Stop! Thief! 😼 A panel from this past Saturday’s comic update.

It’s a week-early post! And from here on out, I will try to post one page a week, every Saturday between the hours of 8pm and 9pm PST. Emphasis on try – I might not always be able to make it every Saturday. But I will do my best.

Character exploration sketches of Troy the highland bull! This sweet emoo is a bit of a class clown, a talented actor, and a brave friend who will use his strength to intimidate your bullies!

How long is rock and roar 1 going to be? Do you have rock and roar 1 all planned out?

Is it just a matter of inking and coloring the comic pages every 2 weeks, or do you have to think about where you want the story to go after each comic page?

I’m very excited to see Clash and the Steel Stampede! And I’m excited for rock and roar 2!

Rock and Roar is planned out from beginning to end, every chapter and scene is written. I'm following the outline as I draw each page, and I sketch out a few pages at a time before I start polishing the next page that will go up. I'm hoping the comic doesn't go on longer than four years, but it'll depend if I'm able to switch to a weekly schedule instead of biweekly at some point.

And thank you! I'm excited to introduce them.

New page is up!

Since the 80's had a lot of different music genres, are there any types of genres that our main band members dislike?

One of the most universally disliked genres by the time the 80s came around, was disco. Disco was so popular in the 70s that many rock radio stations became disco stations instead, and this over saturation exhausted a lot of listeners until there was some pretty public backlash against the genre. However, disco beats played a big role in new wave, so our band members are influenced by it, even if they had long stopped going to disco clubs, and Miles will often deny that he enjoys those jams.

But in terms of 80s genres specifically, no one in our band of artsy New Wavers, except for Fenris Vanderwulf, is a fan of glam metal. Fenris lives for the extravagance and larger-than-life personas of those badly-behaved rockstars, but to Miles, Darrel, Layla, and Shawn, the music feels simply too pop-y. Although, Miles will admit, some of those guitar solos are pretty awesome - those guys can really shred.

Alven Pine, a deceitful mockingbird, uses all kinds of tricks to make sure his signed artists become stars. This A&R rep's got a good ear for music, and was himself once a singer - although he relied on stealing other bird's songs, rather than composing anything original himself. These days, he'd much rather let his artists do all the performing work. Sure, he'll get you the record deal - but at a cost.

just found your comic and love it! No pressure, but I’m curious, what kinda creatures might like synths or chiptunes in Rock and Roar-verse?

Thanks for your question!

The synthesizer of course plays a large role for a story set in the 80s! In Rock & Roar, Layla Keys is the synth player in the new wave band that Miles will be tagging along with. Layla has been fascinated by electronic music all her life, but she isn't the only one.

Synth-pop turned out to have a very wide appeal across all animalkind and all over the world. Funny enough, it came about because of the late punk scene, specifically as part of the new wave movement that was rapidly growing into what we now recognize as the sound of the 80s.

Because punk by that time had drawn musicians of all species, new wave and all the genres under its umbrella were very diverse in terms of the animals who were playing in those bands.

For example, Darrel Hare loved the synth sound so much, that he hired Layla to help him bring his song ideas to life, and the synth became an integral part of his band's sound.

Of course, if we are talking about electronic music in general, the category is much larger; for example, "house" music - which used synthesizers and drum machines - was also emerging at around the same time, though it evolved from disco instead of punk.

However, electronic dance music, or EDM, isn't the focus of Rock & Roar, so it won't really be explored, at least not at this time. There might be some fun allusions to it here and there, though!

Emma Kitteridge character exploration sketches. More on the way!

Thank you so much, I love this! You totally captured his attitude!

Decided to draw Darrel today.

Darrel belongs to @rockandroar

maybe a strange question but in your post introducing steel stampede you said that heavy metal originates from and belongs to animals with horns. does that mean punk is that way but for cats? all the punks we meet in the comic (so far) are cats after all

I love this question, thank you for asking!

The short answer is yes, what we now know as punk was originated by cats, and it developed in largely two places - New York City and London in the mid 70s. "Proto-punk" artists that preceded this movement and inspired what would later become punk, were animals of a few different species; but it was street cats, with their independent streak, who turned out to be the fierce non-conformists that rock music needed at that time, and who took those earlier ideas and created a whole new movement in music and culture.

