I’ve been drawing cartoons all my life, but I’ve never actually done a comic strip — you know, the “newspaper funnies” four-panel sort of thing. That style is what I’ve always aspired to in the way that I draw, but… I dunno. I didn’t know how to write them, or something. It eluded me, so I did decades of other stuff in the meantime.
Well, at the start of this year I made myself a new sketchbook (many new projects start with me making a book of some kind), and I formatted it for a landscape, four-panel type comic strip.
I had the premise already in mind because I’d drawn a kind of prequel story for the Charlottetown Comics Club’s publication “Modus” last year. But this project had a couple of non-rules from the start:
- This comic strip was just for me.
- I wasn’t going to think at all about what I’d do with it. In fact, I was allowed to choose never to show it to anyone!
- I was going to do it entirely on paper — nothing digital. That was partly to save time, partly to remove the urge toward perfection that digital makes possible/imposes. Mostly, though, it was because I love just working with pens, pencils, and watercolour. This was going to be made during offline me-time. (Plus it would mean growing better at cartooning, since I couldn’t “fix it in post”.)
At Comics Club recently, Tyler clarified that the group wouldn’t be publishing anything together for this year’s zine fair; everyone was making their own thing. “So what are you making?”, he challenged me.
I knew immediately. And I managed to fill the last page of the sketchbook during my “Noodle & Doodle” session last Saturday, then went home and set about scanning all the pages. (Oof!)
This weekend, I manually imposed all those images into a printable saddle-stitch layout (if that doesn’t mean anything to you, I’ll just say that it was hard to do), and today I created a cover. Now I’ve got copies crawling out of my printer…
Maybe I shouldn’t get attached to achievements, but… this feels exciting, and damned good.