it's just jay

I like to draw. Animation BFA | CCA 2026 🎓 https://linktr.ee/sketchyjaycomics

[sketchyjaycomics]

curl up in ryan gosling's arms, you say?

[leo-nite]

The fact that bloodymary is trending ON ITS OWN without phm or iron lung is just. really funny to me

[sketchyjaycomics]

not the first time it's happened either which is EVEN funnier

[duckngk]

making friends

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this is how i am with my friends too (im grace)

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its insane how popular bloodymary has gotten. here's my slop from this past week

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character animation practice with jacks

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another class assignment where we draw in different styles! feat. my special girl jacks

[sketchyjaycomics]

I redesigned the main "the doraemons" cast for a class assignment and im pretty happy with how they turned out! the goal was to do a complete sweep-over while maintaining the essence of the original character design. 10/10 would do again. also included their OG designs at the end for comparison

[sketchyjaycomics]

whatever, go my scarab

[sketchyjaycomics]

doodles from storyboard pro

[sketchyjaycomics]

Synopsis: A normal man gets into an argument with his roommate–a giant, evil robot from space.

If you're a fan of big mecha robots like the Transformers, you'll like my junior film! Feel free to check it out ^_^

[mortalityplays]

the whole point of a zine is that it's cheap to produce, amateur and homemade. if you're being asked to apply to participate in a print project, it is not a zine. if the final product is being printed and bound professionally, it is not a zine. if you are being asked to enter into any kind of licensing agreement more complex than "my work can be reproduced as part of this publication" it is not a zine. nine times put of ten if the final product costs more than $5 you have left zine country. im so serious about this.

[mortalityplays]

this isn't snobby gatekeeping or imaginary semantic problems or whatever, this is an issue that has come up irl at cons and zine fairs local to me and which keeps coming up online. people who show up to trade fairs selling professionally printed $15 anthologies as 'zines' have a direct impact on the people trying to sell their $3 chapbooks at the next table over. submission based kickstarter projects that bill themselves as 'zines' exploit the connotations of amateur, punk production values to induce creators to work for less and eschew formal guarantees and protections they are entitled to.

[leog4u]

my favorite zines have all been $1 or free and printed on highlighter paper. i used to pick em up from a book store in chelsea that sold predominantly self published work, and had sections for zines. Some were about how to eat cheap in the city when most of your paycheck went to rent, others were talking about the best drag performances in town, and plenty of DIY stuff. all of them had the same unique quality: nobody but the author and their collaborators could've made this, and they wanted to make it easily accessible to the community

i kinda hate that the word that was used for extremely personal and cheap works is applied to essentially art books of your favorite anime OTP

[mortalityplays]

hi! sorry, real quick:

grab a piece of paper and fold it in half like a book

write "im indifferent to zines" on the cover

write "i've never been able to buy one" on the first page

write "and i'll never be in one" on the second page

write "just want to be a hater today" on the back

congrats you're in a zine! if you like you can photocopy it and sell it to art students, fellow haters, or anyone with a sense of humour. I'll buy one.

[theliltchirurgeon]

ive been saying this since 2015! all my illustrator friends kept submitting to them (and gettin in which i was proud of) but they... werent zines. they were like massive books with grandiose color schemes and gilded bossing. i couldnt afford them even. zines are oft free or traded and they arent about how pretty a picture you can make.

the first zine idea i found was in a book i checked out from the library (id never remember what it was. it was about cartooning i think and had a section about chibi style lol) that had a little section on taking one sheet of paper, marking it into eighths, cutting a line in the center of the page and folding it over for a quick eight pages. like this

this makes printing soooo easy too. id love to see these floating around places

[iwanttodance]

So I scrolled past this post and was thinking the same thought I always do when I see people talking about zines, which is basically ‘zines are so cool, I’ve never made one because I don’t think I have anything interesting to say in one, but I should make a zine someday if I ever have creative energy again’ and then it gets added to my ever growing mental list of things I want to do but don’t end up doing (I have spent the last several years struggling so hard with my depression that I can’t seam to create anything at all)

And then I thought, hey I have a piece of paper by my desk I should at least follow that diagram and fold it, that way I’m halfway there even if it’s blank and sits on my desk for months, and then 5 minutes later I had this:

Now I’m just holding this little thing I’ve made in my hands and I love it so much

So thank you to this post for inspiring me to make something today! Even if it’s just a simple silly little thing I’m going to treasure it

[relevant-wikipedia-articles]

Zine - Wikipedia

[molotovblogtail]

Amazing! Not only did I not know to correct pronunciation of 'zine', but I also had no idea that they connect black history, political activism, the origins of the Kirk/Spock ship, and feminism. Such a powerful force in history these little homemade magazines.

