JULY & AUGUST 2026

Hi guys…, we're doing this again. I honestly wasn't planning or attempting to turn my monthly updates into bi-monthly updates. I wanted to provide an update at the beginning of August, but then next thing you know, August just evaporated, and now it's September, and I honestly don't know how that happened because the rest of the summer had been an absolute drag for me. 

It's been so hard to get anything done because I have my child with me at home. Summer camp was only 3 hours long each day, and it was only for 3 weeks out of the entire summer. So I've had basically no time to get anything done. I fully understand why parents are so eager to throw their kids back to school now. It's rough out here as a parent, especially in the accursed year of 2026. 

But the good news is, I managed to complete my goal of getting 2 comics done by the end of the year! That comic was actually a new chapter in the Mighty Machine saga for the 1st time in, (oh god) SIX years now since I last worked on it?? 

I've actually had the pages for this new chapter drawn for quite a while now, and it was pretty quick to make, since each chapter is only going to be 5 pages long now. The only thing that I was really hung up on was designing the tank, which I procrastinated on for like weeks, if not months. Also trying to find a window to get the pages scanned at my local print shop, because I no longer have access to a scanner at home. 

Once I did, though, it took less than a week for it to get colored. I think if I stick to a routine of spending the 1st few days of my daytime hours getting the comic drawn, then spending my 1st few evening hours coloring said pages, I think I’ll have the ability to get chapters done pretty quickly. 

Then I can spend the rest of my time in the month focusing on something else. And that's something else is paving the way for Project Marth. I've had to do a lot of soul searching the past couple weeks, and I fully decided that I'm no longer going to use comics as my main method of success because it's just not feasible in the current media climate. 

The current state of webcomics is kind of like how they used to exist for newspapers back in the day. Comics that succeed right now are these very short 4 panel or or 10 second shorts that are usually comedy, wholesome or feel-good focused. 

My style of comics are just not conducive to that style. I prefer telling long narratives. I prefer telling a story over pages rather than a page, and it’s impossible to hook people into what I have to say in just one page, because it's about the entire experience, not about a quick dopamine hit. 

Not to discredit the people who have found success with this model, but it's not an environment I can succeed in. Not helped by the fact that I hate interacting with social media in the first place!

I know people say platforms like Web toonz is the place you go to if you have longer form stories to tell, but Web Toonz is actually very selective about what they promote. Anyone can post up there, but the only way to succeed is if you're promoted. And on WebToonz, they always prioritize romance, or horror, or romantic horror. 

And that's not what I'm interested in. Not that I think any less of those genres or artists, but that's just not the focus of my stories. What people also don’t recognize is that WebToonz is very much a brand, meaning that they have a very specific visual style they want to push, and anything that’s too far removed from that aesthetic won’t get their time of day.

That's the problem I had with The Contenders; a western cartoonish looking shonen-style action series. Mighty Machine is in a similar boat, and both are so antithetical to Web Toonz brand imaging. So it’s impossible to find success on that platform either.

The final problem I’ve had these past 8 years is the fact that I’m not just trying to tell stories, I’m trying to communicate ideas. And ideas are just really hard to sell to people in this day and age unless you want to be a political commentator on social media. Which admittedly I have been doing on TikTok, to so much more success that I have on my comics.

This fact depresses me. 

But it means I have to go where the wind blows instead of fighting against the storm, and right now everything is telling me to prioritize my gamebooks. Games are much easier to sell to people, because you can pitch them as a product. I know exactly how I can pitch Project Marth, and I know exactly how I can potentially promote it across social media. 

It has a clearly defined gimmick that can hook people in, and I've never been able to find that with my webcomics. So I've made the decision that I'm no longer going to be making comics my priority. I'm still going to make them as a hobby and more of a discipline exercise because again- I still want to make new chapters of Mighty Machine, now that I've seen how quickly I can potentially make them. 

But I'm not gonna be pushing for them as hard anymore, because I just don't see a future in them right now. If I want people to get invested in them, they first have to get invested in me and my body of work. Right now I see game books as the better avenue to achieve that. 

So what does this mean for the Zelda RPG? I… honestly don’t know, because I’m still waiting on The Ocarina of Time news. This project has been stranded for so long, that it’s become directionless on what should get done first. The only way to drag it out of its rut is to have a fire lit underneath me, and right now the only thing that I can see doing that is the OoT remake, and the inevitable discourse that will come from it.

I know that’s probably not a satisfying or particularly enlightening answer. I get why people get mad at developers when a project gets delayed, stalled or outright cancelled, and all they can conjure up for an excuse are vague statements. But sometimes there are no effective ways to articulate how the creative process fails, especially to an audience that has never made anything for themselves before. 

This is also why I believe everyone should find some kind of creative hobby, so they can at least be more sympathetic to those that do creative work as a full time job.

So that’s where we at now. Hopefully I can remember to do a monthly update on time for once, but worse case scenario- you might not hear from me again until after christmas. Cuz fall might as well be stress season. Back-to-school, then Halloween, then Turkey Day, then Christmas, then New Years, all under the economic crises we in America are enduring because of the decaying orange goblin…

I… LOVE… being alive, in the current socio-economic climate!

~ An Eli that’s on the verge of ANOTHER mental breakdown <3