Loophole

This is the tumblr blog for Loophole, a webcomic about wolves and nerds and burgers. Loophole is brought to you by the combo artist/writer cool kid team Chelsea Jones and Jesse Keneally.

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HOWL-loween

Hope y’all had a good one, because we sure did! Howdy folks, Jesse and Chelsea dropping in this Tuesday to say no page this week, but we still want to say hi to everybody <3 Costumes under the cut!

What did y’all do for the spooky? Did you kiss skeletons? We have been and will continue to kiss skeletons. In Jesse’s case, Halloween skeleton-kissing meant a lot of smeared face makeup.

Worth it.

Chelsea...Chelsea had a hard time. She was, in fact, our FIRST LOOPHOLE COSPLAYER, WOOOOO...but she had a hard time.

When you wear glasses

in a full-face wolf mask

things get very foggy

very fast

and the furry hands

aren’t exactly helpful

when it comes

to holding the camera straight.

She did her very best. Here’s an earlier shot of a Chelsea who could see a little more clearly:

Nice.

Anyway, if you want, drop us a line about how Halloween went! We’d love to hear from y’all out there :) Know that we’re aiming to have something a little more content-heavy lined up next week. And until then, keep on keepin’ on!

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Place your bets now--is this knock knock joke gonna be awful, or unforgivably awful?

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/whisper

Guess what

When your creative team is one part considerable over-ambition and one part painstaking meticulousness, sometimes deadlines don’t fall exactly where you want them to.

This week’s extra Wednesday page is gonna be an extra Thursday page. Colors are being magicked onto it as we speak! For today, please enjoy some early developmental art for the lovely Isidor Tzavaras.

Grump that he is.

Artwork by painstaking meticulousness Chelsea

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BOOOOOOOM IT’S HERE, THE BIG NIGHT HAS ARRIVED AND LOOPHOLE IS UP!! A WHOLE PAGE OF IT!!!

Hi guys! Jesse and Chelsea here, waving hello from where we lie dead on the floor! October’s moon is at its fullest and, in congruence, Loophole is launched!

Some of you, particularly those who’ve been with us since spring, may be thinking that the launch has popped up without a ton of pomp and circumstance--AND YOU’D BE RIGHT!! Don’t mistake us, this has been our intended launch date pretty much since the beginning, but there’ve been some goings on in our non-comic lives that have taken up time that might have otherwise gone to things like hyping our start date. Some of those things are our really cool, really involving, kind-of-relatively-new professional lives--yay!!!

Other things are events like the amazing and incredible GEEK GIRL CON! We have had the pleasure of attending two cons this year, both all new to us and both really, stunningly fun. We offered a report on the WONDERful time we had at WONDERcon (oh you’re gonna get tired of us fast), and a lot of what’s to be said about our GGC experience can be summed up as “good con things got even better”. Seriously, if you’re looking for a safe, fun, healthy, well-rounded convention experience, and you can get yourself up to Washington next fall, that is the place to be.

Assorted madness aside, here we are on LAUNCH DAY and what you’d probably like to actually hear about is how the comic is going to move forward! Where will you see it? When will you see it? The answers are that you will see it HERE on loopholecomic.tumblr.com, and it will arrive on your computer screens...a little erratically, to start. When we first set out on Loophole, both of us were working pretty minimally: part-time workloads, amorphous schedules, pretty typical early-job situation. Then, in the last few months, there came some pretty significant changes. Full-time jobs, and a goal to get a place of our own, mean that (as aforementioned) the hours in the day dedicated to comic activity have simply shrunk. What we’re working steadily towards, though,  is a weekly Tuesday schedule! By next spring, we’re looking to make that place-of-our-own goal into a reality, and alongside that, we’d like to be able to give this project the attention it needs to be the cool, stable thing it wants to be. So, in summation: rickety, Tuesday-focused update schedule. The first exception to said schedule is this very week (our integrity is a shining beacon in a dark time) when you will get an additional WEDNESDAY page! Two pages! One week! Holy shit!!!

Until things can even out a little more, we just ask you to be patient with us. Thank you so much for being here and reading this, we hope our story unfolds into something you enjoy, and hey! Happy Halloween!

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Loophole zine and Wondercon 2015!

So our original intention was to get home from Wondercon full of sparkles and enthusiasm and articulation! We were gonna write ceaselessly about what a lovely experience it was!

We got home from Wondercon full of back pain and cheese puffs and phlegm. And that’s why it’s taken us a week to speak up! But we’re fully rested, full of food slightly better than cheese puffs, and we’re now ready to share with all of you fantastic folks how Wondercon was!

What an incredible convention!! As San Diegans whose only flirts with convention life have been the ever-intimidating SDCC, we weren’t sure what to expect. But what we found was some really amazing (refreshing) energy! Text blocks are hard but here’s some praise in the form of bullet points!

The con was in a really nice big space, reminiscent of SDCC without being overwhelming.

Really nice crowd! Not belligerent or stifling!

Chelsea was particularly keen on the kids. There were lots of babies and young families in cosplay, they were all incredibly cute. <3

Jesse got a dragon.

The dragon’s name is Krystolonsoelle Archimicarus Javier Belcher (obviously).

The exhibitors were fantastic and so sweet about our zine; we hadn’t shared a zine prior to this convention and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive and very supportive! Hecka encouraging!

We enjoyed handing out print copies of our zine, but we’d really love sharing it with all of you guys as well!

You can download a copy of our Loophole zine here and read it for yourself!

