(Being episode one billion of a diary about the making of a multi-part webcomic I started writing in 2010, and started drawing in February/March 2011, and oh my god the passage of time!!!).  

Okay, 9 of 11 chapters “done”-ish.  Kind of.  I’m doing the faces last so it’s like, every page is people with no faces…?  I don’t know if I mentioned this before— probably.  But what I’m hoping, and I’ve never tried this before, but I’m hoping this’ll make the face drawings more consistent, if I save them all for last and do them all at once. I struggle a lot with consistency.  

Like— what the hell, here’s an example of an image— (it’s supposed to be a character standing in front of a flashback-y thing, kind of-ish)— sorry, for your eyes—

So… so, yeah, everything is like that, blank-faced weird non-people. I saved all faces for last so I’m not bogged down trying to get an expression just so, and I can focus on drawing folds in fabric incorrectly, weird impossible shadows, and little insecure, tiny lines that don’t make any sense, and fail to understand hair, etc.

But anyways, the “hard” parts are all drawn for 9 of the 11 chapters.  Writing’s 99.5% done. I’ve cut things down from 225 pages to about … somewhere between 190 and 210.  Just cutting stuff or pushing art closer together so it looks slightly fuller…

Chapter 10 only needs… 4-6 more drawings, so that’ll be done … tonight or tomorrow.  

And then 11… 11’ll be some work. But the entire comic, it’s all characters standing in nondescript locations, talking to one another about vague feelings, so … how do you make that interesting to look at???  I like comics where the drawings tell the story so it’s hard for me to like my comics because they’re very tell-don’t-show because of the clip-art talking heads I rely totally on. (If I didn’t have clip art, I’d be in this for another … oh, 2-3 years or so, though, and nothing I’ve written justifies that kind of time investment).  

I made a mistake by going in order though for this last push on the art end. I don’t want someone to see my enthusiasm vary as a thing progresses, but that’s what’s going to happen.  (I think I read Barry Windsor Smith drew every third page of Weapon X so that if his style changed, the reader wouldn’t be able to tell immediately because it’d all be spread around….)

Looking at most of it finished, it is absolutely fucking ridiculous it’s taken me this long to finish this Mickey Mouse shit.  It’s just a bullshit sitcom-y talking head comic! It’s just a fucking talking head comic and it’s taken me this long.  And I’m recording it as it’s taken this long— how embarrassing is that?  So embarrassing.  And I’m cheating on some/most of these drawings! I’m using sketchup and photo reference and copy-paste shit and clip art and all that shit… The art is mostly non-sequential, even!  I made a million choices to make things easy on myself.  So, the “taken forever” part of things… I can’t even guess why it’s taken this long.  Where did that time go?  (Besides my day job where I’m headed to later today, and which is always my priority, but…)

Anyways, I’ll have a mostly drawn (but no faces), fully lettered and assembled comic in my “hands” (digital … hands…?) by the start of August, health providing.  So… take that month to fill in the blanks, and maybe see what can be done with color— I think it’s definitely going to be mostly black and white (time investment aside, I just like black and white comics more), but maybe SOME color might work… mixed in judiciously?  Maybe.  

Figure I’m done by … September or October, maybe November…?  

What else— San Diego Comic-con is going on right now.  That part’s kind of not fun when you’re home working on something dodgy no one will ever care about because you hear about, like, well, REAL projects…?  Where it’s not just copy-paste drawings of anatomically-disfigured people standing around spouting bad dialogue, in something a foolish person might describe as a “story” but no educated person would.  Announced to rooms filled with people who care.  Like, “Oh.  Oh, right— I’m a creative tundra, a quality black hole whose gravitation pull is such that only raw sucking can escape its vortex.  I forgot. Thanks.  Thanks for the reminder, comicbookresources dot com.  Someday everyone I’ve ever loved will be dead?  I wasn’t thinking about that at the moment, Robot 6, but thanks— that’s one to grow on.”

(I guess this is the part where I’m supposed to throw myself on my sword and be like, “The fact it’s hard work to do things is why you should never be snarky because look how hard it is, don’t be snarky, be a skittle commercial, be a human skittles commercial.  My feelings!”  … ha, no, yeah, no… “I thought the world had shitty stories in it but then I started to sell shitty stories so I realized, hey, man, hey… the world should have HUGS in it.”  That shit just makes me laugh…)

Anyways, work proceeds.  End in sight.  Done soon.