Project Diary 9/12/12:
Another installment of a diary I’m keeping making a terrible webcomic for the last, oh, twelve years? Thirteen? Twenty-eight? I don’t remember when I wasn’t making a terrible webcomic anymore.
Lunch break. Long day; need to keep my fingers moving on a keyboard, so I can get right in it when lunch is over… so project diary! Let’s see: well, I feel like I’m almost done but I’ve felt that way for a year now. I saved drawing faces to do all at once, in the hopes that just doing faces would help give things a consistency they wouldn’t have otherwise. (Maybe not a good idea for various reasons— I don’t think I’d do it that way again). So everything is laid out and all the big drawing is done— I’m just drawing faces (badly).
It took a while to get moving there, to find a style I could do consistently enough. But I’m on chapter 4 of 11… it takes maybe a day or three per chapter— I draw pretty slow. After that… after that, I try to put in some weak backgrounds on some of the blanker pages— not a lot of drawing there. Draw one new page to smooth out a transition. And it’s 90% black and white but there’s a very light amount of color work that needs to be done— not much full-on painting, but some Photoshop tricks I’ve picked over the years. Figure .. two weeks? three? for that. Little things to spice it up.
In “feel worse about it than before” news, I’ve got the same rough premise and/or occupy the same rough story-world, as one of the new Fall tv shows— not one of the ones that sound good, either. Yay, creative bankruptcy! Some people chalk these kinds of things up to Ideaspace or coincidence or the inherent nature of trying to come up with ideas at the same time as a billion other people, but eh, I just take it as confirmation of being hack-y and lame. ”I invented According to Jim three years before they did but it took me a long time to draw so…” Wee!
Though, on the other hand, if you’re doing something NO ONE has ever done before, it’s equally possible everyone else had the idea and was like, “Oh, that’d be the worst. That could only ever be a big pile of poo. No way.” I wouldn’t trust that either. No one’s ever done a comic about handkerchiefs, that is itself a handkerchief, but … you know, that doesn’t mean it’s to be done, necessarily. (Though… that actually sounds like a good idea to me at the moment … I don’t know; maybe I’m onto something… THE UNCANNY ‘CHIEF-MEN…)
Like, at least my underlying analysis two years ago of “Oh, obviously someone should make something about ____” turned out to be correct, according to massive multi-media conglomerates…? I don’t know— I just can’t really see it that way, at the moment.
Or it’s just— the new Fall books are coming out with all the hooplah of … you know: Tom Wolfe’s new book is about immigration in Miami! Zadie Smith’s new book is about women and class or something in modern London. Michael Chabon’s new book is a Dickensian look at race relations and pop culture in Oakland. They’re all these big zeitgeist-y “novels of the city” coming out, and I’m sitting here barely managing to finish an under-drawn four-character sitcom set in a non-descript city (well, I drew things that kind-of look like buildings behind some of the things that kind-of look like characters, which is as much as I can do), all of which vaguely resembles some show that Jim Belushi was too rich star in. They couldn’t get Belushi!!
(If you’ve never googled Tom Wolfe— I like the photo that comes up when you do, at least for me…)
So yeah: progress on comic and self-loathing trending upwards; enthusiasm levels trending ever more sharply downwards. Same old same old. Okay: sandwich eaten. Back to work.