This zine is essentially a very rough look at what will someday be the first chapter of Loophole! The both of us worked collaboratively on script and artwork, and we’re both pretty darned happy with what we accomplished in the time we had.

But this is far from final! By the time we get to our legitimate release, these pages will be full color, and could easily look pretty different from the way we do now! At Wondercon alone, we got some fantastic feedback from other artists and writers--who were super amazing just to give us their time--and we’ve already got changes in mind where dialogue and other nitpicky things are concerned.

Even said, we’d very much appreciate feedback on what we have done so far! If you have any advice/suggestions/desire to just drop in and say hi, you can either message us here on tumblr, or (if you’d like a rather more reliable messaging system) you can drop us an email over at [email protected].

Thanks so much for supporting the comic already, just by following us! We hope you enjoy the read, and we look forward to hearing from you!

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Hi guys! This is a big old bag of zines we took to WonderCon today!

We were both a little too exhausted to get into the deets of all this earlier, but we’ll be attending WonderCon the next two days and handing these out as we walk around, and once the con’s over, we’ll be posting a pdf version of it so y’all can get a good look at it too :)

Hope you’re all having a good weekend! If you’re around the con and you spot us—or our bag, at least—come and say hi!

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Day reblog!

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Hi guys! This is a big old bag of zines we took to WonderCon today! We were both a little too exhausted to get into the deets of all this earlier, but we'll be attending WonderCon the next two days and handing these out as we walk around, and once the con's over, we'll be posting a pdf version of it so y'all can get a good look at it too :) Hope you're all having a good weekend! If you're around the con and you spot us--or our bag, at least--come and say hi!

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The effort killed us, but we finished the zines!!! Now we’re ghosts and we’re gonna go to WonderCon with our zines. Come and find us to get a copy and enjoy the novelty of meeting real ghosts!

~*o*~

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Another livestream!!

We’re going to be pushing through a bunch of comic stuff today, feel free to stop in and say hi!

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Another livestream!

Come watch Chelsea draw some more!

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We're taking a quick break, be back soon!

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Another livestream!

Come watch Chelsea draw some more!

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Loophole zine livestream!

Hey guys! Come take a peek at our zine stuff today in this here livestream!

Chelsea’s going to be working on some tones and Jesse will be in the chat hanging out too! Hope to see some of you there :>

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Starting thumbnails like

Finishing thumbnails like

But hey, good news! We wrapped up the last thumbnails for our zine last night and have started the lovely process of lining! What a joy :D (:’D)

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A very nice thing to have for characters you're going to be drawing incredibly frequently is a sheet of expressions, to get used to how they emote! The best thing you can do for expressions is to focus on character rather than cliché, of course, but it sure is a fun exercise! Here's some line art out of the in-progress expression sheet for one of our protagonists, Girdie duPont.

Artwork by Jesse

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Our ask box is open!

Hi guys! Quick little announcement here. 

If you have any questions, comments, or half formed thoughts about Loophole, feel free to ask or chat away about them in our shiny new ask box! Click "Ask us Anything!" on our blog page or just click this nifty link that redirects you right to the ask page, ain't that handy? (I think it's handy.) 

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Tonight is a night that the two of us are hard at work knocking out content for next month's zine! So until we have more announcements for you, have some lupine development art~

Artwork by Jesse

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Hey guys!

It’s probably not a stretch to say that just about all of us here love story. As crafters, dreamers, and all-around creators, stories are something we need! They fuel everything that we build. And we here at the blog are really really excited to say that we have a story to share.

It's a story about some nerds. One nerd is stuck working a dead-end job while he tries to figure out where his life is going. Another nerd is just struggling to make ends meet, because she’s hardly got the energy to try and figure out things like that anymore. Throw some lycanthropy into that mix, and you wind up with Loophole, an upcoming webcomic by Chelsea Jones and Jesse Keneally--better known around here as ThePinkTroll and whaaleshaark!

So, Loophole itself won’t be going up online until later in the year--at the moment, October is the most specific launch date we’ve got. But we’ve got tons to share with you before then!

First off, we’d love to say a little about the premise of the comic. One on level, it’s a sort of slice-of-life story about two kids dealing with rEally fun (not fun at all, truly awful) stuff like financial strain, trust issues, isolation, and grief. While there is going to be a healthy dose of magical werewolf business going on, we’re hoping to depict some pretty relatable material here. We’d like to get across some messages about healthy relationships, self-care, and what those do and don’t look like. With any luck, people will be able to find some of themselves somewhere in the story, and maybe come out the other side of it a little happier.

About that healthy dose of werewolves though!! If you like seeing goofballs deal with the supernatural like big nerds, then this is for you. There’s gonna be a nice big bunch of werewolves, lycanthropy lore, and giant puppy dog petting, so if you’re into animals and the supernatural side of things, this should be a pretty fun read! And some of the wolfier characters are giant dorks, so feel free to laugh at them while they act as such.

We are also giant dorks ourselves, and we will probably be nerding out by putting in the occasional homage to things that are near and dear to our hearts. Like other webcomics. Or damn good cups of coffee.

This is our first venture into producing something of this scope, but we’re incredibly excited to share this story with you, hear from you, and hopefully make you laugh at these tiny little nerds and their ridiculous antics.

We look forward to sharing more, and talking more, and laughing more with all of you soon.

xoxoxoxoxo ---------------------- Loophole's tumblr! Loophole's twitter! Chelsea's tumblr Jesse's tumblr