Old School Revisitation
There is this group of comics that I drew when I was twenty-four, that I always think about revisiting.
And I've finally started, only this time with my left hand (because my left hand lines seems to match these stories a little better than my right hand lines).
When I sat down to draw these comics ten years ago I thought of myself as a man on a mission. I was frustrated by so much of the comic work that I saw at the time. It felt so tortured and stiff. All I saw were these overworked drawings where nothing was left to chance. It sickened me. I thought everyone was holding their pens too tight.
I wanted to be the Jack Kerouac of comics and just let that ink spatter out. Draw fast, draw faster, don't stop to think, just get it down on the page.
And also, I firmly believed that I was doomed to produce shit in the beginning, so just produce the shit, get it out of the way, and don't worry about it. The next comic, whatever it is, will be better.
I still agree with a lot of those ideas (a lot of cartoonists hold their pens pretty tightly), but there are some flaws in the comics that I produced back then that kind of make them unpublishable. The main problem being that there are just too few panels per page. One of the ideas I had in my righteous head was that readers don't really look close enough at the art, and basically they look at a page and don't even see the drawings. Solution: big simple drawings that they have to pay attention to.
Unfortunately, this results in thirty panels taking up twenty pages. Which is fine, until you start figuring out how to print it.
So I have this pile of comics which I really like.
And I've constantly thought about redrawing them (with more panels per page). But you're not supposed to look back.
But I do look back.
And I've finally started, only this time with my left hand (because my left hand lines seems to match these stories a little better than my right hand lines).
When I sat down to draw these comics ten years ago I thought of myself as a man on a mission. I was frustrated by so much of the comic work that I saw at the time. It felt so tortured and stiff. All I saw were these overworked drawings where nothing was left to chance. It sickened me. I thought everyone was holding their pens too tight.
I wanted to be the Jack Kerouac of comics and just let that ink spatter out. Draw fast, draw faster, don't stop to think, just get it down on the page.
And also, I firmly believed that I was doomed to produce shit in the beginning, so just produce the shit, get it out of the way, and don't worry about it. The next comic, whatever it is, will be better.
I still agree with a lot of those ideas (a lot of cartoonists hold their pens pretty tightly), but there are some flaws in the comics that I produced back then that kind of make them unpublishable. The main problem being that there are just too few panels per page. One of the ideas I had in my righteous head was that readers don't really look close enough at the art, and basically they look at a page and don't even see the drawings. Solution: big simple drawings that they have to pay attention to.
Unfortunately, this results in thirty panels taking up twenty pages. Which is fine, until you start figuring out how to print it.
So I have this pile of comics which I really like.
And I've constantly thought about redrawing them (with more panels per page). But you're not supposed to look back.
But I do look back.
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