In December I announced the next comic in the Spare Parts Press lineup! Raw Feels by Leonie Brialey

  For those of you following along at home. I've had a renewed passion for blogging. Today I would like to send a thank-you out to a lucky reader. I’m going to choose a person from my awcomix newsletter to receive a postcard from me with original art!

I've had a potential story in my head for the last 3-4 years. It was one of those ideas that just seemed too hard, too messy, like there was no entry point into the story. That all changed recently when I was struck by a flash of inspiration and I sat down to pen a draft of the story. Expecting it to be around 15 pages long and not sure how it would go, I was surprised when 32 pages flew out of me in the space of a few days.

I previously wrote about how difficult it is to come up with a name/title for a book.   I thought I had found the perfect title with Spare Parts, but it was so good I used it for my new publishing venture Spare Parts Press . More recently I was fascinated with the word Sonder (if you've never heard the word, here's the meaning). I think it is too fancy to use for a book, although now I wish I used it for the press. Sonder press would have perfectly tied in with the work I wish to publish.   My latest idea has narrowed down to using a variation of my last name. I would go with simply the word 'Wood' or some variation thereof. Although perhaps too simple and open to connotations I don't intend.

I've been working digitally fairly exclusively since April 2020. It took me about 4 months to just start feeling comfortable and perhaps a couple more months to actually produced something I was completely happy with (add to this about a year of non-serious dabbling). I thought it might be interesting to look at the difference between my old comic making process and the new.

A pivotal point in my comic drawing practice was when I started art school. Although I had already self-published comics in a zine format, 7 Pages felt my first true zine. It was the first thing that truly felt ziney. At the time, zines were more common and there were multiple online zine distros popping up. This meant that not only was it a zine, but it also fell into the subcategory of 'perzine' (personal zine).

Today I'm feeling a nostalgia for the low-fi culture of the past. Things like Cassette tapes, paper zines, finding an obscure artist in a second-hand bookstore. However, I think it's important to realise why these things were interesting. It's not some sort of hipster notion of obscurity. I think it has more to do with the shareable and transferable nature of them coupled with the effort it took to find them.

Restarting blogging has been going well. There are a few reasons I've started doing it. Nostalgia for a simpler time Reaction to vapid algorithm-based social media (that equates to digital sharecropping ) To practice my writing Air out ideas and thoughts Inspired by Seth Godin's daily blog

My name is Anthony Woodward. I'm an Australian-born cartoonist who has been living in Canada since 2014. I have been drawing comics since around 1998, however, I didn't feel like I discovered my current comic sensibilities until I started art school around 2003. During my first year in art school, I started a free zine called 7 Pages. I started it after discovering a free photocopier and also inspiration from a fellow student who had started a weekly photocopied poster zine. I f=go by the name of awcomix online, which stands for my initials AW.

One of my favourite podcasts out there (besides Seth Godins Akimbo ) is Andy J. Pizza's Creative Pep talk . Each Wednesday, he puts out an episode that is pure inspiration and fuel for creative ideas. If you're someone that is looking for some inspiration, or a little push to get out of a creative rut, go and listen to this show, and you won't look back.