Hello! It’s been a while since I’ve been here. For those of you who’ve followed for a while, you know that this blog is one of the places where my posting tends to come in bursts of feast or famine. I’ve grown a lot in the almost decade or so since I first started posting. My life is very different, my artistic goals are very different, while at the same time a few things have stayed very much the same.

(I originally posted this on my Patreon, but thought I’d put here as well.)

Life

The biggest change is that I graduated from my x-ray program last year, got my license, and have been working as a tech for the past year or so. It’s consistent, rewarding work, but also pretty exhausting. I spent about a couple months stressing and looking for work and doing commissions last year after graduating, which is why there was a flurry of posts between last August and September (when I finished The Holy Cephalophore and some Devilsburger comics.) and then sudden radio silence. I DID make a comic about it–“Fujo X-Ray Visions #2” but never got around to posting here. The full-time life is NO joke. I’m glad for the consistency and money, and ability to flex my new skills, but whew! The time sure flies.

The other change: I turned 30! A lot is pretty much the same, but it’s a milestone amongst the other huge changes.

A little story for you all: on my birthday, I decided to go on a hike with my family members, something scenic but nothing too strenuous. However, along the hike I was trying to keep up with people walking up trail stairs and got majorly winded, almost feeling like I was going to pass out. Immediately all my family members were crowded around me, giving me water, tending to me like a little kid again. My cousin, who has a baby, had tons of emergency snacks strapped to her belt. I felt deeply embarrassed and foolish. I was grateful for the help and support, but I had wanted to feel like a capable adult. But then again, that sense of showing off had led me to overexert myself. But whatever. We finished the hike and then went off to stuff ourselves with Chinese food. 

A few months later, I received a patient at work that had the exact same birthday as I did—not just the same day, but the exact same year. We both laughed it off, but also we could remember the same, sunny day, experienced simultaneously by both of us on different sides of the city. 

Art and Events:

Art and art events are kind of the ways that I help track my own life and times. I’ve donea lot of work recently, flipping between doing sketches on paper and digital work and commissions. I use a lot of notebooks; I go through lots of reams of paper. I feel like I do want to scan and document some stuff sometime, but it’s a bit exhausting and I’m not sure where to start. So, I’ll talk mostly about the things that have happened this year, as well as where things are going:

Alaska Comics Camp 2026 

So anyway, I went to Alaska in early May, both for the Alaska Robotics (weird name I know) minicon in Juneau, and then for about a week of camping in the Alaskan wilderness in some cabins with a bunch of other cartoonists. I got to meet some really cool people I’ve admired for a long time, like Dylan Meconis, Lucy Bellwood, and E.K. Weaver. At times I felt very overwhelmed to be in the presence of such folks, but out in the woods it feels like a very equalizing environment. I’m not sure if I ever became completely comfortable, or able to open up to people there–but everyone was very kind, and astoundingly competent and organized, I couldn’t help but feel inspired.

There were some really neat panels about organizing comic events, looking for grants, and writing about comics. All of which I think was super neat information, but not sure I’ve really been able to utilize it all yet. Lucy Bellwood gave me some cool advice when I asked about maybe wanting to do Graphic Medicine-themed works, and also had some very nice things to say about “The Holy Cephalophore,” which I had submitted as a sample to my application for the Medieval Minicomic grant last year but hadn’t won. 

Overall, it was an inspiring experience, if a bit of an overwhelming one. I was very proud to have applied, gone on my own to a brand new place, and met people all by myself. 

Manga Ichiba (2026).

Aside from acclimating to a new job environment, Manga Ichiba was the “project” that took up most of my creative time and brainspace for the first half of this year. I spent several months working on my doujinshi—medieval RPF BL (wow, who could’ve expected THAT), as well as doing various unofficial promotional work for the event. It’s something I was very, intensely passionate about, and I had a very good, if overwhelming experience there, both as a staff member and as a participant. 

I’m very proud of the unofficial poster I made for the event, which got very widely circulated on the interwebs, as well as the Circle Cut I made (refashioned from the cover design of my doujin.)

You can read part one of my doujin, “Quod Ames: Something You May Love” as a PDF download here on itch.io for $3; if you’re a paid patron though please feel free to email me and I can just email you a copy. I don’t feel like putting it directly on patreon for now (for various reasons.)

I also made a blog post writing about the process of how I made the comic . The whole comic was made, printed, arranged, and stapled all by myself, since I didn’t want to run into any censorship issues sending it to a printer. 

