click to visit larger image Stuck in Jam, page 31 From the Fenworks |
I keep posting these with the words, “The comic continues!” And I’m not sure if I’m reassuring you or reassuring me. Ah, heck, it’s the both of us, I hope. Maybe I’ll stop with those words and start focusing more on what I’m doing and where this is going. Because it keeps continuing, even if in fits and starts. So..
Yesterday, I spent an hour in the bathtub, soaking my back and shoulder muscles while stupidly tensing them up just to hold my phone in front of my face. In that hour, I wrote half a years worth of comic script by pecking away at the touch screen.
Back up a couple of days. I’d spent the last two months or so worrying and fretting about how I was presenting the story. Was I foreshadowing things enough? Was I explaining background early enough? Is there enough action? Well, this comic isn’t really about action, it’s more like a series of Calvin and Hobbes exposition style comics that tell a mythical story while tripping around humor every week. Is that good? Is it funny enough? Then I got the color proof of the first volume of 26 pages, and that was exciting. It gave me the courage to finish the current page and then dig out all the scripts and put them in order so I could continue on with it. And that was awesome. I could hear all the cars outside, beeping out a song in my honor. It was Carmina Burana.
What I’d written was funny.
I walked away from my office telling myself, “I’m a funny, funny man!” And I walked right out the door and stomped around the neighborhood for an hour and a half, writing more scripts in my head. I came back. Did some dishes. Started coloring today’s comic.
The next morning, I took an hour and a half to do the layouts for the next three pages. Now that this page is done, I’m going to try doing those three at the same time. Crank up the pace, and see how long it takes to do three pages at once. See if it improves the art, or risks it.
I don’t know if this comic is going to be much of anything to anybody but myself and a handful of fans, but it really doesn’t need to be. Right now, I’m lucky enough to have the time to really work on it. And doing that is better than playing Minecraft all day, fretting about finding more work. Work finds work. My entire career is a product of my comic. Neglecting the good work would be stupid.
But while I’m working on it, I might as well get a kick out of it, right?
In any case, you may have a question I haven’t answered yet: What’s been delaying the comic all this time?
It’s a combination of things, really. Part of it is that making the comic right is more important to me than getting it done on schedule. That was something I’d stated at the very beginning. But the biggest obstacles were business and illness. I’ve been doing freelance webdesign work that has been extraordinarily demanding while at the same time suffering from enough stress and depression to have my doctor threaten me with blood pressure medicine. I throw that out there like a thoughtless appendix to this whole episode. Let’s break for a moment for emphasis.
Like so many other people in the world — maybe most of us, really — I’m faced with a particularly tough decision. This sounds melodramatic, but it’s at the core of everything. Do I kill myself by stressing about my survival? Or do I risk my survival by not stressing about it?
I’m not in a critical state. I’ve got a friend who is much worse off than me. I’ve lost family members to these things. But both chronic depression and heart problems run in my family, and those two things are a nasty double whammy that synergisticly aggravate each other. And it’s awfully early in my life to have blood pressure as high as I have it right now.
There are two things that I have a habit of doing, that I’ve neglected in the past five years, that both help in treating these familial specters. I’d figured them out at the age of 16, when I chose not to learn how to drive just yet, when I developed the beginnings of the story I’m publishing right now. I didn’t realize how important they were at the time, but I started down that road. Walk and draw comics.
Whenever I’m walking or drawing comics, I’m not thinking about how shitty the world is. I’m more relaxed than when doing anything else. Whenever I’m walking or drawing comics, I actually feel like I have a purpose. I can’t tell you what that purpose is. It doesn’t matter. It’s the illusion that I have during that time that’s important. It’s healing. It’s rejuvenating.
The last six months, I made the wrong choice, and it got me stuck in my office 18 hours a day doing neither. I don’t have to walk and draw comics all day long. But there have to be time for both. Whatever I do in the future, it has to make way for these two things.
So, while the comic, whatever its form, may not always update on a weekly basis, so long as I’m alive it will be imminent. You may not get the next page next week, or you might get three! But you’ll get the next page. I’m working on it.
Epic of Sally: Responsibility originally appeared on Drawing Contraption on 2013/05/28.