Each weekend in December, I took an hour to reflect in writing on my creative process. Then just recently I read over these reflections and set a few creative goals for the coming year. I recommend doing this or something like it! A year is an arbitrary distinction but it can also be a useful one.
Some of those goals which I’m comfortable sharing here include exploring anonymity, having a comic published by a publisher (Are these two contradictory? Maybe!), creating a sequel to my Ley Lines comic, and making more collaborative comics. In 2015 I created collaborative works with Kimball Anderson and Warren Craghead. Both helped me create and think about comics in a new way.
Some of the other comics I made this year include:
I did less writing this year that I’ve sometimes done in the past. However I gained a lot from my writing exchange with Kimball Anderson, within that I’m most proud of my piece about Unfolding because it serves as a good record of me slowly coming to terms with and growing to understand that comic. I also liked the ‘group essay’ that I ‘curated’ (don’t love either of those terms) about manga influences for Comics Workbook Magazine #7. It makes a stab at getting towards some important ideas about the way we process early formative influences, pulling them close or casting them off or both at the same time. Finally I’m planning to write a quick best-of list in the coming days.
I also think it’s important to look back on and celebrate my creative failures over the year. This isn’t intended to be self-deprecating and I’m very proud of all the comics mentioned above but I also think it’s important to be honest about the power and beauty of failing. I only threw out one comic this year, a six page work about Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing that was my first attempt at making something for the Ley Lines series. It was unsuccessful because I simply told the (interesting) story of that work’s creation and then leapt with no elegance into a pedantic monologue about my views on the piece. In hindsight For Lives gets at some of the ideas Erased de Kooning led me to think about with more subtlety and elegance.
I also think my serialization of After the Fire might have been a failure. Points for effort, I guess, but in the end I feel that presenting the comic in that way was more an annoying barrier to reading than a means of communicating any coherent ideas. Finally, I tried this fall to write a full comic mentally, planning out text and images completely without writing anything down and then simply execute that preplanned work. It didn’t work! I started to draw the comic and soon realized it wasn’t any good!
Maybe I should have thrown out more work this year. Maybe I should have shared everything. Hard to know. I look forward to many failures and some successes next year. Thank you for reading this and for reading any of my work because it means a whole lot. Bye.