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Drawing Batman

6 Jun

I had a hard time deciding what I was going to do for 1134 Comix this week. I planned to make a new News from the Crypt episode. There were a few things that popped up in the news this past week that I though worthy of lampooning, but I just couldn’t decide. I might be moving away from making commentary through online comics. I’ve found myself much more focused lately on writing in general and other 1134 Press stuff. And I’ve been feeling the urge to get back to more drawing for fun, rather than going for jokes. I’m sure I’ll be making a comic about some politician before I know it, though. I’m all over the place. 

I woke up today without a proper idea for 1134 Comix. I was going to skip this week. After putting on this Batman t-shirt, however, I had my idea. I always liked drawing Batman. He’s one of my favorite DC Comics heroes, and I think he’s fun to draw. I tend to go for the big, super muscle-bound version of Batman when I draw him. I also like the blue and gray costume to draw. I do like the black costume with the armor and everything, but if I’m drawing for fun, I’m going gray and blue. 

I hope you enjoy the video!

G.J. Sieck

Click the image to watch the video!

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1134 Press Hits a New Milestone

3 Feb

We don’t usually post here in the middle of the week, and I don’t have a new comic for you today. I did want to take a moment, though, to acknowledge the growth of our main platform. It’s not a lot in comparison to other YouTube channels, but 1134 Press has recently passed 500 subscribers. We started the channel some years ago; 2017 if I’m not mistaken. However, we only started posting videos with regularity over the summer of 2020. Since then, we’ve seen fairly steady growth in viewership.

I’m compelled to reflect on the history of 1134, but I’ve written about that previously. I’ve most recently written about our journey here. Instead of rehashing our journey, I want to look forward to the future. With the channel growing, our goals for 1134 Press and 1134 Comix seem that much closer. While we continue to produce more and more videos about bookmaking and journaling, we have so many more ideas in the works.

If all goes to plan, here are just a few of the things we can look forward to:

  • A new book of fiction
  • Premium content for 1134 Press subscribers
  • More videos for the 1134 Comix channel

If you happen to be interested in bookmaking, journaling, paper crafts, or writing in general, become a subscriber to our main channel. It costs you nothing and gets us that much closer to achieving the goals outlined above.

Check out our channel here.

Thanks, and come back soon for a new comic!

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Channel Update

18 Nov

Hello everybody,

Well, we moved house (and the studio spaces). Unfortunately, though, putting everything back together has been much more of a process than expected. The bookmaking space is nearly together, but we were unable to execute a new video for YouTube this week. We expect to be back up and running in time to create something for next week.

The drawing studio is also coming together, but it is still a bit of a disaster area. So, no new webcomics this week either. Depending how it goes, there might be something new for 1134 Comix this coming Sunday. Anyone who has followed this page for any amount of time likely expects long lapses in new content. So, has anything really changed here?

In conclusion, we’re working to get our stuff together. We can’t wait to start putting new content up as soon as possible.

Thanks for your patience!

G.J. Sieck

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Moving the Studio and Reflecting on the Journey

1 Nov

Since I started 1134 Comix some years ago, I have had a few studio setups. The studio changes every time I move house (makes sense, since this has always been a home-based situation). Where I sit today is the third workspace from which 1134 content has been produced. From this iteration of the 1134 Studio we created 1134 Press, which has become the flagship of this endeavor. We’ve since published five books as 1134 Press, including two 1134 Comix titles. We’ve created countless handmade books, and most excitingly, began sharing our craft in video form. After years finding its voice, and moving locations, the project I called 1134 is at last becoming itself. And again, a new studio is on the horizon. 

All that might be a long way to go just to say we’re moving; but I like to tell a story. In the beginning, this all took place in a dingey basement where I would listen to heavy metal while drawing my often-random cartoons. Then, the studio was crammed into a small room on the third floor of a Baltimore Brownstone; I actually made some of my best work there, though the work did not have very far reach. As I write from this current version of the studio, which consumes a significant portion of our Mount Vernon apartment, I can’t help but reflect on the path to this point. Though each stop along the way on this journey has had value, this stop has been the most valuable so far. With much planned for the future of 1134 Press, we look forward to setting up in the new location and beginning the next chapter. 

