I'm always whining that Slightly Damned is crap because it has basically squat in terms of "notable" attention. No professional reviews, no awards, no Wikipedia page, etc. So this year, I want to try to win an Ursa Major Award.

What are the Ursa Major Awards?
"It is intended as Anthropomorphic (a.k.a. Furry) Fandom's equivalent of the Hugo Award ® presented by the World Science Fiction Society, mystery fandom's Anthony Award, horror fandom's Bram Stoker Award, and so forth."

For those of you that want to know more about the UMA's, you can visit the official website here: http://www.ursamajorawards.org/index.htm

Nominations should be opening up sometime in January.

In the mean time how about we work together to get Slightly Damned onto the 2012 Recommended Anthropomorphic Graphic Story list?

What is the 2012 Recommended Anthropomorphics List?
This list is separate from the actual awards, and serves as a sort of archive of recommended Anthropomorphic art that was created in 2012.

The list can be seen in its entirety here: http://www.ursamajorawards.org/ReadList.htm

Here's where you, my dear reader, come in.
Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to send an email to recommended@ursamajorawards.org that contains the following information:

The title of the work: Slightly Damned
A link to the website: http://www.sdamned.com/
Any other information you wish to include. The exact instructions are on the Recommended List page in the above link, but they aren't much different than what I have stated here.

THE DEADLINE IS JANUARY 15, 2013!
PLEASE DO NOT SPAM THE EMAIL

We're good until nominations open on the 17th or so! Thanks for your support and stay tuned!

...of course, only if you actually believe that Slightly Damned should be recommended/nominated/awarded.

I know it may seem silly to covet an award like this, but... I dunno, I figure I have nothing to lose by giving it a shot. Some of you might be confused as to why I care about a furry award when I've fought against being pigeonholed by the label for years, but I have two good reasons for this:
1) I think this is the only webcomic award where I have a snowball's chance in hell of actually being eligible for. The Harvey and Eisner awards are just... yeah, no way, the Hugo Awards require registration for expensive cons (one in San Antonio, TX, one in London), and the Webcartoonist's Choice Awards have been dead for years. If there's anything else out there that you guys know of, I'm all ears!

2) Hey, I figure if Pixar's Brave is elligble for an Ursa Major award, why not Slightly Damned?

(P.S. Thanks to Tec for writing the logistics stuff!)

Happy New Year! If I had to pick one word to describe 2012, it would be "extreme". There were a lot of extremely awesome things that happened, as well as couple of extremely crappy things.

Anyway, Slightly Damned updates will resume as normal starting tomorrow. If you're looking for the holiday comics that used to be in the archives, check the Monster Hive website: http://www.monsterhive.net/ Personally, I hate it when people live filler and fanart in their comic's archives. It makes reading through them such a pain in the butt.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, guys! From Christmas Day until the 30th, there will be an update with a new page from Monster Hive's 6-part comic collaboration about a mysterious holiday party.

Fern & Cal from Grayling, by Arby (page 1 & 5, overall script)
Joe & Gaia Cow from The Good Life, by Glaucus
Frim, Ra'aj, & Jinjo from Within a Mile of Home, by Rx3 and Cei (page 3)
Locke, Shaela, & Kaia from Lunavis, by Pompolic (page 4)
Eldora & Akiara from Messenger, by Bugbyte (page 6)
... and of course, Crunky, Cliff, and Duster from Slightly Damned, by yours truly (page 2).

No matter what holidays you do or don't celebrate, here's hoping you're all having a wonderful time. Cheers!

2012 has been one hell of a roller coaster ride, and I'm beat. I'm taking a break from the main Slightly Damned comic until January 2, 2013.

This doesn't mean that I won't be drawing or doing other stuff. In fact, my friends and I are working on a holiday comic that will run around Christmas. I'm just feeling a little stressed out and I want some time off from worrying about the comic. See you guys in the new year! ...Assuming we all survive the apocalypse on the 21st, that is.

