If you follow my work, you might know that I tend to produce several drafts of a project, letting a few months pass between each draft so that I can see the piece with fresh eyes. An unremarkable act in prose writing, I think, but a little unusual for comics. I think this approach works well for me, and it means that I have two or even three proejcts in progress at any time.
Right now I’m working on seven different comics. This is a bit unreasonable and it seems like an obvious reflection of my anxiety about Everything and my consequential inability to focus or be patient.
However, this is also because I’ve been going back and revising several older comics. This is generally seen as a bad idea; you’re supposed to recognize that you did the best you could on the project at that time, and move on, to avoid a recursive loop of changing old work again and again. So maybe this is a waste of my time. Maybe it’s also an attempt to feel productive even when I’m not making new work.
I’m not redrawing old comics from scratch, but rather revising them for potential book-length projects that I think can read either as thematically connected short stories or as a single, loose narrative. Alice Munro and Italo Calvino as always my north stars for this approach. I should probably seek out other writers who work this way, because I’m sure they exist. It’s an interesting challenge, returning to old ways of working and trying to bring clarity and complexity to the ideas I was working towards at the time.
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Can’t and Won’t, Lydia Davis (reread)
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin (reread)
The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness, Sarah Ramey