It’s an exciting week at Tempest in a Teardrop studios because we have a new technological gadget to exploit when making comics! Codex has a rad drawing gizmo: the Huion Kamvas Pro 13. It’s a second monitor that sits at an angle that you draw on.

Grrr. I mean electronically. Anyone can draw on a monitor if you use the right kind of pen, but there are better ways to tell your boss you’ve had enough and have decided to improve your job situation by working as a Septic Tank Pumping Technician.

For you non-artists, I’ll illustrate. Drawing with a mouse is like using two fingers to draw with crayons. Using a stylus on a special pad is like discovering there’s a second dimension. Drawing directly onto the monitor is like finally noticing that red and yellow make an ugly shade of orange. I think it’s orange, anyway. I don’t know, I’m not an artist.

You’d think Codex is jumping on the moon right now, giddy with her newfound superpower. You’d be wrong.

For Codex, change is… difficult. When we upgraded her drawing software in 2015 she didn’t take it well. She’d been using the same program since 1996. In a burn-the-ships moment I had to pry it from her teeth, which ruined the 3.5 inch plastic floppy disks the software came on.

I imagine one of her ancestors muttered the words, “Why draw on mastodon skin when there are perfectly good cave walls everywhere?!”

I get it. I do. You can take Scrivener from me when you pry it from my cold, mechanical hands. But she now has artistic magic at her fingertips. Do you know how many Popes Michelangelo would have murdered for such a device? I’m assuming it’s more than he actually did.

Meanwhile, this is her first doodle with the new gizmo.

It’s… not bad.

We might be running a Glyph comic on Friday. Possibly Monday too.

Meanwhile, if anyone wants to buy a Wacom tablet circa 2015, with slightly toothy character across the drawing area, shoot me an email.

–> Quizzer