Blah!

4/20/05 4:38 PM

Well, I got the day off, my wife is working, and I've found myself with a little time to ramble on in text form. I haven't worked much on my comics this week. It would be easy of me to blame this on laziness, except I have been everything but lazy. Sometimes you got to spend a little time paying attention to the daily things you do. Okay, that's BS too. The truth is, I'm in that brief suspended moment that exists immediately before the release of a video game I want. My old games look old, the new game looks new, and all I actually feel like doing is playing the new game, except, it isn't for sale yet. The agony! Then I have to stop and note that if this is the worst of my worries, then life is good. My wife is great (happy birthday, babe). My job brings a little money, and a little sense of accomplishment, since I get to be paid to use the aesthetic problem-solving portion of my brain. My lifestyle is in a state that I've wanted it to be, possibly since I started plotting it at the age of eight. Goals are set, and obtained with the usual effort. It's been a good year, and I am content.

It sucks.

There is absolutely nothing worse for the production of art than contentment. Observe history: The best works of art always come from a time and a place and a people who are undergoing strife. DTF has been strangled at my sheer lack of angst, as it was built to harness that very energy. The Illuminated Bosh however has turned out to be my favorite project. I can rapid fire a gag for a quick fix on a creative output withdrawal with that little strip—even when I don't feel like devoting free time to my work. I may obsess, but my obsessions are subject to a constant state of change of focus. It's because of this that the stories of The Floating World will be slow in development. Its process is not a casual one, and it involves a lot of pre-planning and postproduction reflection. Currently, I believe I aim for “breathtaking” and achieve “hmm, cool, I guess.” The process, however, is designed to improve that over a short period of time. It's an artistic exercise program. I spend some time lifting the heavy weights of TFW, and then I go back and DTF looks like light lifting. Bosh is a similar exercise, though focused on the writing of the gag and not the art. Right now, the gags are little more than a “heh”, but over an extended period under the highly restricted format, that one concentrated area of exercise will improve.

About that reflection. Page one on TFW has brought a lot of it. It's a normal thing as I begin a project. I actually take a step into something and then I get a better view of how it's going to go. I can compare and contrast my expectations vs. the actual experience. I've made many observation on the nature of the visual language already.(source: Neil Cohn ) For one, I thought that the grammar would come naturally to me. I've been creating scenarios as well as images my whole life, so I thought the crossing of the two would be a smooth marriage. It seems that in actual practice, at first, my grammar is a bit off. My voice here comes off to me as that of a foreigner with a thick accent. The arrangements of images in the comic, from one panel to the other are vital in this project. I need to maintain a connection between them. I'm projecting it might be useful to have more than a single event going on. When my plot for a page (the actual written plot for page two) is along the lines of, “He walks thru the woods,” I might want to add other activity, because walking through the woods on it's own is awfully challenging to make interesting. I have to get into detail about what happens during this walk, however mundane it's intended to be. The ordering of events is slightly more complex than I had anticipated, but I can see itself clearing up and my syntax improving relatively rapidly.