It is hard to believe that this chapter may very well be the last time I draw her for a very long time if not forever.

My plan for the day turned out to be a little too ambitious after all, but TSG pages are coming along smoothly.

Today's background listening included:

• Bret Easton Ellis interviews Paul Schrader — Really great. I particularly love the few Pauline Kael anecdotes Schrader shares. Kael is grossly overrated in my opinion, and I say this having enjoyed a number of her books. She did good to bring actual critical criticism to the field, but neither her taste nor how she expressed it really jive with me.

• TRACKMARKS by Hamed Sinno — Sinno, who is one of the most talented and creative people I know, was on a train in London when it got held up because a man on the tracks in what was apparently a suicide attempt. Folks on the train started to get irritated, and that irritation soon ballooned into rage, directed squarely at the distressed man who messed up their schedules. Hamed was wise enough to record this vocalized rage and weave it into a powerful song together with lyrics drawn entirely from advertising slogans seen on the London Underground. 👌

#journal #work #comix #tsg #resistdystopia #radar

I'm doing something a little different with the final chapter of THE SOLAR GRID in that I'm adopting something of an assembly line approach to working it, despite my being the only person actually working on it (This is potentially somewhat ironic given the Luddite segments featured in the previous two).

I've basically divided the chapter into three chunks of 12 pages, tackling one chunk at a time. I've done all the panel layouts for the first chunk, now onto filling them with actual characters and scenes, first in pencils, then in inks.

What this means is that each chunk, or pile rather, gets three passes before moving on to the next: first pass for laying out panels (based entirely on the thumbnails), second pass for doing the actual drawings in pencil, third pass for inking everything up. Dividing the work up this way makes it seem more manageable somehow, less daunting.

I quite like looking at the pages at this stage, with just the empty panels laid out. Pages stripped to the musicality of their compositions.

#work #comix #tsg #ResistDystopia

Final TSG thumbs clock in at 36 pages and there ain't no other way about it. There are four pages worth that maybe aren't wholly relevant to the plot, but they provide good narrative flow, add much richness to the story, and induce it with “real-world info”, or non-fiction if you like, which I think is part and parcel of the function of any good work of fiction. Cutting those 4 pages would reduce my workload by maybe 12 days, a gain that is not at all worth all the richness that would be lost.

36 pages means I've got a rough estimate of about 108 days of work ahead of me before bringing THE SOLAR GRID to a close. Some pages I might be able to dash off quicker than I anticipate, others employ techniques I have yet to fully utilize for comix and as such are a bit more difficult to accurately assign production time, but 3 days per page seems to me like a reasonable enough average.

Will take the long weekend to get my ducks in order; meal prep, organize tools, and ready the workspace. It's the meal prepping though that'll take up the bulk of the next few days. I find that I work best when I don't have to think about food or anything else aside from the work at hand. Especially essential when you're in it for the long haul.

#tsg #work #comix

Made it past the 20-page mark on latest TSG thumbs and still plenty of story to tell. It is evident that capping this chapter at 20 is impossible if I want to do it any justice, and do it justice I must. Will try to see if I can close it at 30.

Mind turned to mush, I find this stage of comix-making to be the most mentally-draining. It isn't the most labor-intensive, but it requires the most figuring out.

Sent off a lot of hi-res scans to the folks overseeing the Italy exhibition which includes much never-before seen process stuff. Pretty sure it wasn't what they expected, pretty sure they think I'm demented.

#journal #work #comix #tsg

Knowing that very soon the work at hand will involve long stretches at the drawing table, I'm taking advantage of the ease of mobility of the scripting/thumbnail stage of TSG's grand finale by taking my work to bars and cafe-like places. An added, albeit unnecessary expense, but important for my sanity.

Still haven't solved how to fit the thing into 20ish pages, but I'm hoping I'll get there soon enough.

#work #comix #tsg

I'm grateful for all my readers, but especially grateful to international readers. The high price point of each print issue of THE SOLAR GRID is not at all lost on me (an unfortunate consequence of the considerably limited print run we can muster), a price point that is even compounded when you factor international shipping into the equation. And I feel more grateful to those who, after making an initial order of the first couple issues, end up coming back for more.

I'm generally aware that sales of a thing aren't always an indication that you're doing something right. So many things often factor into why a thing sells well; market penetration, aggressive advertising, or straight up name recognition, or in most cases all three. But in our very small, very humble, very independent effort, sales are a very good indication, especially when direct to the reader and especially when the reader feels they must let you know how much they appreciate what you're doing.

From the bottom of my heart, I thank you.

#work #comix #tsg

Latest digital TSG has dropped. Print forthcoming.

#work #comix #tsg

Original artboards for THE SOLAR GRID to date.

One more chapter left and I'm done.

#work #comix #tsg

A couple hours after the sense of release/relief following the completion of the TSG chapter that precedes the very last, I started to think about the work ahead: The next and final chapter in THE SOLAR GRID.

According to script and thumbs, the last chapter is a 50-page beast. Between pencils, inks, and letters, we're looking at an average of 3 days per page, and that's if I work fast and assuming no pages require color, but there are in fact quite a few that do. In fact in fact, some even require what might best be described as ill-advised mixed media madness that I'm not entirely sure I can adequately assess the time they would need to make before trying to work on one or two such pages first. Which means we can be sure that 3 pages a day is way too optimistic and things will probably not work out that way. But even if we were to make use of this ludicrously optimistic calculation, we would be looking at 150 days of work. Five months basically, and that's if I work weekends and take on no other projects whatsoever, however small.

This is a terribly depressing realization and wholly unrealistic. I can't not have this chapter finished before year's end, I just can't. I will kill myself. The only logical thing to do at this point would be to go back to script and thumbs, see if there's anything I can cut or at least compress. And perhaps do without any unpredictable visual experiments that could potentially multiply execution time, no matter how strong the creative itch is. I really shouldn't spend more than three months on the thing, so that means I need to see if I can bring the page-count down to 30. That's a lot of cutting and compressing.

Shit.

On a completely different note, I have done absolutely nothing towards this week's newsletter which typically goes out every other Friday at 11:59 pm. It is now 9:45 pm.

Fml.

#journal #comix #tsg

Ooof.

Okay, off to New York for a few days.

#journal #tsg