30 Funny And Relatable Comics By Brian Russell (New Pics)

We asked Brian about his creative process: “The drawing portion of my comics usually takes me around two hours from beginning to end. I usually sketch with a pencil on some paper that I have a template for, then ink on my computer. Now, the writing part? That’s unpredictable! Some jokes are easy and they write themselves, and some have been sitting half-written in my drafts for years!

I don’t know that any of my techniques are unusual, per se. Something I don’t know that other people do is laugh while making my comics. I guess it’s a good sign that I think what I’m working on is funny! Ha! But there are many videos of me from my weekly Twitch live streams where I’ll draw one part and just crack up.”

“It’s almost always difficult to come up with new ideas,” the artist says about facing creative block. “Lately, I’ve made a choice to not force too many ideas. I try to jot down life-based ideas as they come up. I’ll write notes on my phone or whatever and sometimes they make sense and sometimes they don’t. If the idea isn’t working, I’ll set it aside and work on something else.

For me, it does help to have some deadlines. My brain likes boxes and restrictions, so sometimes just knowing the deadline is coming up will help some of those ideas organize into place. There are many times when I’ll start to ink a comic and realize that the joke doesn’t actually work as well as I thought it did when I sketched it, but you just have to work it out or pivot. I try to have at least two comics in progress in my brain so that if one doesn’t work, I can move over to the other one.”

Brian says that there are many great artists out there who inspire him: “Brian Gordon (Fowl Language Comics) helped me hone in on my joke-telling and focus, Michael Regina (Adamsville, The Sleepover) inspired me to take a little more time for the art, and Jon Baker (Alarmingly Bad) showed me the ropes on beginning to animate my comics.”

We wondered whether it’s hard to develop a unique style with so many other creators around. Brian replied: “As for developing a style, I think you just have to start drawing and you can figure out your style along the way. There are a bunch of my favorite comics that I made 5 or so years ago that don’t look like 'my style' anymore because it’s just evolved over time. I found different pieces that I liked almost on accident and just started doing it differently and adapted moving forward because I liked how it looked. Sometimes you just have to start and allow yourself to evolve over time.”

When asked about future plans, the artist told us: “I’ve really been enjoying doing slightly animated comics for TikTok and YouTube. The more I get into doing those, the more I think about how a comic will look animated and it’s influenced the way I draw the comics. I hope to keep practicing with this style of animating and voice acting and have a great time with it. One day it’d be great to put another book together, but at the moment, I’m having fun simply making people laugh with comics and animations.”