▀▄▀▄▀▄ the SlAshBloG. ▀▄▀▄▀▄
SLASHFiC Progress Update and Some Extra Stuff
posted 2:30am August 29th, 2026
hi everyone. just want to give everyone, including myself, an update on what’s been going on with slashfic. how is everybody else?
…oh, sorry. i haven’t figured out how to put comment sections on here yet. my bad. (if someone wants me to pay them peanuts to put a per-page comments section on my site let me know!!!!!)
…anyway, i’ve been doing good. here’s something stupid i did yesterday: i drove up with sofia to pick up catbite keyboardist Kayleigh KMOY Malloy and catbite bassist Ben Parry from the Los Angeles International Airport, drove down the pacific coast highway, ALL the way to VENTURA, CA, to get them to their first show of tour in time, caught up a little in the green room, watched them soundcheck, drove BACK UP to hollywood for dinner at the Formosa Cafe, and got home at 11pm. it was kind of the best day ever. that’s how you know catbite are my goats, though. i wouldnt even pick up my PARENTS from the airport. that’s just a joke mostly.. im sorry mom..
photos by sofia dupre
i work on something SLASHFiC related every week, and then i work food service 4-5 days in a row, and then i come back and work on another slashfic thing. but that’s part of the problem. it is almost always a different thing.
let me just begin to break down how many slashfic things are 20-65% finished in the pipeline right now:
▀ about 10 (give or take) halfway done slashfic strips, some of which i will be releasing in ways besides posting them to my instagram. most of them are at the inking stage. (i hate the part where i have to scan everything in and re-collage it all back together. what they dont tell you about mixed media..)
▀ about 4-6 mini cartoon shorts, some voice acted, some more similar to mini music videos (one with original music by tape girl!), and more, hopefully! the inital purpose of these (besides that i like them) is to reintroduce the characters of the comic to new people. also they would be in vertical video. i know. im sorry
▀ speaking of vertical video, comic dubs! sofia dupre and i recorded a lot of dubs of the original run of SLASHFiC strips! one of the hurdles for that is, i haven’t asked anyone to voice inez or chloe yet. but, i know who i want anyway, so it’s fine. also, tape girl beth will be doing the music and sound design for these. basically, i haven’t moved forward with it yet because the next steps involve other people and i wanted to make sure my focus was on these by the time i drag other people into it.
▀ a new section of my site called “the green room” where you can listen to music and chat and maybe watch me stream! i just have to find a good music widget, a good chat widget, a good stream widget, and remember how my site’s javascript works cuz i totally forgot, and,…
EDIT: it's actually working and in early stages right now! it's actually hidden somewhere on the site right now if you are nosy enough... i will announce it more officially when it is ready.
▀ back to comics. i have a 16ish page House Show Arc that is meant to serve as a conclusion to the first “act” of slashfic. i began work on this in 2023 and attempted to finish it in time to pitch for silver sprocket. despite my rushing i did not finish it in time and it got rejected because it looked rushed and unfinished. who’da thunk! i stopped working on it when i began work on the lyric book for the precure album. i really really like this arc and i would very much like to finish it after this batch of comics is done.
▀ a 4ish minute music video for the song “Vocal Coach” by Bomb the Music Industry! i wrote/plotted everything out and then filmed all the backgrounds for this the last time i went down to NYC for the Catbite/Kmoy show at TV Eye. the music video is about slashfic going to brooklyn to play a show there for the first time. i would still really like to finish this one once i finish some smaller things, but i would definitely need to enlist the help of a few others to get it done i think. if you make things in flash let me know if this sounds like something you’d want to help me work on..?? jeff rosenstock help me….
