Character: Server

The Most Christmas Party

It occurs to me that I’ve never actually been to a company Christmas party as an adult. I remember being dragged to some of my dad’s work events that were intended for the employees to bring their families, but my experiences at those were largely of being bored because I was, like, 8 or something. As an adult, I’ve either worked alone in my studio, which does not involve staff parties unless I put little party hats on my pets. Prior to that, I’ve either worked retail or in education, and the one Christmas party I was involved in at a school was a meal at a restaurant at a giant table seating 20 or 30 people, where everyone just talked to the 6-8 people near them, who were almost always the same people you talked to all the time at school. It certainly lacked Helen’s… bigness.

I’m going to be at Calgary Horror Con for the first time, selling the horror and horror-adjacent books from my catalogue, and maybe dipping out to watch movies if I get tired of talking.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Sebastian is Employee of the Week, and you can, too! It’s how I have predictable money, which is both Cool and Good. If everyone who read the comic in a month chipped in $1, I’d be able to turn down most freelance work and focus on doing Hell, Inc. stuff and my own graphic novels! That would be preeeeetty cool.

You can help Hell, Inc. for free by voting for it on Top Webcomics, which has been a great way to draw in new readers. Click the banner below to vote daily!

Next Week: The bar staff are less enthusiastic about how things have gone than one might hope. Read it early on Patreon!

 

Drunk Santa vs. Ceiling Skeleton

Drunk Santa vs. Ceiling Skeleton, the fight of the century! If this was HEAT, you’d get about three months of that. I miss drawing beefy wrasslers doing violence to each other, but I do NOT miss trying to pace wrestling as a webcomic. The fact that anyone kept reading that comic while the Super Max Challenge Final took up a YEAR of posts might qualify them for sainthood. I’m currently developing another wrestling comic as a graphic novel pitch, so maybe drawing a lot of wrasslin’ again will be in my future.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Barrie Deatcher is Employee of the Week, and will get to read my new Rent-A-Thug graphic novel as I draw it! Subscribers to my newsletter have already seen the first page, which I think is several orders of magnitude cooler than any previous Rent-A-Thug stuff. Patreon is my predictable source of income, and I would very much like it to grow to the point where I can get into a workflow of webcomic + graphic novel.

Remember Top Webcomics? That’s still a thing, so if you want to boost Hell, Inc. in the rankings and funnel some new readers in, click on the banner below. You can vote daily.

Next Week: Sara has very strong opinions about having gone to O’Hellihan’s instead of the Christmas party. Read it early on Patreon!

Cartoon Brawling Dust Cloud

Despite it seeming like the obvious visual choice, I avoided drawing an actual cartoon brawling dust cloud. I don’t have a high-minded formal reason for it, it just looked squashed and weird once I accounted for the space the balloon would take up. It was easier to communicate the same idea with a tangle of bodies that used the space better. Thinking about those kinds of decisions that go into making a comic is always interesting to me, as there’s rarely a definitive correct answer, but rather many viable options depending on what the artist intends to communicate to the reader.

In other news, Calgary Expo and FCBD are in the rearview mirror, which gives me a little over a month until I next appear amongst the living. I’ll be back in Calgary, this time for the Horror Con, on June 17th and 18th! It’s themed around Killer Klowns from Outer Space this year, which kicks ass, because that movie rules.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Barrie Deatcher is Employee of the Week, and will get to read my new Rent-A-Thug graphic novel as I draw it! Subscribers to my newsletter have already seen the first page, which I think is several orders of magnitude cooler than any previous Rent-A-Thug stuff. Patreon is my predictable source of income, and I would very much like it to grow to the point where I can get into a workflow of webcomic + graphic novel.

Remember Top Webcomics? That’s still a thing, so if you want to boost Hell, Inc. in the rankings and funnel some new readers in, click on the banner below. You can vote daily.

Next Week: Helen’s romantic past! Read it early on Patreon!

Against Helen’s Love

In the Patreon preview for this strip I wrote about the ways that Helen’s characterization has been unconsciously influenced by trash reality TV, and also accidentally created everyone’s new favourite reality show, Real Wine Moms of Hell. I assume the season order from Netflix is already in my email inbox.

April 27-30 I’ll be at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo for the first time in 4 years! Have I already had a panic attack about it? Sure have! My brain is garbage. Come and see me at table P01 in the Big 4 building, which I have conveniently mapped out below:

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Cindy Gauthier is Employee of the Week, and you can read her comic on Webtoon! It’s called Posthumous, and is a comic about two friends (who are cool, weird cyborg-things) exploring space and how the things that are in space are often terrifying. Season 2 is underway!

Patreon! Go there. Do that. It is my most reliable source of income, and that is very helpful when living that freelance life. If everyone who read the comic last week chipped in $1/month, that would be enough to almost completely eliminate the need for freelancing. That would be rad!

You can also support Hell, Inc. for free by telling your friends about it, because that is infinitely better than any promotion I can do. Also voting on Top Webcomics by clicking the banner below is very helpful!

Next Week: Helen’s problems become EVERYONE’s problems. Read it early on Patreon!

Hard to Get

Deciding on Helen’s character being “drunk chaos gremlin” was the most important element to making the O’Hellihan’s half of this volume come together. Whenever I needed something to move scenes along or punch up a strip, I could rely on Helen. She really became the driver of the second half of the book. Also, I’m talking about the story as a book because I’m starting to plan the big Hell, Inc. print collection, which will include 300 strips. It’s probably going to have two strips stacked on each page (like newspaper strip collections often do), because a 3.5″x8″ format probably can’t handle being 3″ thick. Maybe in hardback, but it seems like that would be an unpleasant reading experience, ergonomically. More thought will go into that in the next few months.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Ben Hamlin, host of Syndicated with Lesley and Ben (among other casted pods), is Employee of the Week. I’ve been a guest on several episodes, most recently the strange and Hell, Inc.-esque animated comedy Ugly Americans – a short-lived series that never quite reached the potential of its premise. I’m also on the episodes about extremely well-crafted but under-remembered ’90s sitcom NewsRadio and 2010s stoner thing that loosely adheres to its premise, Workaholics. I’ll also be returning on their new season about crime shows, discussing the shockingly good Star Wars spinoff Andor.

