K.M. Claude's Blog

October as a whole and Halloween have not been a cheerful time of year for me for quite a few years now, and the ever looming specter of censorship closing in on spaces for art to be sold does nothing to assuage that depressed mood; so, to try and get into the spooky spirit, I’ve put all my books that are still available through itch for sale in one big bundle. Twelve comics all for $6.66 for those who might be missing some e-books. Sale ends All Saint’s Day at 12 noon CST.

Halloween Bundle: Get All Digital Books on Itch for $6.66

Happy Halloween, ghosts and ghouls!

Small update. First, some good news! I will be attending the Louisiana Zine Fest at EBRPL main branch on August 1st.

I would say “if I have any zines left over, I’ll put them up for mail order on itch” but, itch has been forced by payment processors to crack down in a Draconian manner on adult content. This is the bad news. In fact, two of my zines — Avaritia and Invidia — were removed by itch. So who knows! If censorship and being told how you can (and cannot) legally spend your hard earned money disgusts you, call the payment processors (in particular Stripe) and raise complaints: stop-paypros.neocities.org has updated contact information and more.

Free Zine!

In an effort to get the word out and to generally rail against censorship, I am bringing a free mini-zine to Louisiana Zine Fest called “Censorship Delenda Est” because I have to use my Classics background somehow.

You’re free to print your own copy as well, just right click the below image, and either save or view it in a new tab and print it (many guides exist online on how to fold and cut these hotdog style mini-zines but here’s one person’s how-to video):

‪Giving Back: Website Gallery Template Guide

I know people tend to feel really overwhelmed when they see online spaces shrink. In response, you see a lot of “oh just make a website!” But! That can be scary. If you’re scared to make a website or feel the pressure to do it NOW but also do it RIGHT, don’t panic. Click here to read the super simple guide I made on domains, hosting, and even how to make a simple website landing page. It’s a short read as it is not designed to be a super in-depth guide on the ins-and-outs of it all, but rather a primer to get people started with as little friction as possible (plus there’s a lagniappe landing page template I made for anyone to use). I also published a guide here on how to use my gallery website template and made it accessible to anyone who cannot use itch (such as anyone in the UK dealing with age verification rules.)

Furthermore, censorship must be destroyed :)

Happy Lundi Gras!

I’ve just released my latest mail-order zine, Avaritia. This is a zine about greed, in a hell of rape, torture, very improper use of fishing hooks, incest, and revenge for past wrongs.

While this zine is related to Invidia, it’s not necessary to have read Invidia to read this one.

It has been about a year since my last zine release (a lot has happened!), but hopefully the wait will have paid off as this bad boy is in color and the physical edition features an iridescent gold cover. This zine is available as a PDF download or a physical copy (with free PDF).

You can get your copy on my itch.io storefront here!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

My gift to you: a new zine is now available.

Pathetic is an erotic-horror ghost story dressed as a BL — a snapshot of an abusive relationship from the abuser’s point of view, forced to confront the result of their actions and their own memories.

This zine was originally created in Fall of 2023 and mixes elements of BL manga and J-horror with kinky, creepy eroticism in 12 black and white pages, featuring Fr. Tiefer, Jehan, and (if the cover didn’t give it away) Annemarie. Physical copies are 5.5″ x 8.5″ and laser printed on 28lb paper. Both digital and physical zines are sold through itch.io

You can read the first three pages here.

I’ve just released my latest mail-order zine, Invidia

This zine came about from an anonymous prompt. This takes place in the afterlife – something not unlike hell, depending on how you slice it. Featuring characters that appear frequently in my works (especially the Obscene Sacraments series.)

There are TWO versions of the zine available for mail order: both have the same internal content but one is printed on green paper with an iridescent cover and the other is printed on white paper with no iridescent cover. A free PDF download comes with every physical purchase; the PDF is greyscale on a white background.

You can get either edition on my itch storefront

I hope you enjoy!

Do you want a holiday card this year? If so, sign up below before November 30th, 2023.

Holiday Card Sign Up Form

And Much of Madness has just dropped! Grab it now on Amazon for $9.99.

This is a collection of eight black and white comics now in paperback, featuring the following works:

mit dir stirbt mein Herz F.A.C. Freak of Nature and Sick from Two Dead Queers Present: QUARANZINE あなた CON/TRITE Not Real A new comic, RE/CAN’T, which remixes/revisits Can’t from NANSENSU #2 with a slightly different take and newer art

What does this mean for all the above zines that I was printing at home as floppies and selling through snail-mail? Well, sadly for those who did not order floppies of the above, I have retired making physical floppy copies of them for the time being as, well, they’re all available now in paperback (and printed and shipped much faster than I myself can.) While I may consider a short run print of some later on, my focus on printing floppies is for new, weirder projects at this time (thus the reason, in part, for the paperback collection.)

