The Red Carnival

I was having trouble making comics. Or more specifically… finishing comics. I used to think that ideas were the hard part of creating. Maybe some misguided adults told me as much in my younger drawing days. But that’s far from the true challenge. Ideas are easy. Because they take so little effort. Finishing something. That is the true challenge.

I have so many comic ideas. And new ideas are fresh and tempting but they are also not tangible. Barely real. So I needed a way to finish a comic to show my idea as reality. Herein was the problem.

I have two comic projects swirling in that abyss known as perfectionism (aka development hell). A place where I draw page one and then page two and I look back at page one and realise the new skills I learned with page two should really be applied to page one… and… well, yeah… it’s a trap. So in an effort to get something finished I decided to choose one of my ideas that I liked but wasn’t immensely precious about and to just do it.

So I set myself a deadline. To be fair, even knuckling down on the specifics of the deadline parameters was its own challenge. It’s evolved (and evolving as the process goes on) but has become essentially: 8 hours per page. That’s layout, drawing, refining, letters and colouring. The writing is done in any spare moment I can carve in my day to day, so it’s not part of that total. But some writing and refinement to the story is done on the fly.

And that’s it. 8 hours per page, then I push it out beyond my reach. Is it imperfect? Yes. Is it technically done? Yes! Is it a path to improvement, reward and motivation for the next issue!? Absolutely. So that’s where I am. Two issues deep in a journey that was so daunting. But already I’ve improved so much both as a writer and an artist. And I have the benefit of a piece to hand over to a reader and say, “What did you like? What was rubbish? etc” And that is worth more than I realised.

So hopefully you’ll come along on this journey, and read my comics and let me know what you think. These ideas have spent too long swirling in my chaotic brain and it’s about time I learned if they are actually worth the read!