By nature, alley cats tend to gather in large groups. It was then easy in this environment for musicians to share music and political ideas amongst each other and a whole new genre and subculture grew out of that. These cats were also very territorial, so in many pockets within the punk scene, outsiders weren't warmly welcomed. This is what has happened in the music scene that Miles is a part of, and why it's made up exclusively of cats who've claimed those alleys as theirs.

But as punk rock grew in popularity and spread across the globe, it began to draw crowds of all kinds of animals. By the time punk grew into the Hardcore movement, canines were just as numerous as felines in the scene. Punk gave way to many other genres - such as Gothic Rock and New Wave - and each had different kinds of animals within the bands that represented each of those genres. We'll be meeting some of them throughout the story.

All of this will be elaborated on in the Rock & Roar Wiki, which is currently in progress!

I just stumbled across your comic after seeing a reblog of some of your character art and I immediately fell in love with it??! I adore your character designs and the 80s/music aesthetics so much!!!

I have a story taking place in the late 80s in my mind where music plays a key role as well that I wanna turn into a comic in the future so I guess following your story will give a huge inspiration boost for me as well!

I hope you'll keep having motivation, inspiration and lots of fun while creating your comic because it's such a wonderful one!

Wow thank you so much for your kind words! Your message really made my day! I'm so happy to hear that you are enjoying the comic and that you are also telling a story in the 80s, and I love that music plays an important role in it. Please do share your comic with us when you create it!

I saw this comic, and it makes me think of Rock and Roar! lol.

https://www.tumblr.com/andreandkarl/746223567417540608/32824

I hope the link works!

Haha! That's so Miles!

A new page is up!

Hello, my name is Jonathan.

I really like the character, Grant Ruffalo. He is officially one of my favorite characters now.

Can I ask a question? Does this character has a backstory on how he started to form this amazing metal rock band?

Thank you for your answer? 😊

Hi Jonathan, thank you very much for your question!

Grant has a lot of stories to tell from his many years as a musician. His father was a blues guitarist who moved his family from the US to England when Grant was still small. As an unusually intense and focused calf, Grant quickly picked up guitar playing from his father and dived deeply into it. Throughout his childhood and teen years he would continue to spend countless hours practicing, as well as obsessively listening to every blues and rock record he could get his hooves on. He quickly developed a reputation for his amazing guitar technique, powerful vocals, and...aggressive temperament which he'd need to work on improving, but that's another story.

Grant went off to college in the late 60s. At that time, the music that was popular was quite a bit...janglier and lighter than what Grant wanted to do (this was the time of hippies, after all). Grant loved the psychedelic rock, acid rock, and blues rock bands of the time, but he had a vision for something darker, heavier, and definitely louder - and together with his friend and bassist Onyx Slater, they'd start working on this strange new music. They soon recruited Billy and Gunnar, and started rigorously practicing. As an already creative guitarist, Grant had no problem figuring out new ways to experiment with all sorts of distortion in his sound.

Bassist Onyx Slater had a passion for horror movies and spooky stuff in general, so that helped the band figure out the visuals for their music and their overall look. Grant was already fairly popular with the other bovids on campus (as herd animals, horned and hooved folks tend to gather together), so he had no issue finding audiences for his band's local shows. With all of these friends showing up to the concerts, word began to spread among the herds, and new bands with a similar sound - inspired by Steel Stampede- began to sprout up all over the region. Aside from these bands all sharing this heavier sound, all of them had members with horns, so they came up with the "🤘🏼" hand gesture as a way to show support to each other at shows and as a symbol for their growing subculture. Local media took notice of the rapidly growing numbers of oddly-dressed fans and named them "headbangers" for the way they rocked their horns in unison to the music at shows.

Through the years, Steel Stampede continued to grow and innovate. By the mid 70s, they'd moved past much of their blues origins, and instead focused more on playing faster and louder, perhaps inspired by the alley cats of London and across the pond in New York City who were developing a fierce new style of rock music called "punk". Meanwhile, having now been signed onto a record label, and with their popularity rapidly growing amongst young animals all over the world, Steel Stampede, and especially Grant himself, were being credited in the media as the pioneers of this music genre now known across the globe as "heavy metal".

To this day, Grant is still regarded as the father of metal. And while he will humbly shrug this off, just ask any metal-loving animal who they think is the king of the genre, and they will almost certainly tell you that Grant Ruffalo is the leader of the herd.

Is it ok to draw fan art of any of your characters?

Yes, absolutely! I love seeing how others draw my characters. :)