▀ for my birthday last year i made an animated block of variety television hosted by slashfic. i made it to play at my movie theater job after hours for all my friends. they really liked it and so did i. so i made a short to bookend the thing as something i can share with the world, instead of just my friends. i filmed all the backgrounds, i wrote/boarded/recorded lines and everything, and when it was time to start drawing i was like “man. there are so many other things i need to be working on”. so i started working on the things before this. but i still really really like it. but i think i need help to finish it. one day… (if you own a small diy space and would want to host a screening of this thing let me know) (also if you have experience and would want to help me on this let me know)
it doesn’t actually look like this
▀ probably a lot more than that but i’m cutting my priorities off here
if that sounds like a lot, i guess it is! i feel like how toby fox felt when it was taking 2 years for every deltarune chapter to come out cuz he kept redoing chapter 3. but then he and the team hunkered down (with help from a new producer) sorted everything out and its been smooth sailin’ ever since! i think i really believe in everything i have in the works. truly. but clearly something about my system isn’t working. i get a lot of advice on what to do and none of it overlaps with what anyone else says. but the reason i wrote it down is so I have something more concrete to hold onto moving forwards. i don’t know how anybody gets anything done! including me!
i think with beth stepping in to make music for the comic has already started to whip me back into shape. we worked together on the deltarune cartoon PASTARUNE recently, and we both finished the whole thing in a WEEK which is insane for two people who basically never release anything, so i’m hoping we can find a way to work together more efficiently together going forward.
the whole idea for this cartoon was some doodles me and my friend tyler came up with on shift at work. that's kind of all a cartoon has to be
anyway, that’s it for now. life is awesome when you do what you want. listen to a good song and go outside for a minute! you will probably have a cool idea or a funny thought. bye!
-anj
on finishing things and how many things i want to finish
posted 2:30am july 29th, 2024
[matpat voice] HELLLLO internet! i’,m writing a blog post. heres shit im thinking about tonight:
▀ slashfic and its amount of incompletion
▀ my friend fizz’s album ‘villians of the labyrinth’
▀ the precure album lyric book i have to finish before going to new york city in august
gonna break these down one by one
▀ slashfic and its amount of incompletion
i think about this one pretty much all the time. ive been drawing marcy and her color coded friends since, uhhhh, november 2018. pretty much december at that point though. point is! that’s a while. as the time of writing this blog post, ive got 13 pages of slashfic added onto the site. and not even all of those are actual comic pages! not gonna count the number though..counterintuitive
but i’ve made so many more pages than that. a lot of them were for the original “graphic novel” version of the story that takes place like, two years after the story im writing now takes place. something like that. i dont know if youve noticed this but im not really a timeline sort of guy. who the fuck cares. anyway
yeah so like, anyway after i realized that i didnt really have the time, skill, knowhow, time management skills, fortitude, penis, etc to make an entire graphic novel in my free time (especially one that focused on like, the comedy of being unable to move on from a breakup LOL) i pivoted to what we now know as Slashfic Singles, little comic strips that explore the characters being in a band together and slowly forming a Scene. what in the FUCK was i talking about
ok right yeah but this kind of started to quickly become its own serial plot. which im SO cool with! but a part of me i’ve been trying to wrestle into submission for a while is that i’m a perfectionist. i’m in a way capable of letting myself half ass something. i full ass everything. slashfic single? full ass. tape girl single art? full ass. peach rings tour poster? full ass. kmoy lyric book? full ass. one off joke comic about marcy? full ass. wait. that ones not a good idea. not every idea needs full ass completion. in fact nothing needs the same amount of effort as anything else. figuring out how much effort each specific thing needs i feel like is one of those things that really differentiates the rookie and the master..
anyway so yeah like.
around, shit, this time last year, i was trying to quickly wrap up a “vol 1” of slashfic singles so i could pitch it as a zine to san francisco indie comics press (and store) Silver Sprocket. Josh PM from bay area ska band Sad Snack works there! here’s a pic of us chilling:
photo by sofia dupre!!! check them out here!
so the sprint to get that zine done helped a lot! i didn’t finish though. i got too ambitious with the scope of it visually i think. i wanted everything to feel like it was taken on digicam (which is Sooo in now btw… just saying i was on this shit before anybody else). there was a 4-page scene talking about the anxiousness i feel reading other artist’s comics (but retrofitted to be about music, obviously). and then like 7 other pages i never even got to cuz i couldnt finish this 4 page thing. i think i wanted to do it “right”.
right now though, i don’t even think i care about doing it “right”. i just want to do Any of it, at All. worrying about doing it ‘right’ KEPT me from doing it all. i just want to make anything whenever i can right now. so right now this means quick joke strips that focus on punchlines over grand artistic statement. things that are FUNNIER when they look less finished.
