{"id":14454,"date":"2023-10-22T18:34:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-22T22:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2023\/10\/22\/goal-achieved-a-comic-strip\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:50:57","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:50:57","slug":"goal-achieved-a-comic-strip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2023\/10\/22\/goal-achieved-a-comic-strip\/","title":{"rendered":"Goal Achieved: A Comic Strip"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure class=\"post__image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-content\/uploads\/posts\/1873\/Marsholes-Cover-section-2.jpg.webp\" alt=\"Cartoon character sweeping the surface of Mars\" width=\"452\" height=\"452\"><\/figure>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been drawing cartoons all my life, but I&#8217;ve never actually done a comic strip &#8212; you know, the &#8220;newspaper funnies&#8221; four-panel sort of thing. That style is what I&#8217;ve always aspired to in the way that I draw, but&#8230; I dunno. I didn&#8217;t know how to write them, or something. It eluded me, so I did decades of other stuff in the meantime.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>I had the premise already in mind because I&#8217;d drawn a kind of prequel story for the Charlottetown Comics Club&#8217;s publication &#8220;Modus&#8221; last year. But this project had a couple of non-rules from the start:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This comic strip was <em>just for me<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>I wasn&#8217;t going to think at all about what I&#8217;d do with it. In fact, I was allowed to choose never to show it to anyone!<\/li>\n<li>I was going to do it entirely on paper &#8212; 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&#8217;t &#8220;fix it in post&#8221;.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>At Comics Club recently, <a href=\"https:\/\/linktr.ee\/clavcity\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Tyler<\/a> clarified that the group wouldn&#8217;t be publishing anything together for this year&#8217;s zine fair; everyone was making their own thing. &#8220;So what are you making?&#8221;, he challenged me.<\/p>\n<p>I knew immediately. And I managed to fill the last page of the sketchbook during my &#8220;Noodle &amp; Doodle&#8221; session last Saturday, then went home and set about scanning all the pages. (Oof!)<\/p>\n<p>This weekend, I manually imposed all those images into a printable saddle-stitch layout (if that doesn&#8217;t mean anything to you, I&#8217;ll just say that it was <em>hard to do<\/em>), and today I created a cover. Now I&#8217;ve got copies crawling out of my printer&#8230;<\/p>\n<figure class=\"post__image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-content\/uploads\/posts\/1873\/printingMarsholes.jpg.webp\" alt=\"Photo: Printing my comic strip book\" width=\"1000\" height=\"1000\"><\/figure>\n<p>Maybe I shouldn&#8217;t get attached to achievements, but&#8230; this feels exciting, and damned good.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jordanbeaulieu.com\/Charlottetown-Zine-Fest\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Charlottetown Zine Fest takes place on November 4, 2023 at the Charlottetown Library Learning Centre<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been drawing cartoons all my life, but I&#8217;ve never actually done a comic strip &#8212; you know, the &#8220;newspaper funnies&#8221; four-panel sort of thing. That style is what I&#8217;ve always aspired to in the way that I draw, but&#8230; I dunno. I didn&#8217;t know how to write them, or something. It eluded me, so [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}