How My Wife Became Osamu Tezuka
It's 1am. My wife is sitting at her desk with her iPad on Procreate. She's been grinding art for several hours, and she still has a few more hours left in her. It's a sight not too dissimilar to a super cool manga guy Osamu Tezuka in the 1980s.
Tezuka's desk TV is my wife's PC monitor with YouTube on. Tezuka's record player is my wife's Spotify. Tezuka's many assistants? That's probably the cats. Well, they're mostly emotional support cats. Neither cats has seemed to want to pick up drawing yet. They'll get there.
She sometimes wears a cowboy hat we got from a trip down south. It's not exactly Tezuka's wacky painter hat. Close enough. Also, Tezuka would have totally listened to furry drama on YouTube. That's just a fact. Not sure if he'd have Marty or Keemstar playing...
Right now my wife (read in a Borat voice) is finishing up a design for a fake Sunkist bottle. It's supposed to be for a friend who needs it for an indie short film, and it's looking pretty profesh so far. After that, she's finishing today's inktober. She prepped the sketches for inktober back in September. It's some pretty ambitious stuff for someone to draw in a few hours, even with a sketch prepped. Then there's that Mermay comic she's finishing up the cover for. Gonna love to see that printed out.
After that, illustrating my comic/zine might come next. I suck at art. She makes my random witticisms way funnier than they actually are with her designs. We (and by that I mean mostly myself) were thinking about doing the comic once a month then putting up a patreon. We already leave the comics around town at coffee shops and pizza places as mini 1" zines. They're like 30 pages, which is 30 panels to fill, give or take a few pages. Should be doable as a monthly thing.
Though, in the other hand, I don't want my wife to feel even more like Tezuka and his crazy manga deadlines than she does already. On top of all of the art projects and writing, there's also her YouTube channel. She's been working really hard on her channel over the past year. Learned to git gud at editting, learned what to script and what to ad- lib, learned how to work the algorithm a little - she's got a system. Really couldn't be more proud. I just worry that she'll continue to grind this hard. She'll only maybe play video games on stream. She's in grind mode. Playing games for no purpose is hard to justify with limited time. Guess we're a weird YouTuber married couple now.