Some thoughts on my old comics.
It has been a long time since I put art on the internet. When I started doing this, I had a laptop, a scanner, and Krita. I didn't even have a mouse. I did the linework with Micron pens on standard printer paper, and then I scanned them and painstakingly edited out all the artifacts on the resulting images before adding color by clicking and dragging on my trackpad (a process that surely would've given me carpal tunnel syndrome if I'd kept at it for more than a few months). The final products were, frankly, pretty bad. Lots of gradients, questionable color choices, and liberal use of the airbrush and smudge tools. They got better when I got a tablet, but not much.
The problem was that my ambitions still outpaced my capabilities. I had dozens of ideas for comics, each with an ongoing story and a tie-in to the fictional universe that connected all of them (although, in some cases, it would have taken years of regular comic posts for the tie-ins to be revealed). I could (and did, on numerous occasions) explain my grand plans at length to anyone who would listen. I had notebooks full of sprawling plot diagrams and sketches of pages that I never finished. There were probably more plotholes than plotpoints in those notebooks, but I forged ahead anyway. In my head, I could envision future comic scenes down to the tiniest detail, and I felt compelled to bring those visions into reality, even though my work never exactly lived up to them. That is, until I lost motivation and had to deal with more pressing life concerns, like becoming and remaining employable (even for popular and skilled artists, webcomics are pretty much always a money-devouring pit).
I have mixed feelings about these old, abandoned comics. They weren't good, but they are relics of a different time. It wasn't always a good time, but I can't go back to it, and there's a kind of nostalgia mixed up with that. Even so, I doubt I'll ever re-post the original runs of these comics.
I do intend to keep the "reboot" of Simon & Anikai online because I think the art is much more representative of the vision. That said, if I continue that story, it probably won't be going in the direction I thought it would when I started. The original Simon & Anikai was intended to be a gag comic with storylines that I thought would span a few months of strips at most. There wasn't much in the way of an overarching plot, although there were certainly themes and recurring jokes that would crop up repeatedly. I never really got to any of those stories, but the plan was to create something that looked a lot more like Bloom County than, say, Gunnerkrigg Court (not that I had the skill to create something that visually looked like either of those works, but you get the point). The reboot was supposed to be much more plot-heavy, with darker themes, fewer jokes, and simplified black and white art. In retrospect, though, I think the skeleton of Simon & Anikai is poorly suited for a serious story. If I continue working on it, I will probably lean into the inherent absurdity of the premise a bit harder.
Champions of Paulton probably won't get much more development, although I might do a few demo pages. There are a few problems with that one. Firstly, I think the comics would have to be in color. The setting itself is very colorful, and I can't even imagine what it would look like in black and white. But that would take a long time to produce, and I don't really have the time at the moment. Secondly, the setting is not entirely my own invention. It was inspired by a Gamma World game that I participated in years ago. The GM gave me permission to use his setting for the comic, and I modified it to suit my tastes and intentions. Still, I feel the need to significantly overhaul some aspects of the worldbuidling in order to make it more fully my own and integrate it more naturally into the larger universe it shares with Simon & Anikai. Also, I feel that the original plot struggled with tonal whiplash between comedic and serious elements, and it would need to be revised pretty significantly.
But I do still like comics, and I still imagine most of my stories coming to life through them. I still come up with more story ideas than I could hope to finish, but I hope I can pace myself and finish at least one thing. It will probably take a while, though. This is just a hobby, and one of quite a few different hobbies that compete for my free time. I don't have a hope of getting updates out regularly, and I'm not going to promise that. But I may be ready to share a significant chunk of a new project before the year is over.