I hope everyone enjoys And Much of Madness — if you get it and dig it, dropping a review on Amazon or on Goodreads means the world. Enjoy

Introduction

F.A.C. was a bit of an experiment, combining digital and traditional art elements, including alcohol markers and stamping, in order to create the final printed zine. This post-mortem post has been sitting in my drafts for about a year — just like the zine itself, this post had a bit of a hiatus as well, but I hope it will be an interesting look at how F.A.C. came about.

ProcessThe Daily Grind (aka My Usual Routine)Writing & Sketching

Initially, I wrote the script on my phone’s note app. Once written, thumbnails came somewhat easy. I say somewhat as I have multiple pages of iterations that never made it in, but the initial work was straightforward.

Thumbnails of F.A.C.Hiatus

Based on my work in progress status updates on social media regarding this zine, I took a hiatus sometime around October 2021 and did not return to it until July 16, 2022. There are a couple of reasons for this:

The spread that had inspired this whole zine — the one of young Jehan on one side and young Annemarie and Emilein on the other — was still waiting to be inked and I didn’t want to mess it up, being that it inspired the whole thing, so I wanted to save it for lastAt the time, I was stuck on one page that, no matter how I tried to lay it out or resketch it or rethumb it, just did not cooperate; until I could get that page settled, I didn’t want to work on the rest, including the first point.My engagement ended suddenly which as you might imagine was a bit of a difficulty in life.

While I’m still slowly recovering from #3 on that list, #2 and #1 were still a thorn in my side; add to it, I managed to delete the only copy of the script I had which meant all I had to go off of were bits of it I’d already typed into the first few pages of the zine, my own chicken scratch lurking in my digital sketches or thumbnails, and my memory. In an odd twist, losing my script actually was the biggest benefit to me because it forced me to look at everything I had, finished and unfinished, and ask myself: is this necessary?

Revision (aka Hacking It Up)

I’d been thinking about the zine on and off and, after spending more money on paper and other BS at Michaels (BOGO 50% off select Recollections paper? You bet I’ll stock up on shiny card-stock!) I decided to sit down and try to puzzle the rest of it out. I started moving pages around in Clip Studio, opening up old pages and re-reading what script I could salvage, re-writing bits of script on sketch layers, and pulling out pages that weren’t working. Rather than continue it, as originally intended, I figured why not cut it off after the sort of amended “refrain”. That worked!

So I kept cutting, rewriting, and rearranging — keeping in mind that ultimately I needed to have my final page count be a multiple of four and I would need a title page (since the cover would not have a proper title or author) with some sort of copyright page — until things started to click. The problem page that couldn’t be sketched was scrapped. Half-started pages were scrapped and moved to a “junk pile” at the end of the story file. The original ending page was scrapped. A bit of a difficulty in all this was that I realized I wanted the spread that inspired this to be centerfold, so as I made edits I also had to be mindful of the pacing, to ensure that spread would be dead center.

Eventually, everything clicked into place; I finished the lineart for the inspired spread, added my final text boxes, and then exported my pages as PSD files (with editable text thanks to the new Clip Studio update.) It was now time to start adding tones.

And Now For Something Completely Different!

Usually when I do “traditional” coloring in my digital pieces, I stay in Clip Studio Paint and use 100% digital brushes that mimic traditional media — usually Frenden, DAUB, or some True Grit Texture Supply brushes. Maybe I throw in a texture or two for good measure. It always looks nice, though I find for some brushes, personally I can rarely make traditional digital brushes look as authentic as other people seem to make ’em look.

However, with this zine I wanted to try something a little bit different: something my friend Romey Petite showed me once over video call. Romey is an effervescent creator, patient teacher, and illuminating clown and I am very lucky to call such a being my friend. Anyway, Romey showed me how they would line a drawing in Manga Studio 4, print it out, and then using (or creating) a lightbox they would add a textured color or shade on a separate paper stacked above the drawing, tracing the contours that shone through the box. Once that was done, the traditional art would be scanned and digitized and introduced back into the digital artwork, lined up as best as possible. This method allowed for unique custom textures to be introduced. I figured with this method, I could replicate both the traditional textures and opacity variants of art markers as well as create a sort of intentional registration error.

Digitized Traditional On DigitalFrom my instagram

First things first: I had to print out each page. I created my InDesign file, added my linked PSD files in, and printed out each page: this way, I could edit the PSD files and they would update in InDesign automatically. Second, I layered a second sheet of printer paper on top my printed inks, clipped them together, and colored in my “tones” where appropriate using a lightbox to see where my inks were. Then I scanned in my “tones” and pulled the scanned images into Photoshop to be touched up and added to the comic PSD files.

