Ley Lines: Recapitulation, L Nichols
Summer Travel Zine 2018, Cathy G. Johnson
Four Years Part One, Kevin Czap
Rumbling Chapter 1-2, Kevin Huizenga
An Untamed State, Roxane Gay
An Abundance of Katherines, John Green
Lethal White, Robert Galbraith
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This post is late, because I’ve been deep into new projects, trying to pump out pages every day. But September was a time of building. I wrote and drew in my sketchbook. I made plans for the future. I tried to read for hours at a time instead of in twenty minute bursts.
I also went to SPX, where I was so flattered by people buying my work and so grateful to spend time with friends who I don’t see often enough. Things I thought about and talked about at the convention include:
- Making conventions a more pleasurable experience for me (I left early on Sunday, even though part of me wanted to stay)
- Alternatives to conventions, both for creators and for readers
- Creating positive communal experiences that involve comics
- Taking a day job as a given, instead of as an obstacle to be overcome, and what this change in mindset might unlock logistically and creatively.
- Artists in the past who might seem to have lived off their work, but who in fact relied on a spouse, or inherited income, or some other source of wealth.
- Building community
- Building a life that allows time for art
- Drawing on the train
- Collecting old work, and how the ideal size for pamphlets and for books might be very different
- Writing about or documenting your process versus focusing on new work
I often get a strange feeling when I’m in a public space and I see someone holding a copy of a comic I’ve made. I had assumed this feeling might go away, but it hasn’t yet. As I look at the comic, I am thrown in the past. I think about how the original drawings are tucked in a closet somewhere and how those drawings are different from the final, printed work. I think about drawing that comic, about where I was and how I felt when I made it. Maybe I think about how I feel different now. It’s a strange feeling, but it’s sort of nice.