We’ve started boxing things up in preparation for the big day. Then, once we finally get over to the new place, we will have to go through the process of putting everything back together. With that said, we are going to take two weeks off from publishing the main content. Web-comics and YouTube videos are scheduled to return in the week of November 16th. In the case that this timeline shifts, we will post updates to our various platforms. In the meantime, there will still be some activity from 1134 on the socials and our blog page. 

Be back soon!

G.J. Sieck

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Random Sunday

17 May

Way back in the early days of 1134 Comix, I had a character called Axgar. I posted a five-page Axgar comic on the site (which you can still find here), wrote a longer story, and created a bunch of art pages with the new story in mind. Well, the story kept being put on the back burner as I focused more on other comic ideas for 1134. Eventually the hard drive where all those art pages and scripts were kept was stolen, which caused me to pretty much give up on the character and story.

I’m feeling random today, though. So, I made this random drawing of Axgar and figured I’d post it here.

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Maybe this guy deserves another shot . . .

-G.J. Sieck

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An Announcement about 1134 Web-Comics

17 Nov

Hello 1134 Comix readers and subscribers,

Last week I posted that there would be an announcement regarding the future of 1134 Comix—and here it is. I would like to give as much context as possible, but I’ll try to keep this as succinct as I can.

Those of you who follow this page closely will know some, or all, of the following things: I teach writing as an adjunct professor at a university, I’ve started a super small press called 1134 Press, I’m a fairly decent fiction writer, and have been an off-and-on freelance designer over the years. What the vast majority of you wouldn’t know is that I’ve also recently started working full time my university. Clearly, I can’t do all of these things all of the time. So, I had to consider what it is that I want to focus my attention on, and what I need to step back from. I will no longer be doing any freelance work of any kind; which isn’t the point here. The point here is that I will be pulling back from producing a regularly updated web-comic series.

Now that I have a full load of work at my university, I need to be selective of where I spend my time creatively. I currently have a half dozen or more writing projects in one stage of completion or another. I believe the writing projects are where I should focus my energy. I’ve come to believe that my focus on the web-comics has caused me to not give the proper amount of attention to writing prose; and I think it’s time to spend more focus there, for a while.

All that said, I actually do have plans for future sequential art stories. I still have plans for more News from the Crypt, for that matter. For those of you who do follow this page: expect to see some more News from the Crypt posted as I wind down the web-comic postings. Expect to see a few more 1134 Comix characters and one-off comics pop up here and there. Also, expect that the sort of comics I’ve been posting here to become fewer and fewer. I’m planning a new direction for my creative work, and the nature of that work will cause longer stretches of time between projects reaching publication. My hope is that this will also mean that when I do publish work, it will be that much more meaningful.

To sign off: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—see you in the funny pages!

G.J. Sieck

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1134 Comix: More Videos?

4 Sep

As some of you might have seen, I recently created a video based off of the News from the Crypt web-comic. If you haven’t watched it yet, I think it’s kind of funny but also kind of bad for a few reasons (you can determine those reasons for yourself if you give it a look lol). You can find a link to the video in a previous post; lower down the feed. Though the video didn’t exactly crash YouTube with the amount of views it received, I am going to create more videos for 1134 Comix. Having decided to create more videos, I spent some time working on the YouTube page–I realized that the page is a mess. I’m not going to try to describe the myriad problems here, but there is some work to do in getting pages/accounts sorted out right before more videos are posted. Also, the video linked in the post below will probably disappear during the process of fixing the channel(s). Fortunately, I caught the problems with the YouTube account before uploading a lot of stuff.