Patreon! It’s a predictable source of income, so if you like things that I do, check it out.

Also check out the newsletter, which is how to hear about what I’m up to without needing to subject yourself to things like Twitter.

You can also support Hell, Inc. for free by telling your friends about it, because that is infinitely better than any promotion I can do. Also voting on Top Webcomics by clicking the banner below is very helpful!

Next Week: Does Drunk Santa reciprocate Helen’s feelings? Does Drunk Santa HAVE feelings? Read it early on Patreon!

Even and Sticky

I’m bouncing between projects like a superball right now, which is kind of counter to how I prefer to work. Any given day I have about 5 things I could be working on, and another 2 or 3 that I should probably be thinking ahead toward. That is too many things, and largely why I wish I was the kind of creator who kills it on Patreon. That way I could pick one or two things and focus on those, and then do new things when those are done. That would be pretty great, and less stressful!

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Caitlin is Employee of the Week, and is currently in her writing cave working on the large amounts of BURGERPunk RPG material that are the result of the improbably overachievement of the Kickstarter. Speaking of crowdfunding, Patreon! It lets me have predictable income and focus on making the comics I want to make! If every Hell, Inc. reader kicked in just a dollar a month, I’d be able to cut my freelancing down to just “I have been offered a lucrative book deal” stuff! That would be very cool.

In other news, social media’s slow collapse strengthens the case for Top Webcomics. The Old Internet becomes the New Internet! Click the banner below to vote daily.

Next Week: Sobering up in Hell is not better than sobering up on Earth. Read it early on Patreon!

Topics of Conversation

Conversations with my parents during the pandemic made me realize how much “things we have done recently” form the core of most casual conversation. When the answer to “what have you been up to” is “nothing, same as you,” it’s a lot harder to carry on a chat. That was indirectly how I arrived at writing this strip. I wasn’t consciously comparing the gang not having anything to talk about because they’ve all been together for a month straight to not having anything interesting to tell my parents because I’ve been at home for a month straight, but upon reflection it’s pretty clear how I ended up at this week’s joke.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Sebastian is Employee of the Week, and you can, too! It’s how I have predictable money, which is both Cool and Good. If everyone who read the comic in a month chipped in $1, I’d be able to turn down most freelance work and focus on doing Hell, Inc. stuff and my own graphic novels! That would be pretty cool. Speaking of graphic novels, currently Rent-A-Thug: La Cosa Glasnostra is being reformatted as traditional comic pages and posted. Following that, the Rent-A-Thug graphic novel will be starting up (unless some publisher gives me a lot of money before that happens).

Also, the next RPG in my burgeoning empire is going to be launching in February, so sign up for my monthly-ish email newsletter to learn about BURGERPunk.

Sheila’s Sign Language

Sheila’s Sign Language is much easier to learn than ASL, but more limited in expression. It’s really just communicating the one idea, isn’t it? Still, it’s an important one.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Brien Aronov is Employee of the Week, and you can too! Get Employee of the Week shoutouts, read my next graphic novel as I draw it (more on that in the near future!) or commission digital art! All of those things also help provide a level of predictability to my income that basically doesn’t exist otherwise, because freelancing is chaos!

If you want to keep up with what I’m working on, what my friends are doing, and (most importantly) see cute photos of my pets, sign up for my monthly(ish) newsletter!

Christmas Party Benefits

“Christmas Party Benefits” sound like the kind of thing a company would include in a job posting that definitely doesn’t post the salary. Encouraging employees to view each other as having “stab here” signs on their backs also seems like the kind of thing a job that doesn’t post the salary would do.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Caitlin is Employee of the Week, and currently helping finish the Hell, Inc. The RPG Kickstarter fulfillment. Our kitchen table has been a packaging station for a while now, but the end of the shipping tunnel is in sight. Until there’s more shipping. I should just get my living room classified as a Canada Post depot.

A new book series has started for $5/up patrons! The first published Rent-A-Thug story in 12 years, La Cosa Glasnostra, is being published in print-page format for the first time on Patreon. The first 5 pages are free here. The rest will be going up on Patreon, and seems like it’ll end up being somewhere in the 40 page range. I don’t know if I’ll end up printing this one, we’ll see how I feel once I see the whole thing compiled as a PDF.

I haven’t plugged it in a while, so go sign up for the newsletter.

One For Everybody

Oh yeah, that’s right, I’m bringing back a character we last saw about 140 strips ago. I’m an unstoppable juggernaut of (very) slowly turning Hell into Springfield. Wait until a few strips from now when I do it again! And probably more times later! I’m actually getting ahead again, so expect to hear about some other projects as well as Hell, Inc. in the near future. One of which is still Hell, Inc. related, I suppose, since it’s Hell, Inc. The RPG, which a lot of my recent efforts have been dedicated to.

EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK:

Leonardo is Employee of the Week! They’ve got a copy of Hockeypocalypse: Slashers coming in the mail because they supported its creation! You can do that with my next graphic novel, which I will be serializing on Patreon as well. Backers at the $5/month and up tiers will get a copy mailed to them when it’s finished!

You can also sign up for my newsletter, where I’ll be announcing a new Hell, Inc.-related projected later this week!

Next Week: Enter the Drunknasium! Which I guess is just a bar? Read it early on Patreon!