Last fall I enjoyed documenting my progress here as I revised and eventually completed a draft of a long comic. I’m looking at that draft again, and as usual I can now clearly see that some parts are good and other parts still need significant work. So I thought I’d do a bit more writing as I figure out what comes next.
I always wonder how much to say about work in progress. I think it’s more interesting to be specific, but I am also aware of the risk that talking too much about current work will divert some energy better directed into the work itself.
Anyways. The comic I’m worked on is called And One Night More. It was excerpted in Yearly 2023. It’s about the Thousand and One Nights, less the stories themselves than the story of the stories. That is, how the Nights came to be translated and retranslated, the story of the storytellers.
I regularly feel frustrated or annoyed at various points as I’m working on a comic, as I assume most people do. I’ve thought a lot over the years about how to make those feelings productive, what they might signal about what to do next with a project, and of course how to move past them since they’re not especially pleasant. As I reread my draft of AONM, I felt frustrated and annoyed for two reasons.
First, there’s the colors. Despite revising them endlessly, my visceral reaction is that they’re not quite right. This is annoying because I don’t know how to fix them, and because the actual work of fixing them will be very tedious (making similar but not exactly the same changes across many pages).
Second, some of the drawings aren’t very good. I’ll need to redraw a number of panels, some entire pages. One explicit goal with this comic was to draw freely, to create images that function in part as markmaking. Sometimes I succeeded but sometimes I used that goal as an excuse to be lazy. What’s the difference between a sloppily illegible drawing and a gracefully loose drawing? You know it when you see it, of course. At least with several months distance.
Then, as I’ve mentioned, there’s my broad sense that something isn’t right here. That some significant structural changes might be needed. Maybe this is a third frustration, but it feels more like a broader truth looming in the distance. Hm…