At this point, it’s hard to promise a real schedule for video uploads. I think that, for now, new videos will generally be based on the News from the Crypt web-comic. Most weeks, there will be a web-comic posted as usual, on Instagram and 1134 Comix (we also have content on webtoons, but that’s another platform where its use is being reconsidered). Some weeks, though, an animated video will be posted instead of a News from the Crypt web-comic. If all goes to plan, I will get better and better at creating videos; and saying the channel grows a following, I will start posting videos more regularly while pairing down the amount of web-comics posted. From my experience with the first video, I feel like animated shorts are the best medium for News from the Crypt, and that the audience would be more interested in the videos than the web-comics. I also plan to make other videos unrelated to News from the Crypt, but we’ll see how it goes. 

For now, look forward to more web-comics. We are still finishing off the Pussies of Tomorrow story, and the News from the Crypt web-comic is still ongoing. I plan to have the YouTube channel fixed up and a new video ready some time over the next week or two. To wrap up this post, I’ll just remind everybody to check back later today/tonight for the next page of Pussies of Tomorrow–find out what happens with Captain Snowball and the crew!

G.J. Sieck

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What do you Think?

11 Jan

As we dot our Is and cross our Ts in preparation to send The Adventures of Blakbone and Other Stories to the printer, we’ve been brainstorming the next web-comic. We’ve come up with two ideas that we like. The working titles are, Pussies of Tomorrow and Shifty Elephant. This is were you come in.

What would you rather see become the next 1134 web-comic?

A) Pussies of Tomorrow

This web-comic would follow a group of spacefaring cats. They would go on adventures full of zaniness and enough cat themed jokes to make you puke.

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Or,

B) Shifty Elephant

This web-comic would be a detective story featuring, you guessed it, a shifty elephant. It would follow (for the most part) a standard detective noir  story structure and would definitely make use of as many tropes as possible.

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As we work on the next chapter of Blakbone (The Outer Space Adventures of Blakbone), we will be checking our responses to this poll here and on social media. We hope to have the next Blakbone story out by summer time; after which we plan to start the next web-comic series.

So, coming up at 1134 Comix:

  1. The Adventures of Blakbone and Other Stories (the official, final release date will be announced this month!)
  2. The Outer Space Adventures of Blakbone (Planning to release the full story in print by summer ’18)
  3. Either Shifty Elephant, or Pussies of Tomorrow (web-comic to start by Summer ’18

Note: Character designs are not final

Vote in our comments section, or email at 1134press@gmail.com

Also, you can follow us on Facebook

on Instagram at gj_sieck

on Twitter @GJ_Sieck

and find our print books at 1134 Press

Thanks!

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Submit your Writing

11 Sep

writersblocflyer1

Writers’ Bloc is a University of Baltimore student organization that promotes writing within UB and the surrounding community. Writers’ Bloc is interested in submissions from writers of all levels from the Baltimore area. That said, submissions from outside the Baltimore area are also welcome. Comic submissions are also welcome (1-2 pages total).

Submissions to Unbloc Zine are accepted year-round, but get your work in by September 30th to be considered for the October edition.

Writers’ Bloc / Unbloc Zine accepts:

Fiction, memoir, poetry, experimental forms, comics, and art.

Submit to unbloczine@gmail.com

Visit the Facebook page for further submission guidelines at: facebook.com/ubwritersbloc

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1134 Comix – Made Easier to Read

30 May

1134 Comix has been publishing web-comics on this platform for a few years now. All of the comics posted have been placed into the “comics” category. The way things have been done since the beginning of this site have made it too much of a chore to go back and read stories from their beginnings up to where they currently are.

Finally, I have made this somewhat easier by creating new categories for each title. Now, all you have to do is go to the “categories” scroll down menu and pick which title you’d like to read. Remember though, once you select the title you’ll have to scroll down to the very bottom of the page for the first page and scroll up to read the following pages.

In the meantime, I’ll continue adding to these stories and also finding ways to make them more accessible.

The new categories are:

Blakbone

Axgar

A Day in the Life of Larry

Horde of the Unvanquished

Outer Space Adventure

Thanks for reading!

-G.J. Sieck

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