Under the Hood

Turning toward Seacritters updates on Patreon again, which means taking stock of the work I’ve done so far on this gargantuan project. If a monthly pledge is beyond your means, you can now buy a standalone collection of development posts! These include behind-the-scenes character sketches, musings and mutterings about how I’ve been staying motivated on this massive project, and goofy GIFs. Here’s a selection of images to whet your nautical whistle:

“I draw the path to walk”

A page from Laura Knetzger's comic with lush black and white forests. The text reads "My friends don't come so often when I call anymore. It's my fault. They're children, and I asked them to earn me money instead of just playing."

Still thinking about this short comic on creative practice by Laura Knetzger.

Last night I sat in a cloud of campfire smoke with a friend, talking non-stop about the balancing act of creative practice. He’s a printmaker and a bookbinder, two disciplines that require a great deal of precision and craft. We agreed that we want to encourage everyone to make art, to make music, to dance, to be unrepentantly bad at things, to understand that there is art we make because we are dedicated to a craft and art we make because it’s an expression of our innate human desire to play. How it isn’t contradictory to preach the necessity of both. Sometimes I do feel like a hypocrite, cheerleading people who believe they “can’t draw” while internally upbraiding my own ability to put pictures in boxes. But these things are not exclusive.

Lately I’ve needed the energy of 2010-era Alec Longstreth, delivering this lecture at The Center for Cartoon Studies. Alec—who had, at the time, sworn not to shave or cut his hair until he finished his graphic novel, Basewood—was a human lightning bolt. He embodied that spirit of craft and professionalism, but with a punky, DIY energy that made it all feel both radical and attainable. I was so fired up after hearing him give this talk that I actually pulled all-nighters (something I was loath to do even at the tender age of 19).

A page from Alec Longstreth's zine Your Comics Will Love You Back all about setting reasonable timelines for your work by tracking progress and number of pages finished over time.

This image of his encapsulates everything I’ve come to rely on in the process of drawing Seacritters. I’m not perfect—I still occasionally underestimate the time things will take and fall prey to distraction and despair—but I’m committed to this idea.

That summer at CCS I found myself surrounded by 36 other people who wanted to take making comics seriously. I had never been in a room with people who shared that dream. It’s hard to remember what that was like now, having worked in studios full of creative professionals and lived in cities lousy with cartoonists and traveled all over the world to huge conventions and tiny festivals crammed with passionate people hawking zines and graphic novels and minis. But it felt propulsive at the time, and right now I need the creative equivalent of jet fuel.

I need the reminder that there are other people out there touching the lightning bolt for the first time, and channeling sparks into the page.

Laid Low

I’m sick in bed the week of Thanksgiving, which is mostly bothering me because I was looking forward to using the holiday lull to finally get some work done.

This sounds bad, I know. But my family doesn’t even do Thanksgiving! My whole life I’ve made do with (and enjoyed, to be fair) turning up at other people’s celebrations. This year I’m starving for a secret pocket of time instead; one of those interstitial spaces that nurture creativity. I’ve been thinking of the days I’d bike to my studio in Portland having forgotten, in my freelancer’s fog, that it was a public holiday. The roads were empty. The traffic was quiet. No one was asking me to work, so I could actually work. And my work, of course, sits in the strange dip between play and purpose.

I wrote a little on Patreon this week about taking time off of penciling the graphic novel to design a new character. It has felt intolerable do this kind of thing when the spreadsheet looms and I’m constantly berating myself for how long this book has been taking and I want to see progress and I want to know how long it will take and the work of designing something new is anything but predictable.

And yet it IS predictable! I went from tentative sketches to a properly captured character in about three days! That’s barely any time at all!

Anyway, top of mind these days: how making a career of a creative practice does, eventually, impose a sense of constant dis-ease. The catch-22 of needing a sense of spaciousness in order to indulge the kind of experimentation and noodling that allows one to actually, y’know, create, but existing in a world full of deadlines and invoices that require foreknowledge of exactly how long something will take. There’s nothing new about this gripe, as evidenced by the very thoughtful and validating comments I got from other comics peers on that Patreon post, but I’m feeling it keenly right now.

At least I’m getting to draw a lot of outrageous lizards.

A dense sketchbook page full of goofy lizards.

The Switch

It’s happening again, the thing that happens when I get back to drawing after a slump.

The transition was abrupt. I woke up two weeks ago, went to the studio, queued up Neil Gaiman’s live reading of The Graveyard Book (my habitual comfort food of many years), cranked out four pages, rode my stationary bike for a half hour, and then took it upon myself to begin eating a whole head of lettuce every day to finally get ahead of our CSA box. The transition was shocking in its ease, especially when I hold it up beside weeks and weeks of disruption and self-judgement. I’ve been torn between dog-sitting gigs, two different living situations, visits from friends, heart procedures at the hospital with my dad, studio moves, traveling out of state for events, and passing obsessions with whittling, ultralight backpacking, and quilting scattered in between.