A reader asked me for some art advice and I typed out whatever came to mind. I decided to share it here:

1) If you want to draw better, you must love to draw. You must love to draw because you need to do it as much as you can, as often as you can, wherever you can. The only way to get better is to draw. Don't worry about making things look good all the time, just draw to get used to drawing. For example, I usually doodle when I'm waiting in restaurants, and I used to draw in the margins of my notes and homework when I was in school.

Famous animator Chuck Jones once said, "You've got a million bad drawings in you; you better get started.” in reference to new artists and animators. There really are no shortcuts. You have to draw all the time. I don't bother to upload half of the stuff I draw because it's not worth it-- I just draw to draw.

2) Practice sketching using long, unbroken strokes. Not the scritchy, precise, little lines stuff. Doodle. A lot.

3) Learn to understand what you see from real life and draw what you see, not what you think something "should" look.

4) Experiment. Make mistakes. If I spent all my time trying to fix all the things I see wrong in Slightly Damned pages, I'd never move past the first page. Just keep moving; nothing is perfect. There are things you will only learn from doing, and you'll never be able to even see the flaws in your work if you don't move on in the first place.

5) Read tutorials and real anatomy books. Not that "How to Draw Manga" or "How to Draw Furry" crap. Those are mostly useless and will teach you how to replicate someone else's "symbols"-- how they interpret real life, not how you interpret it. Disclaimer: Imitation CAN help when you're learning to draw something new and difficult, but you don't want to depend on it.

I recommend Posemaniacs.com, books on animation (even if you aren't animating, they will help you make your characters look alive), Scott McCloud's Making Comics, and any art books.

6) Break complex forms into simple shapes to give them volume. There are literally thousands of drawing books and tutorials that can explain this better than I can. It's very important.

7) Look for other people's advice. There may be someone out there who disagrees with everything I have to say, so look for inspiration everywhere. Use deviantArt, use Tumblr, or whatever. Absorb and reflect on as much as you can.

...These thought aren't very well organized. I haven't made any tutorials for anatomy or page design because I do things very inefficiently and wrong; I don't want people to copy me and learn to do things in a way that could stunt their growth. So use these nuggets as a starting point, not the end all solutions-- investigate what I said and find tutorials, books, and rants from artists who actually know what they're doing. Figuring out what's valuable and what's bullshit is all part of the neverending process of improving your artwork!

The comic is late (again), but you can watch me work on it and the next page here: http://livestream.com/slightlydamned

Featuring: Michelangelo by Playmates, Figma Link by Max Factory, and Crunky by Zoogenesis

I'm participating in this event as an artist! Please come by to donate to the Red Cross to get discount drawings!

I've got some bad news for you guys: there will be no new Slightly Damned pages this week. Maybe there could have been if I were the responsible type and had a buffer, but I'm not, so I don't. Anyway, there are two reasons why I'm not going to be making any new Slightly Damned pages this week:

1) I'm making an emergency visit to California to see my grandpa. He was recently diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. I originally planned to visit him after Anime Kaigi this weekend, but my dad urged me to see him sooner rather than later. So I'm making the trip BEFORE the convention.

2) Anime Kaigi is this weekend, and I'll be there Saturday and Sunday. It's a very teensy con, but it'll still be a time- and energy-consuming affair.

I'll still try to work on commission stuff and Soprano of Time this week, but I'm not sure how much I'd actually be able to get done. I don't want to make any promises I can't keep, so I'm being up front with you guys. I don't have time for Slightly Damned right now. I'll probably be able to get back to work next week, though! Then things can proceed normally.

Sorry guys, I was just too burnt out to make another comic this weekend. Maybe if I'm feeling up to it, I can make up this missed page! But for now, I just need rest. Expect a new page by Wednesday.

Filler graciously provided by Bugbyte. Go read her comic, Messenger!