I’m currently working on thumbnailing and working out the kinks (heh) for part 2, which has been taking longer than expected. I originally wanted to have it be done in time for the San Francisco Zinefest 2026, but clearly that hasn’t happened. I guess I’ll send in the apps for Manga Ichiba as well, and I’ll debut there when I can. 

SF Zinefest (2026)

It’s coming up in just a couple of weeks, and I still need to do so much preparation. I’ll be selling copies of Quod Ames, of course, but I also would like to at least make a new print, if I can’t make a new zine. I’m a bit haunted by the fact that last year someone came by my table and was like “Do you have anything NEW?” I was both flattered (because someone remembered me from years past) and irritated (why so demanding?) However it is true. I’ve been cycling the same prints year after year, I can understand people wanting some novelty. 

The SF Zinefest will be on September 6th, at the Hibernia this year, not the Metreon. I hope that people can still swing by!

Manga Maji (2027)

An additional project I’m working on is a 5-6 page comic for a doujin circle with some friends for Manga Maji, a doujin fest in Long Beach in January of next year. I’m not sure how much I can talk about it yet, but I’m really excited for it and can’t wait to share a bit more from it. All I can say is that It’ll be my first time doing more of a completed f/f comic project, so I hope it can all turn out out fine!

Shortbox Comics Fair (2027)

I applied to this as I do almost every year, being like “eh, I don’t REALLY care about it, but I guess I’ll do it anyway, tch.” I did that too with my last application to x-ray school. Turns out, maybe being tsundere about applications IS the key to getting them—because I finally got in! OMG!

I don’t have a comic concept in mind yet—since as you can see above, I’m very busy already with the current comic projects going on—but it is something I really want to do. I applied using my historical-inspired works for my portfolio, so it will probably be something akin to that. It was kind of funny sending in my art samples, because they were all very edgy and dramatic stuff while my icon, in typical Tomatobird style, was my cutesy avatar. I can’t help it! I like the contrast!

Because it’s shortbox as well, I won’t be able to really post any previews and stuff here as well, but I’ll def post updates when things are available. 

Miscellaneous

There’s always an endless amount of projects I want to do, projects that never get made, projects that get half-made, or barely concept’ed, that never get off the ground. I feel this patreon is kind of a testament to that, in the way it’s kind of the graveyard of my many projects that I started, promisingly, but never was able to finish. In some ways, I’m really embarrassed at that, but in other ways I think it’s a way I’ve grown. 

Also now, after almost a decade of first making “zines” proper, it is kind of shocking to me to look back and see what I WAS able to accomplish. I’ve made more than 28 zines–fully completed zines, that I’ve printed or PDF compiled—not counting unfinished projects–since 2018. Those probably wouldn’t have been possible without the numerous experimentation and aborted attempts. That is something I am proud of, even in my frustration. 

The cliche but inevitable part of making art has been my own frustration with the limits of my own talents, the limits of my arts education, my struggle with storytelling and writing and making things that people can resonate with. I feel like, this year and in the past few years of being consumed by school and other life stuff, I have actually been able to see both how I’ve grown, and how I’ve stagnated, and just how precious art-making and comic making is to me.

I’ve changed a lot over the years–I started off making comics and line art commissions in my sketchbook for 20 bucks a pop on a tumblr that doesn’t exist anymore. I started a Bible webcomic that lasted 30 pages and fizzled out and died because my beliefs changed and I became more critical of its accidental implications (real OG tomatobird followers know…). I made a comic because I was in despair about my school situation, resolved the school situation and made more comics about that. I started a comic just LAST year that got to like 3 pages before it fizzled out, lying dormant until I can possibly work on it again (I still would like to revisit it, but who knows how long that would be.) Oh yeah, and there was that “game” I was sort of working on but is still lying in my files… Anyways, what was the point of this?

I guess I’ll always be working on things, and some will get finished while others will eventually break apart and be absorbed, nutritionally, into the work that DOES get done. “Creative compost” as I’ve seen it mentioned. I change, the work changes. If you’re still here, you’re along for the ride.

Anyways. As mentioned above if you want to, you can read Quod Ames (hmu if ur a paid member on patreon), as that’s 36 pages of Actually Finished Work I am pretty proud of, and hopefully by next year there will be 36 more to complete it. You can also read Free Lunch, which is a cute 12 page comic I made in like a week, and the last half made in 1 night on the fly (I don’t really want to do anything like that again, but it was an illuminating experience.)

I don’t have anything autobio to show for this year so far, but I hope that the proof can come through in the work itself.