At the recent Syntax demo party the newest edition of the diskmag Vandalism News was announced. You can read more about what it is about at their site (or download it here), but in short: it’s a digital magazine originally distributed on 5 1/4 inch floppies around the world describing the happenings in the Commodore C64 demo/cracking scene.

Once again I was asked to contribute to it, an opportunity which I gladly accepted.

Personally I feel a pressure to perform, but not in a bad way. It’s a stimulus for me to try to do something that’s liked by that particular audience, whilst trying not to be predictable. I also try to improve my pixeling skills.
The making of the magazine takes several months so I got more than enough time to polish my ideas.

A little comic

A section that was already present in the previous issue. A place especially for me to showcase my cartoons. This time all were made in single-colour format and I only made two, trying to go for quality over quantity.

SX on the beach was a leftover idea from the previous issue. Quite pleased how it turned out.

I don’t do many multi-frame ‘strips’ and doing them in a 320×200 resolution with text took some thinking organizing and reworking. Because it’s pretty much a ‘talking-head’ idea it was also a challenge to still make it somewhat visually appealing. I tried to achieve that by making the main guy as expressive as I could. Again pleased with the result: taking the time for it, paid off.

Vandalism Mews

Vandalism has a lot of little graphics between the texts. I had the idea of introducing a new character “Vandalism Mews” a bad tempered mongrel of a cat.
The editor liked the idea so Mews had his premiere and popped up at several places in the magazine.

Oliver Frey tribute

The name ‘Oliver Frey’ was not familiar to me, but I have seen his work in a lot of places. An amazing artist that died recently, the magazine was dedicated to (amongst others) him.

I was asked if I could rework som of his hand-drawn sketches he drew for Commodore Gaming magazine Zzap!64. It was mostly tracing the original drawing and scaling it down. But I wanted to capture the quick had drawn energy, so it was not trivial.

Conclusion

This time I won’t go on about the quality of all the other artists in the magazine. Being asked to contribute is an honour but also means people see I have something to add (so shut up imposter syndrome!).
For me it’s an opportunity to challenge myself and grow.

And seeing that I have eleven contributions to this grand old magazine, makes me proud.

Thanks David!