Lessons learnedYour monitor will make everything look light. This is a lie. Duplicate your tones on a new layer, set the opacity to ~50%, and set the Layer Mode to Overlay. You’ll be happy when you print.Make sure you print your initial inks from InDesign rather than Clip Studio. Also make sure there’s no bleed or weird scaling happening. You want this to be as 1:1 as possible.So long as paper can slip and slide out of place on a lightbox, so too will you be chopping up and editing these tones until they match up as best as possibleAbove: Scanned “tones” done in French Grey Prismacolor Double-Ended Brush Tip Markers on printer paper via lightboxAbove: Animated GIF showing scanned greys inserted into PSD of comic file underneath digital lineartStamp Effect

I wanted the cover to have a stamped, file-like aspect, but I also needed a title page; so, I grabbed a spare test print of a font variation and used it to get some letter samples, as well as some stamp décor elements.

Above: Scanned rejected test print with various ink stamps in the negative space

Once scanned, the image was opened in Photoshop. The Threshold tool was used to whiten the whites and blacken the blacks of the letters and design motif, creating a crunchy high contrast image. The letters and motif were modified and all letters were rearranged as needed to spell out the title and its abbreviation in Photoshop then saved as images.

After creating these word, letter, and motif images, I was able to easily drop them where needed into InDesign.

Putting it all together

From there on out, the process was about the same for most of my print books: the rest of the text and front matter was added in InDesign, PDFs were exported, File > Print Booklet was invoked multiple times, and the long arm stapler was busted out. The biggest change from, say, printing Not Real was the cover: rather than printing on cardstock from my laser printer, I used Recollections Holographic Foil Cardstock and sticker tags with alphabet stamps from Michaels (which hey if they’d like to sponsor me… ;P) to create the title. One thing I had noticed from printing the cover of Not Real was that some colors of cardstock did not seem to take the ink well: it would rub off like newsprint ink. I am not sure if it was the fact it was cardstock versus 20lb or 24lb or what, but it was a pain in my opinion. Plus the novelty of the iridescent cover with the one-of-a-kind touch of the stamped title label worked in the zine’s favor — especially since the content is all free.

Takeaways

Let’s get the negative elephant out of the room: F.A.C. was time-consuming — even accounting for the hiatus, the process by its nature of traditionalizing digital art (i.e. printing it out) and then digitizing traditional art is a bit tedious. The process also affords many opportunities to get side tracked when switching gears: moving digital files from my tablet PC with Clip Studio to my desktop PC with Adobe software; printing out inks to tone with the lightbox; scanning the tones; touching the tones up in Photoshop and pulling them back onto the original files. Arguably, there exist digital brushes that could do the exact same effect almost as well. Unfortunately, this is a process that is difficult to efficiently streamline any more than it already has been.

That being said, funny enough I found that the individual processes of digitally inking and traditionally toning both were incredibly quick: toning actually took less time traditionally than it would have taken digitally using marker style brushes. I chalk that up in part due to the scale: you cannot magnify traditional space (and there’s no RAM or CPU to stall as you try to color in a large area on a large canvas) so there’s less room to overkill on details. Either way, the overall effect is, in my opinion, worth the tedious troubles and paid off for this zine. Maybe such a process would be too much for a full, multi-panel-per-page comic, but for a short, illustrated storybook-esque zine? The time and effort feels worthwhile. This is definitely a process I hope to revisit in the future.

Just released a FREE 8 page minizine about bodies, transphobia, and who owns what.

This is something of a personal piece. It comes out of, funny enough, a mix of childhood fears of inspection/dissection alongside the “joys” of certain wellness exams and the logical conclusion of some of the current political and legal climate. I’m sure it’ll upset some people for varying reasons. It’s not for faint of heart given its graphic nature, but to quote friend and fellow artist  Idal Waves, this zine is “blunt and shocking in the way it has to be”.

The zine is free to download. There is also a printout file for home printing available for $1.00, and a physical mailed copy is also available for purchase.

I hope it resonates with you.

All my PDF comics for 2 bucks ‘cuz I want more people to see my stuff and get deep in the priest kink comics gumbo with me. Also because I’ve been opted in to revenue sharing with itch and they give me a platform to sell my weird zines so!

This does not include physical zines or other mail in zines that were always physical only due to being posted online for free elsewhere (such as Not Real or STRIPPED)

Weekend Sale Ends Monday at 11:59 PM!