Today has gone by very quickly. So many words spilled out of my fingers today and into various places that it seems shocking to feel like I didn’t get anything done. That feeling is passing as it sinks in that writing is somethign I love to do, even when Ihave reading to do. I didn’t read a single page of American Psycho or Tribulation Force today (I have them with me at work), and I may or may not have the opportunity to read them tonight, depending upon whether I get to work on more comics tonight or not.
I’m really struggling with the sixth and seventh comics. I haven’t even begun to style the art for the fourth one, though I have some good ideas for a whole bunch of strips in a storyline that you’ll just have to wait and see. I’ve got to sit down and take some time developing exactly the right style of art for this one, since it will be one of the few comics I do that requires the introduction of new artwork on a regular basis. I think some people will be disappointed int he way I’m handling the art for three of the comics (perhaps more, depending onw hat happens with six and seven), since I basically just drew each character/setting once and copy and paste them where they should be. One of them is ME2, and you know what THAT looks like. The others at least have the opportunity for new art, since I originated the originals, and know I can re-produce those styles easily. Of course, since it is so time-consuming to get this stuff done at the level I want to do it, I do not expect myself to do a lot of new artwork all the time.
I’m so lazy. Then again, my laziness encourages effeciency. You could say that using the same drawings over and over again to tell an ongoing dialogue is a very effecient way of doing things. Spending the time drawing and re-drawing and cleaning up multiple drawings for every strip, even when the scene has not changed seems very ineffecient to me. Then again, perhaps it is telling of something else I am leaving out of my comic strips: settings.
In comic books, every panel has an elaborate, specific setting. The characters are present, but they are somewhere and being viewed froma particular angle. Together with their background and the perceived “camera angle”, the panel is filled with things that tell more about what is going on. For the sorts of stories that I am telling though, and the rate at which I want to get them out, I am not sure that that level of detail would help much. Of course, I do have plans for a project that uses a more comic-book-like style, with settings and views in addition to just characters and dialogue. I am planning a very particular visual style for that comic, and looking forward to working on it. It could only possibly produced perhaps weekly, perhaps monthly. Depends on how much longer I continue to work on these seven (five) strips, I suppose.
I thought briefly that I had accomplished quite a bit with my getting 15 comics done this weekend. Then I realized that if I were doing 7 strips a day on a continuing basis, I would need to get about that many done in the same period anyway. Fifteen comics in two days gets me just barely ahead, if at all. That’s just keeping up, I suppose. Probably, at the rate I’m doing them, they will last perhaps a week or two beyond the month I will have completed before I begin posting them. Still, that will be quite a large number of comics, and I think you will be able to enjoy most of them.
Anyway, time to go home. No more words here from me tonight.
