As if last time wasn’t enough, I have now decided to review, for my benefit and yours, the variety of comics-related activities which with which I have been engaged throughout 2011.
My biggest project was the completion of chapters 3, 4 and 5 of Sexbuzz, a poorly titled science fiction comic that will be completed in 2012 at a total count of seven chapters and, per my best guess, around 180 pages. People started talking a little about Sexbuzz this year as well, which was incredibly encouraging. I’m about 11 pages into chapter 6 now, so I would guess that you’ll be seeing that sometime in February. I’m starting to think a little more about the work as a whole as well, which I expect will take up even more of my head space in the months to come.
I also did a number of shorter comics in between chapters of Sexbuzz. I think that my favorite was A Beautiful March Day, which I adapted from a story of the same name by Italo Calvino (standing on the shoulders of giants and all that). I also drew about story called Empty about storytelling and real life fiction as well as two issues of a comic written by Brian John Mitchell about guy-who-invented-Conan Robert E. Howard. I drew those in pencil and I think they came out well visually. Finally, I drew one comic a day throughout the month of November along with a number of other cartoonists as coordinated by Derik Badman.
I didn’t do too much writing about comics this year, except one article about Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game and sports manga, originally produced as part of the Moveable Manga Feast hosted by The Panelists. I’d like to do more writing, but there are only so many hours in the day, I guess. Drawing comics has to come first.
Overall, though, it was a good year for this comic book stuff. I mean, I drew about 150 pages of comics this year, give or take. I can live with that. I regularly felt that I wasn’t drawing enough, and that the work I was producing wasn’t good enough. Not to be self-deprecating, but I really do think that’s where I want to be. I want to stay excited about comics, and I want to keep pushing myself to do better workt. I have a hard time talking intelligently about my own work, and it feels a little masturbatory to do it too much, so let’s cut this off here. I’ll just end by saying that I want to very seriously thank anyone who has taken the time to read my comics. I appreciate it.