#88adventure

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88 - Part 1

So 88 was a mspaint fan adventure I made back in 2012, that’s five years ago as of writing this. I made it during a time in my life where I didn't know what I was going to do. I was living in Venezuela and was something like, 15. At the time the country was going steadily down into economic bad times and the educational system was a joke. I felt very entrapped there and knew that any kind of advancement would be a waste, since I’d have to take a GED in the states anyway. During that time I discovered Homestuck and it really inspired me to give art a shot. I wasn’t aware of any kind of formal training so I just decided to go for it.

As of the time of writing this I believe the original forums on which I posted this are dead, and Homestuck itself is pretty much done now. I did post it on this blog a long ways before eventually running out of steam and ceasing updates on it due to a combination of real life fatigues and an amateurish sense of having gotten too deep into something I couldn't commit to.

I wanted 88 to be something a little different and a lot of real life stuff influenced it, including influence from time in my dad’s tattoo shop, the kind of afro Caribbean kind of art that was very prevalent in Venezuela, and my personal love of the baroque and horror elements. It wasn’t a very good piece of work, it delved into some immersion breaking bits of internet humor, and ultimately went nowhere, but it was the kind of work I needed to make at the time to kind of spread my legs and experiment as well as learn some basics through trial and error. 

The story was very absurdist and I had too much planned for it. From the ashes, I did eventually settle on what I want what was known as 88 to be. In time, I’d like to revisit it and give the play it deserves.

Here are links to all of the updates I made, as re uploading with all the text would be a little too time consuming:

http://arnold-gutierrez.tumblr.com/post/15506104303/88

http://arnold-gutierrez.tumblr.com/post/16394634248/88

http://arnold-gutierrez.tumblr.com/post/17602577335/88

http://arnold-gutierrez.tumblr.com/post/19311025490/88

http://arnold-gutierrez.tumblr.com/post/21937798090/88

http://arnold-gutierrez.tumblr.com/post/22762816818/88

http://arnold-gutierrez.tumblr.com/post/23630783238/88

http://arnold-gutierrez.tumblr.com/post/24579892043/88

http://arnold-gutierrez.tumblr.com/post/28939440661/88

After this, I never updated again. However, I did make some unused art for an update that I’ll post now:

At this point I went on an indefinite hiatus and never finished the comic. The stars did not align for this iteration of 88 to take off. However, that’s not to say there weren’t OTHER attempts and itterations...

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88 - Part 2

So after I stopped making 88, I tried to revisit it a couple of times as a more traditional comic. In my mind it slowly went from a comic with horror elements to more of a full blown horror story.

Here’s an early attempt where I tried to set up Edd Ebb’s character right from the start. It was I think the first time I’d attempted to just make a normal comic, and I tried to make some of the paneling as unhinged as the character arc.

Unfortunately, multiple attempts at inking in this style of comic digitally were unsuccessful, as at the time I couldn’t really grasp coloring and inking composition.

Later on I attempted it again, this time with the idea of eventually making it into an interactive comic similar to the team fortress 2 comics, where each panel would appear one after another. This would lead to much more freedom in terms of panel composition, but in the end I was too busy with real life things as well as too unprepared for the added programming aspect.

At this point the intended layout of clicking and revealing one panel after the other becomes more apparent, and also more confusing without that context and an outright counterintuitive way of laying out panels in a normal comic, but I still have faith in the idea.

Developing this kind of artstyle took years to really grasp and begin to execute in a meaningful way, and a lot of that process includes idle doodling...

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88 - part 3

These are just miscellaneous 88 related drawings, both old and recent.

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88 Bonus - Capn Smokey

This is an unfinished spinoff comic about Smokey the Snake, the little companion character in 88. It was going to be a filthy little story about how he met Edd. Honestly, I just forgot I even made it. It was going to involve jungle spirits tormenting some pirates for brutalizing some natives.