About Brandon K. Montoya

Author of Tangents, Wyrd And Akward,

Wyrd Presents: Nick Carter, Perseus & Medusa

And Musician As “The Incomplete Orchestra”

I’m a 47-year-old web comic veteran, I’ve been author going all the way back to my teenage years. I spent about 15 years working for a defunct comic book company, Gravitywell Productions. My co-workers and I turn that small little company into a marvel.

I joined the company somewhere in the year 1995, after meeting the head of the company when I was still a teenager and in high school in 1993. I definitely gave that dude too much credit. Had I known who Ayn Rand was… And how much this guy thought he was a character in one of her books… Yeah. Kind of like working for Elon, except Elon had money.

Yes, there is some “prestige” in my time there, but it was created by those of us that bore the brunt of the work. I was there sixteen years, became a very low, low level comic celeb but was only actually paid twice during that time period. So sure, it is true I am one of the pioneers… But our company stopped existing for a reason.

Our company starting doing webcomics on Geocities, then we moved onto our own URL sometime in either 1996 or 1997. We were doing free webcomics at least a full 1-3 years before Marvel, DC and the newspapers in America or Japan did it because they were scared. The only other webcomic that I personally recognize as being exactly as old as my comic book company is now an anime I think, “Cat Shit One.” I respect that group of creators.

Ahleak George was the original designer of our website, we used that design til it went offline.

If he still works at DC, Larry Barry briefly worked for us too. Though there’s no reason for him to put that company in his resume.

After arguing with the owner about the lack of money coming in at all in the year 2011, I stopped speaking to him and stopped updating the website. At the time I was the webmaster. The website went unmaintained until the year 2018 when it went offline. About a year or so later a different company bought the URL.

Currently, other than myself talking about it, you can only find proof that we existed on the IMDb. Will find me listed under one of the movies with “Azimuth” in the title as a musician.

When I came onto the company I passed the test to become a writer, but I also took the test as a artist. I am a very slow artist, and that is one of the reasons I got out of comics after the blowout with my former company’s CEO.

During my time at Gravitywell Productions, I created and wrote the following titles:

Red Krewe : A retro story set in a sci-fi 1955 where anthropomorphic animals were kept as slaves. The story focused on rebels.
Los Malditos : A super hero satire comic with an all Latino cast
Los Malditos : Last Man Standing, a Resident Evil parody with an all Latino cast
Cycle : An anthropomorphic category story about a man lost in time in an alternative timeline ancient Babylon where science was much further than we thought.
Tangents : The original tangents followed myself and my real life co-workers inside the company as we went into the Comic-Cons. I no longer tell the story in this format because I do not no these people and I no longer live the comic con life.

I also did a series of very short stories that didn’t go beyond I want to say 8 or 12 pages. I honestly with the passage of time don’t remember what they are, and guaranteed they are so dated they would not be worth bringing back.

I also created a line of about 200 different t-shirt designs. By today’s standards… Pretty ugly. Some of them were cool then. Cafepress stuff.

I was also the chief writer for a political editorial newspaper comic strip style cartoon called “End Of The Day” The title of this strip belongs to the former CEO, I do not use or attempt to publish in this title. Instead, since Tangents is not something I do in the old format, I now use tangents to tell the kind of political and current event satire that I would have told in EOTD.

I am first and foremost a writer, but also a musician of sorts, You can find a lot of my creative Commons 3.0 attributions on ccmixter.org under the username coruscate. I’ve done art, I’ve done about every kind of art that you can think of including resin work and arts and crafts. Crafts. Nowadays when I do art it’s mostly stuff in my own personal pleasure and production art. The way that I used to do with comics is not something I currently do.

To spare people asking in the comments, yes I use AI assistance for rendering images to tell my stories with Wyrd And Akward and to tell jokes about politics and the high life with the newer version of Tangents. The images are just a tool I used to tell the stories and to deliver the jokes. I used the following render engines to bring you the best possible images for you to look at while you are reading my story or letting me tell you a joke:

Midjourney
Unstability AI
Lionardo AI
ClipDrop AI
Dream
Ideogram

Bing

Pika Labs

Tengr AI

Sexy AI (hey it’s uncensored)

Meta AI

I use six different engines because I care about the results. When I joined my former company I had never touched a cell phone, and if you had told me back then that I would be making comics almost exclusively on my phone I would have thought you were nuts.

I also use the following two apps to put together the panels :

Meme generator Pro
Image combiner and editor Pro

These are both produced by the same company and for a tiny little piece of cheap software. It’s pretty robust.

I am also experimenting with video, and as I mentioned previously I am a musician. So I am looking for ways to fuse the art and the animation together with music that I’ve made or will continue to make to assist in telling the stories or tell side stories while you look through the things that I am producing here on ComicsFury

Like I said I can draw, however, I work two jobs and I’m raising a 6-year-old. Drawing is no longer a viable option except for occasional small pieces. As fast as I wish to tell my story, it is not a viable option to pay for a full-time artist. I refer to these images as images, and other than I keep the best possible images in front of you, you will not see me bragging about these images as if I spent the time drawing them. I know what that feels like, this is something else entirely. And I’ve run into a few other former authors who are getting back into production because of AI assistance. I know for a fact this does bother some people, but I also know for a fact that there are a great number of people that do not care as long as the material that is put in front of them is quality, and the person doing it doesn’t say anything stupid like claiming they drew it by hand. And that doesn’t interest me. I literally spend portions of each day looking for new ways to render scenes and different things that I could add to the books as I’m preparing to expand my storytelling as much as possible with the tools that are in front of me.

If you have made it all the way to the end of this, thank you for reading.

I’m demigender and somewhere on your left.