Writing it all out, I soften. Of course I’ve struggled to sink into the kind of flow state needed for real progress on my book. There’s been no consistency! No ritual! No routine! My poor little animal brain doesn’t know how to make sense of it all.

But now that the gears have clicked into place and I’m suddenly off to work every morning like clockwork, the other thing happens: I lock down. I become superstitious and squirrelly, prone to evading all well-meaning attempts at conversation from the people I love.

“How’d it go at the studio today?”

“What’s your page goal this week?”

“When are you heading to work?”

Too much scrutiny makes me fearful. The ease of transition is suspicious. How did this happen? Why did I magically wake up and find it simple to return to work on this day of all days? If I don’t understand it, anything might switch it off again. So I err on the side of secrecy, and remain a jealous guardian of my time.

It’s been two weeks of consistent creative flow. It’s working for now. I’ll bask in it for as long as it lasts.

Sail Cargo Resurgence

Back in 2016 I had the pleasure of working on a piece for The Nib about renewed efforts to bring wind-powered shipping to the international trade scene. I chatted with a handful of passionate, fascinating people and just got to scratch the surface of what was happening at the time. Somewhere in the years that followed, between multiple changes in hosting and ownership, the comic disappeared from The Nib’s archives, so I’m re-posting it here on my own site to make sure it stays up for future readers to investigate.

(I’m still mucking around with the best way to format this kind of thing for my own site, but this’ll do for now. You can use the arrows to scroll through thumbnails, or click the image to read in a bigger carousel viewer.)

Hourly Comic Day 2022

Hourly Comic Day is an annual tradition in the comics community where folks set out to draw a panel (or two, or three) for every hour they’re awake on February 1st.

It took me a couple weeks to get through finishing my pages from this year because it was a) hard to fit in inking and watercoloring and posting around caregiving, but also b) just exhausting to deal with emotionally. Still: I’m so glad I did it. In 2021 I was right on the cusp of uprooting my life in Portland to move down to Ojai and look after my dad. Now I get to have a record of what the rhythm of these days has been like, and I’m sure I’m going to appreciate it more and more as time goes on.

There’s more to say but I’ve been formatting and posting these pages in various ways all day as I spread them across my internet haunts and I am wiped, so I’ll just get on with sharing them. If you’re finding this through an RSS reader, be warned that the gallery won’t work! Ya gotta click through to read it easily. (Also! An accessible edition with panel by panel alt text is available here thanks to a collaboration with various folks from the Friends of the Space Gnome Discord server. Blessed be their name.)

You can read previous Hourly Comic Day installments at the following links: 2021, 201920182017201620152014201320122011.

Drawing Board Dispatch

Trying to get better about sharing these things across my different internet haunts, so! I just posted my second monthly update on Seacritters! over on Patreon. If character design notes and thoughts about capacity and sustainable pacing for making graphic novels and also goofy bespoke dancing gifs appeal to you, get thee hence. These updates are Patron-only from here on out to preserve goodwill with my publisher, but the first one is still free if you want to get a sense for what they’re like. The Data/Art/Ritual format is really working for me, since those do feel like the three pillars of my creative practice. I’m excited to leave myself this paper trail and see where it goes.

Also, y’know, possums.

A double-page sketchbook spread full of drawings of possums in blue line pencil.

(Also I’m noticing that it feels weird to post this kind of promotional, audience-addressing stuff on my own blog. I’m assuming an audience in writing this (“if you want to get a sense…” etc.) and realizing that I don’t often think that way when I write here. I’m writing to myself, about my own thoughts, and acknowledging in the back of my mind that some people might read those thoughts, but not actively addressing them when I write. Don’t have a solution to it, really, just thinkin’.)

Q&A: Comics for Social Good

Over on Patreon:

When I shared some process images from my voting rights comic for Oregon Humanities over the weekend, Katie left a comment saying “I really want to get into comics as activism, because it’s kind of the only skill I have to offer, but I’m not sure where to start”. I’m sure this is a common concern, especially among folks who are part of Patreon because Patrons tend to be oriented toward both creative practices and social good, which is why you’re some of my favorite people.

The post I wrote in reply to Katie’s questions covers pitching, payment, research, and interviews, plus links to folks doing great work at the intersection of art and activism. Hopefully it’ll be useful to any of you thinking about this stuff.

Also relevant: fellow contributor Sarah Mirk’s comic on how Multnomah County passed universal preschool last November is now live on the Oregon Humanities website! She’s such a wonderful visual reporter. Go give it a read.

A horizontal spread of illustrated people from Sarah Mirk's comic. There's a woman wearing a mask holding a sign that says "Tax the rich, people over profit!" and a man in a yellow shirt that says "Universal Preschool Now!" holding a coffee. He's saying "This is how a democracy has to work. If we have a good idea people are passionate about, the only thing we can do is organize ourselves."