knew I wanted it to be one character, who I just called A, performing some sort of casual and intimate surgery on another character, who I just called B. I wanted it to be in the context of taking care of someone you care about deeply. I don’t know how much this is actually communicated in the final product, but I find that act very intimate and erotic, in a sort of profoundly romantic way. If I had more time, or maybe if I just redid it now, I would’ve held onto this thread a bit more.

Trying to figure out the boys and the relevant parts of the world.

inspiration

• One sea 10 seas:
  • Watching in a theater was a wonderfully meditative experience, and made me think a lot about images of the ocean and the slightly choppy water.
• Millennium Darling by Midori Iwasawa:
  • Mechanical boyfriends and their keepers should be a more established niche, please join us!
• Kelly Reichardt and Yasujiro Ozu:
  • The care Reichardt has for everyone in a scene and the overall mood of both of their films was really on my mind when I was working on this. I wanted to incorporate a tatami shot philosophy in the paneling, although not sure how well I achieved it!
• BOYS TOYS by Elle Shivers
  • I loved the incorporation of instruction manuals into his comic, and the variety of moods that can communicate. It gave me a wonderful tool for how to approach the routine care Percy gives Ollie.

Some of the layout work I did for the room, plus figuring out Ollie's tool tray.

hopes for next comic

The main takeaway was that I really needed to do more prep work, across the board. Some of the corners I cut knowing it would be rough but that I didn’t really have the time, while others were more or less a complete surprise and really whacked me in the face. Some concrete goals for next time:

• Build out 3D environments if there’s an extended scene in the same space.
• Spend longer doing character design and building detailed character sheets.
• Spend longer drawing the characters all the time… do not learn how to draw them by inking…
• Do a style test early on for how a page should look.

And that's all... turns out when you wait seven months to write a postmortem you don't have a ton to say! Thanks for reading!

bluzo