Announcing Velvet Gewgaw

In the interest of keeping the pot boiling, and with an optimistic eye towards life being that which happens when you’re making other plans, I have started, in lieu of another ambitious comic project, an ambitious comic project.

This is Velvet Gewgaw — a single-panel comic to be published here and on Meta-owned social media platforms every weekday for the next fifty-three weeks (at least).

Think of it as a formalized doodle-session, an extension of the portfolio page on this website only in a standard format and a little more polished. Expect to see those black-and-white landscapes once a week or so; some fanciful creatures might show up; and there will be some surreal or abstract gags as well. Don’t expect it to make sense. I mean, 90% of it won’t make any sense at all, and the other 10% will only make a kind of sense if you don’t think about it too hard. This isn’t The Far Side; it’s The Far Side as recalled from a hypnagogic state.

To say it another way, since I’m sure it will come up: I’m ok. I’m not on drugs or having a break with reality. And I’m not using AI for any of this — neither in concept nor execution. These hallucinations are my own (though not chemically-induced).

Anyway, Velvet Gewgaw has its own page in the Comics tab up there. There’s only one right now of course, so… not so impressive, but give it a few weeks and we should really have something. It’s one of those blog things, so if you want to get all the updates, direct your feed there (I’ll reserve this blog for broader site updates, such as this one.) Or I guess you can follow it on my Instagram or… Threads account.

The really cool way to do it, though, is how we did it in the old days: bookmark https://www.bohemiandrive.com/velvetgewgaw and visit the page everyday. That way you can have the experience of forgetting to check it for a few days, or weeks even, then suddenly remembering about it and coming back to see a bunch of them at once. I love that.