loadtoberJ is back again! 2022 style!

By now you probably know the drill, but in case you don’t:

loadtoberJ is a Loading Artist drawing “contest” where you pick a daily prompt from the official Inktober list, and loadJ-ify it!

There are 5 different categories to win, and the winners will get their choice of t-shirt delivered to them! If you’re wondering what shirts are available, well, they’ll be viewable in the store… once that re-opens anyway. Very soon!

All participants also get a loadtoberJ-2022 badge to wear proudly on their Discord profiles.

Check the #rules Discord channel for more info, and see the winners 2021 and 2020 for inspiration!

I HAVE A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!

It’s been one year since the duck made his first appearance with the burnout storyline, and now I’m proud to finally launch the beginning of Plucked Up as an ongoing slice-of-life comic series!

Read the first set of pages here:

Plucked Up: Nice Day

Plucked Up is exclusive to all my supporters on Patreon, Twitch, and Ko-fi!, and new comics will be posted fortnightly.

I hope you like it!

<3 Gregor

Oh and also there’s a spider on every page. Good luck!

I’m 33 and once again I’ve been completely spoiled by this amazing community.

This time getting together in secret to make this super awesome interactive Game Map, and with it drawings & messages celebrating moments & memories from the Twitch streams!

Huge thanks to SuperTux88 for coding all of this together (press Ctrl + ` to activate dev mode) Also special thanks to Everesce for drawing the map itself!

Here are a few examples of the different posts, and definitely check out the Game Map to see them all!

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and deciding the fate of foxes with bits, by StevenDeLuxi

Mario Kart 8 in a very-distant very-alternate universe where Li (Exocomics) actually beats me, by Everesce

Planet Zoo and my priorities, by Anaryaa

… and so much more! A huge thank you to everyone involved, it was super touching and made my heart swell up (I should probably see a doctor). Below is a permanent VOD of the whole thing being revealed to me on Twitch:

Speaking of the whole thing, MarcMansfield over here with another incredible montage of a gazillion clips showing what the real Comic #500 really is. Check it out below (or this link) on YouTube:

Thank you thank you thank you!! You all make taking a step closer to death so much better!

<3 Gregor

I’ve added characters to the Twitch stream! These are randomly generated per user, and are also persistent!

To see your character all you gotta do is interact with the stream while I’m live in some way (e.g. follow, subscribe*/gift sub, host/raid, cheer/donate, catch the spider, hydrate, etc) and you’ll pop up on screen in front of everyone!

P.S. if you find that the RNG gods didn’t capture your look the way you wanted, you can reroll your character (the full character, or just your hat/hair, face, or body) by using your bees (aka Channel Points) which you accumulate by watching the streams.

See you on Twitch! I’m gonna be finishing the new comic there very soon!

<3 Gregor

*did you know Twitch subscribers also get access to bonus panels?

Wait what? 2021 is over? ALREADY??! Alright, time to reflect.

2021 was a wild ride. Starting with celebrating 10 years of Loading Artist comics.. and then burning out and disappearing.. only to later return with Plucked Up - a side series born out of burnout, rising like a duck from the ashes.

Now I’m back with a renewed sense of where I oughta be spending my time, and with a more loosey-goosey mindset when it comes to making things. I used to obsess with making sure every pixel is “perfect”, spending hours and hours on stuff that, in hindsight, either isn’t even noticeable or worse: made the comic look over-worked or too rigid.

Some of you are probably thinking wtf is this guy on about, his comics never looked pixel perfect … and that’s exactly my point.

Anyway, I’ve thought about it and these are my top four favourite Loading Artist comics of 2021 (in no particular order):

Over His Head

Killing Him Softly

Sending the Message

Party Animal

But overall, I’d say the comic that really stood out to me this year was the entire Plucked Up series, except it’s hard to compare it to the Loading Artist comics because they’re so different. Like comparing apples to… a longform comic about a duck.

plucked up #1

Thank you very much to everyone reading my comics this year, and especially to those who are reading these words right now. With people sticking to social media more and more, the ones who still go the extra mile to visit the site deserve extra acknowledgement, so thank you!

And that’s it for 2021! I’m really looking forward to some of the stuff I have planned next year! In the meantime, you can catch up on all the bonus panels you might’ve missed on my Patreon.

See you in 2022!

<3 Gregor

P.S. - Hall of Memes has been replaced by the #meme_ories channel in the Discord server, as it already serves as an archive for all Loading Artist memes from the streams and things <3