[smiirp]

There is great info about zine making here but… OPs definition of “zine” is just… unnecessarily restrictive and outright wrong ... Zines HAVE ALWAYS included the full range of publications from 8-page sheets that get photocopied to full colour fanart collections. The term zine derives from “fanzine”. The first fanzines were collections of amateur sci fi art and writing. Sure, zines encompass a much wider array of publications now, but that does not mean we change the definition to cut out what we deem to be too “professional.” (Also hint: something being classified as a zine has less to do with how it’s printed and more to do with who it is published by and how it is circulated. But you have to first understand that there is a distinction between printing and publication to grasp this.)

A zine does not have to be made by only a few authors, or DIY, or sold for under $15 to be classified as a zine. Zines are their own medium with their own unique history and their own diverse ecosystem, why would you want to strip that complexity away? You can inspire people to make their own and inform them how to do it without bowdlerizing the whole form and bulldozing over all the connections between the different groups and purposes zines have served and continue to serve.

[mortalityplays]

thanks for the bad faith reading. you're wrong, btw.

I aready said this isn't a semantic thing, but you if you really want to go there: 'zine' is a shortening of fanzine or magazine and the concept of a 'fanzine' itself is directly derived from a style of independently published magazine that has roots at least as far back as the Harlem Renaissance and arguably the political pamphleteering of the french and american revolutions. but the actual point I was making is that the entire ethos of zine making originates in an effort to broaden access to publication, and we are losing that.

am I saying nobody ever slapped a $20 cover price on a zine before the 2020s? no! am I saying no influential underground publication has ever made the crossing into fully fledged magazine? no! am I saying I will come to your house and punch your teeth in personally if you use the word zine in a way I find objectionable? no! I'm saying the trajectory of commercialisation, professionalisation and lost knowledge is not only stripping foundational meaning from the form but directly harms the viability of low-overhead zine production. just look through the notes of this post for dozens of people saying they'd never heard of the homemade zine before this post, that they'd been burned by high production 'zine' projects and soured on the whole concept as a result. no equivocation: this shit is killing the medium.

but hey, maybe the $15 zine is the norm and I'm just pearl clutching because I don't like genshin impact or whatever. let's look at the cover prices of some historically important zines at launch:

oh sorry, my bad, these aren't 'fanzines' let's try again

mm but of course the very first fanzines ever published would be cheap and amateur, the form was still being figured out. what about the one everyone on tumblr loves to call the birth of fandom:

well fine, but what about zines that deal with serious social issues? that involve research, outreach, even risk on the part of the creators?

believe it or not (or refuse to believe it) but the history of zines is not the history of bag-getters. accessibility has always been the lifeblood of the form, and that includes financial accessibility.

I have zero fucking power to wave a wand and magically exclude everyone whose projects I think are tacky from using the tem 'zine', but what I can do is appeal to people to remember that being asked to submit a portfolio for consideration is the exception, not the norm. gloss covers and kickstarter tiers with vinyl keychains and custom wall art is a new and alien graft on a very old medium. being treated like a subcontractor on a 50-person art collaboration that will only be affordable to middle class kids with middle class disposable income runs entirely counter to what used to be the definitional feature of zine making. sure I'm being intractable. I think we should all be a lot more intractable about this. we saw what happened to webcomics.

[sketchyjaycomics]

more of these guys. my sons,,

[sketchyjaycomics]

they're back, and they're gayer than ever

so context: for the majority of my middle and high school years, i was obsessed with a 90s spin-off series of "Doraemon" called "The Doraemons".

i was working on a reboot series-type fan project for 3 years before taking a break from it due to burn-out.

it's been about 2 to 3 years since then, and i'm sort of back to drawing these characters! they meant the world to me growing up and they still do now, just not as actively present.

[sketchyjaycomics]

trying to get the blorbos out of my head via bluetooth

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this semester was a fucking nightmare lol

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updated tf2 oc design! I've changed her name to "jacks" instead of "jax" just cuz it feels more appropriate for the time period. same goes for the hair- it used to be dyed blonde but now it's a natural dark brown. misc. jacks and scout sketches below 👇

[sketchyjaycomics]

more misc. doodles featuring my colorful sons, megatron, and me