Little Leagues #1, Simon Moreton
Caryatid, Daryl Seitchik
Pretending is Lying, Dominique Goblet
Dyaa, Yvan Alagbe
Blammo #10, Noah Van Sciver
Some Trick, Helen DeWitt
Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, ed. Barbara Haskell
Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe [the 1977 book that includes several long commentaries from O’Keeffe about her work]
My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, ed. Sarah Greenough
Some Memories of Drawings, Georgia O’Keeffe
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I finished a new 70 page story this month. Sort of. I did most of the drawing, most of the writing, and most of the sequencing. It’s about Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Now I’m putting on the finishing touches, before I store it away in a drawer for a few months.
I’m currently reading A Writer’s Diary, excerpts of Virginia Woolfe’s diary first published soon after her death (not on the list above, because I haven’t finished it). It’s inspiring for several reasons, including: she wrote one book per year, at a rate of 100-200 words per day (I roughly translate this to 1-2 pages of comics); she didn’t feel truly confident in her writing until during/after Mrs. Dalloway, around age 40; she is regularly calculating how long each book will take her, and usually underestimates; she revises her work after putting it aside for a period of time; and her print runs at least for her early books were in the low thousands, not so far from the print run for a comic. I relate to or feel comfort in these things. Here’s an interesting quote:
“I’m a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I don’t enjoy writing. Yet writing is always difficult.”
My own perspective is that a better metaphor might be walking a new path, but with a map you’ve used before. You know the map is reliable, since it’s previously gotten you to your destination. But the scenery is not familiar as you walk, so you can’t help but wonder if this one path might have been mapped incorrectly, or if you’re reading the map wrong.
I also finished serializing a story for 30 Days of Comics. It’s probably easiest to read on Twitter, though I’ll hopefully share it in a more readable format and perhaps print it in next year’s Yearly as well.