2022 Breakdown!
What were my strategies for making comics in 2022? Did they work? What did I even do this year? Let's take a look!
Preamble
Every single January, I look back on the previous year and wonder if anything I did to make sure I was doing anything worked. It was much easier when I was in my 20s and could live off of trash pizza and energy drinks to hit a twice weekly deadline, but now that I’m edging closer and closer to 40 and have other people’s schedules to juggle alongside my own (hey there, fellow parents!), the scope of what I can do without completely destroying my health has shrunk pretty significantly.
When the pandemic hit, I was optimistic about being able to stay on track after a pretty great few months of the new year, only to be hit with a double-whammy; my kid doing distance learning (which then turned into a year of home schooling because she did not do well with distance learning) at around the same time my old work laptop became a very expensive brick. Money was tight because of, well, you know how the early pandemic was, which meant that I could not afford to replace my work computer until late back to school sales in September of 2021.
My new machine has taken a little bit of time to get used to, and believe me when I say it’s not perfect—it doesn’t measure up to my old laptop in a number of ways, but we can blame the graphic card shortage for that, among other things. I also had a lot of trouble making adjustments switching over to windows 10 when it came compatibility concerning obscure programs that are essential to my workflow, like Paint Tool SAI.
What I’m saying that that I feel like I did less this year, even though I very measurably did more this past year than the two before it. I think part of that is because when this comic was new, I was putting out something like 80 pages per year, and this year I managed to put out 24 pages total for The End. I think the key going forwards is going to be reminding myself that I didn’t just work on The End this past year.
The End
I only managed to put out 24 pages of The End this year, and I started posting those new pages in May. Part of that was because we hit a bit of a stumbling-block mapping out the next two chapters, but part of that was also me not really planning for the summer, when I would have to go from full time comic making to full time stay-at-home-dad. I did a pretty big effort to keep at it, but threw in the towel and promised to be back in September a few weeks in.
While that did slow me down quite a bit, I have to admit that I do owe the keeping on track that I did manage to do was largely because I took up the habit of bullet journaling—not the weird scrapbookish bougie kind, but the ADHD is making staying on top of shit hard kind. Even if you don’t take up full bullet journaling, I want you to take a look at this:
The above image is a crop of a simple chart I made so I could have a visual representation of how I was doing with the chapters I was working on. As you can see, I didn’t start tracking this at the same time I started making or posting new pages, but taking 15 minutes after breakfast to pull out my highlighters and update where each page I was currently working on was at in my process was both satisfying AND motivational. People like to see numbers go up, boxes get checked off and done tasks get crossed out; filling these little graph cubes really helped keep me in perspective.
In 2023, I plan to continue this practice. I admit that towards the end of October, I completely fell out of this habit. As I sit down this week to finish up the last three pages in this batch and queue them, I’ve dusted my journal off, updated the boxes I forgot to fill in and am excited to keep this habit going for as long as I can. I don’t want to set up unreasonable expectations, but ideally I’d very much like to keep up on this until the summer break.
STRIKE THE EARTH!
STRIKE THE EARTH! was a 24-Hour comic I started and mostly finished a couple years before my kid was born. I always wanted to finish it, but it kept getting shuffled to the bottom of my To-Do pile in favour of other things. It has haunted me for years, but I knew that if I wanted to finish it, I was going to have to photograph it and completely re-ink, re-draw, re-letter and remaster most or all of it. It felt like a huge undertaking, and the fact that general conversation and interest in Dwarf Fortress in the spaces I am in online had dropped off almost completely over the years.
That all changed in November with the rapidly approaching release of the Steam version of the game. I basically went into a Fey Mood and blitzed through redoing the whole thing in about a month.
You can read it here on substack in 8 parts. Each part links the previous and next batches, and I’m extremely happy to have finally completed it!
I don’t know if I would have been able to complete it as quickly or as nice looking as it turned out if it hadn’t been for the next topic I wanted to talk about…
Remastering Old Pages for e-books!
So, when I was a bit stumped for how to start Chapter 21, I wasn’t just sitting on my thumbs. I started to remaster old pages for ebooks. What started as small fixes and colour correction ended up branching out enough that it became a much larger task.
When the comic was new, I was very much into coloured line art, and on top of that, the monitor I was using was a little washed out so thinds looked brighter for me than for people reading it. Between the darkness issues and the coloured lineart, most of the first ten chapters get a little blurry because there is no real contrast anywhere, not even when it came to line art. I haven’t released the first one yet, but I do want to show off the kind of changes I’m talking about, because I’m really happy with them!
The plan is to get the first 5 e-books cleaned up and filled with bonus stuff, and then work on catching up to where I am in real-time. The further in I get, the lees work it should be.
The Frivolous Art I (mostly) Did Not Have Time For
For the most part, I did not have time for frivolous art. Most of the non-comic art I did do was making fake regional variant Pokemon based on my daughter’s requests. I also snapped up Rebelle 2—a program that boast imitating the look and feel of real wet media— when it was on sale, and did a quick test sketch and then a larger illustration of Sam and Max. I also did a new author’s art for the back of the e-books. This is already getting pretty long, so I’m going to throw them all into a gallery below:
In 2023, I desperately want to say that I will make time to do more personal art and make more things with the different media types in Rebelle, but I also know that this is the one thing I have the most trouble sticking to—if I’m already drawing, why not be making comics, right? I think I’m going to hold myself to finishing one self-indulgent piece of art a month, which is a reasonable place to start.
Plans For 2023
In short, my plans for 2023 are:
One piece of self-indulgent art a month.
Post often here on substack!
Keep on keeping on making new comic pages for The End.
Finish up all of the ebooks!
If you want updates on how that journey is going and a peek into my process as I attempt to stay on top of things, subscribing here on substack is a really great way to do that! Happy New Year!