blocks

[egypturnash]

Absinthe.

I need to get started on chapter 2 again. I need to stop worrying and throw away my now-passed self-imposed deadline of having it pencilled by the end of this month - with three pages pencilled this is clearly not going to happen.

Nick reminded me that Absinthe should be fun, that we made a pact that we'd quit doing it as soon as it stopped being fun. I don't want to stop doing it; I like doing it - but I'm sitting here looking at the huge pile of work between me and starting to release chapter 2, never mind finishing it, and I just kinda curl up and slither away and do something else. Commissions as my porny alter-ego, reading, travel, anything but just standing at my desk and drawing.

Now, there are clearly things that I need to do before I can get parts of this done - I need to nail down the design of Lexy and her droogs before I can draw the middle part of the chapter, I need to wind myself up to doing what I tend to label the "Where's Waldo" spread before that*. But there's a lot of chapter 2 that rests entirely on already-established designs. And I'm happy with the thumbnails for the whole thing.

I just gotta quit worrying about it, quit thinking about the whole project and just worry about the immediate detail of picking a page and pencilling it. And after 3-4 more are pencilled, about spending time in Illustrator as well. It's a long process and it's not going to get any shorter if I don't work at it in tiny steps.

And then I have the required distraction of readying myself for my first gig as an invited, paid-for guest at a con in... geeze, a couple days more than a week from now. I think I begin to see why Dave Sim quit going to cons after a certain point; they're awesome when they go well, but they interrupt rhythms, they're time that's just not spent turning blank paper into pages of story.

Comments

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

I think Sim just got tired of having to wear a raincoat for when women and people who think women are cool spit on him.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Nah, he quit doing cons way before he started doing the bugfuck "women are parasites of divine male essence" thing. Like during High Society I think.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, and here's the asterisk. Or perhaps the asterix. I think one of the influences I'm exposing in the crazy city drawings, and even more in the busy Expo scenes of chapter 2, is Uderzo, artist of Asterix the Gaul. An early favorite, I had a dozen albums of that in my formative years and it's still good stuff to me even now. I think some part of me is trying to make Wormwood and the Skylands feel as solid and well-referenced as his Rome and Gaul are, and as bustling and lively - never full of gags just full of cartoony people going about their own business, while the protagonists bumble through their story.

[relee.livejournal.com]

So you have some characters you haven't solidified the design on, and you want to draw porn rather than work on the comic. Would you be slaughtering the birds with a minimum of stones by drawing porn of these characters, and testing out various ideas you have for their designs, before picking one to use on the official comic?

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

Here's the thing; while you want it to be -fun- to be doing Absinthe, a project like that, especially one you've invested so much of yourself into just isn't going to be -fun- to do all the time. Some of it will be work and some of that work will be tedious. That's what separates the dos from the don'ts. I made it as a do on Fite but am wallowing a little in Tamino. It's not because Tamino isn't fun but if you lose that momentum for even a little bit, it's really hard to climb back on. I think Absinthe is easily worth looking past the 'fun' aspect of this and really tackling it as both a skill and notoriety builder. It's a hell of a web comic, acres beyond most of what's out there. I'd also say you've definitely grown by doing it and that doing it has led you, perhaps, into the whole PG thing.