▀ my friend fizz’s album ‘villians of the labyrinth’
check out the album here!
my friend fizz……fizz is awesome. fizz is my best friend. we’ve been drawing each other’s characters since 2021 and we’ve been friends for even longer than that. we are the same age and have basically the same dreams of projects so we are kind of like shonen protag rivals. do you know what i mean.
anyway so pink noise is fizz’s work-in-progress rpg game about surrealist lesbians who are obsessed with each other to various degrees of unhealthiness. they’ve been making for i think even longer than i’ve been drawing slashfic. most of this time is time in the oven much like me but they finally released this album. and its like, YEah. fuck yeah. because its like, you listen to this shit and its like IMMEDIATE brainworms. ok maybe not immediate but like PRETTY immediate. anyway
the best part of this album is that it exists. before this bazil and clemency and daedalus (these are characters in the video game) were just like, Concepts. if you knew the plan you knew the plan. but now, through something as like, holistic as a short debut album, these concepts are rather Things and Leitmotifs that can like, follow you throughout your life. that’s something i was always so jealous of as a comics artist who wanted to be a musician. You can’t read comics while doing the dishes, or driving around, or walking around. but music CAN follow you throughout your day.
and they’re kind of nervous right now that it could’ve been better but that’s just making me realize like, if you waited til it was perfect you’d Explode. it’d kill you. you’d die. but instead they put the work in that needed to be done so the thing could be done and then youre DONE. and you put it out. and then you work on the next thing. and then you keep doing it and you have a DISCOGRAPHY!!! which brings me to the last thing.
▀ the precure album lyric book i have to finish before going to new york city in august
so i’ve been working on this lyric book that’s meant to serve as a companion piece to my friend Kayleigh ‘kMoy’ Malloy’s “The Precure Album” (an album about the protagonist ‘Val’ and their obsession with fictional anime character Princess Precure, who also serves as an allegory for their struggles with addiction and substance abuse) for like, i dont know. since march? april? i don’t know. i took a long break between then and now. but like
me (passenger seat) and Kayleigh (driver's seat) sitting in the car during the Catbite LA show in April 2024 while I am showing her all the sketches i made while coming up with my take on Princess Precure's design for the lyric book..historical moment..also that's Samantha from The Marijuana Brass in the back seat. photo by Javier "El Homie" Andrade, also of The Marijuana Brass.
how im feeling about the lyric book right now is like, i finally got some forward momentum on slashfic again and that felt great but i was like fuck. i have this whole like, unfinished thing. where i like have all this work but its literally not even on my computer its just papers on the floor in my room. i dont even know what i have and what i dont anymore. i gotta like sort this all out
but then when i looked at it again i kind of realized like, ok. all the sketches are here. half the finished art is here. all you gotta do is finish it now. cuz im like Dying to get a substantial slashfic thing out. i think ive been release starved for like, a while. havent put out a colored slashfic page in a year next month
but like, i have all this stuff for this lyric book, and i gotta finish it, because thats an Obligation i have to kayleigh and myself and sofia and cool chris. (and if i finish it before august kayleigh wants me to give a copy of it to Jeff Rosenstock at the Jeff Rosenstock Catbite show in Brooklyn this August, which i will be at because i am going to NYC for the kMoy/Peach Rings shows in brooklyn and philly to run merch and sell slashfic stickers. ANYWAY) all the sketches are done. all the outlines half the lineart is done. i dont have to think anymore i can just work. i don't need to wait to "figure out" how to do this lineart for this one pose i just have to draw it and then tweak it if i want. and its not like im saying "it doesnt have to be 'perfect'" im saying that it needs to be done. so i can be done with more stuff. i have this crazy amount of things im gonna do and im never gonna get to do them all if im taking this long at every step
so anyway that is why i want to finish things quick over and over until i have a billion things. so i can rule the world
-anj