Just so’s it doesn’t seem so much like I’m not posting drawings anymore, here’s a recent pic. I’m also still working on my Ain’t No Power comics, but taking a minute to step back and think about it some more. There’s something nice about diving straight into a new full-length story, but there’s also something appealing about catching my breath for a minute and taking some time to let the story develop.

It’s interesting – creating Troop 142 was such a rush. I’d gotten the story thought out enough in my head, that I was able to just power on through, writing and drawing the whole thing in a relatively short period of time. It’s made me realize how precious that sort of momentum is. It’s not easy to create. I don’t think it’s possible for me to operate at that level on a constant basis.

So, I’m figuring, Troop 142 is about to drop, maybe I should pause and try a couple of different things for a few months. I’m going to be doing a ton of traveling in the Fall, going to all sorts of cons. Maybe I should just enjoy the downtime.

I had a great conversation with Jessica Abel about writing, storytelling, and teaching comics, posted over at The Comics Journal.

We talked about a lot of interesting things, but one topic that stood out for me was the concept of “teaching” writing, and the prejudice out there against the idea. It seems like it’s more acceptable that the craft of drawing can be taught, but the craft of storytelling cannot. I get the sense, and can be guilty of this myself, that people think writing is more some “magical” thing that either someone can either do naturally or not at all.

I understand intellectually that there’s a difference between learning tools to write and having a “voice”. Presumably the voice is the part you can’t teach. Or, if you can, you can only help someone “find their voice”. I don’t know… obviously I don’t teach, so I don’t really have much first-hand experience. Either way, I was glad to get into this with Jessica and hear her ideas about this topic.

Here’s a quick clip at the beginning:

Drawing some of the Scouts in the foreground:

More progress:

Drawing more Scouts, with embarrassing Meatloaf soundtrack:

Once I finished inking, I scanned it:

Here is is after I finished things up in Photoshop:

And here are a few details:

Four new Troop 142 pages posted. I love the word “wuss”. Is it regional to the New York area, or is it widely used? I used it around my Scottish Uncle once, and always thought it was amusing how he pronounced it (woose, like “Moose”) with his thick accent.

In other news, Troop 142 #4 got a mixed-to-good write-up over at The Comics Reporter. Obviously I wish the review had been 100% totally positive, as Tom Spurgeon is one of my favorite writers about comics, but I’m still psyched to get to read his response to the book. And, he’s not wrong about some of the criticisms he made, especially that scene where the Dad’s discuss Scouts and atheism. It felt clumsy when I wrote it, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt totally confident about it.

Having wobbly scenes like this go out into the world is one of the big downsides to my approach to writing combined with how I’m releasing the pages (online and in print) as I finish them. I’m certainly look forward to the day I start editing/revising this thing as a whole.

Watched this movie last night. What starts off as a pretty interesting documentary about the relative value of art, sort of starts to devolve into a story about whether or not the little girl is actually the one painting the paintings, or if it’s a hoax. I give the filmmaker credit for including material showing his own inner conflict about pursuing the hoax storyline, and generally showing us that he wishes he could believe that it was all the little girl. There’s definitely food for thought there, but in the end I kind of wish that he’d chosen not to release his movie, since it became more about the mystery, and less about modern art. It’s just one more layer of scrutiny into this little girl’s life.

I was thinking though, that a more interesting question than simply “did the girl do the paintings?”, is the question of “why would it make the paintings any less valuable if they weren’t painted by a four year old?”. Whether or not she painted them, don’t the actual paintings themselves remain the same? What gives them value?

This does get addressed, I’ll admit. I just wish the film could have remained tightly focused in this way. One scene I really liked was when the gallery owner who sells the paintings, who is a photorealist painter himself, speaks of his own frustrations in an art world that deems his work, which takes him months, less valuable than an abstract painting which took far less time. Do we value art based on the hours that it took to create? Like an hourly rate? Or, is there no practical way to quantify what’s good and what’s bad?

Four new Troop 142 pages posted, wrapping up the fourth chapter in the story, Wednesday. Three more to go…

This means the book is more than half-finished, which kind of helps me get over a mental hurdle, where before I couldn’t really see the end in sight, now I can. Obviously there’s a way to go, and I haven’t even thought about starting in on major edits, revisions, and additions to the story – but clearly real progress is being made.

I know that I’ve probably talked before about my writing process, but I want to stress that for me, there’s no other way to write except for the approach of completing each page as I go. I’m just not able to script or even thumbnail things ahead of time. It doesn’t work for me. The best I can do is make notes in the margins of the pages, and write down ideas on my iPhone when they occur to me outside of my studio. I do have an outline of the general story arc written down in a word doc, so I’m not flying completely blind – but that’s just very loose, and I keep changing things as I go.

The approach makes me nervous, because there are likely some ideas that get forgotten because I don’t write them down. And also, I know that many pages that get finished might get tossed in the end. This has definitely happened in the past.

I think the truth is that I’m only able to really write while I’m inking a page. I can spend those hours at the table, inking, and let my mind dwell on the story while it’s not distracted. If I was to sit at a computer trying to write a script, I’d keep stopping and checking my e-mail or playing Scrabble. If I was to try to do some thumbnails, I’d get frustrated that I was wasting valuable drawing time, where I could be getting a page done. I’ve tried these other approaches, and have never been successful. I used to feel self-conscious about it, but in the past year have just decided to embrace it.

I probably drew these pages over two years ago, and even though I think this scene is funny, I’m not sure that there’s a place for it to fit into the story anymore. And, aside from that, my drawing style has changed enough since then that I think it would be pretty noticeable if I just dropped it all in somewhere. I’m pretty proud of some of the pictures of the kids swimming in the water, though, so I’m glad to be able to show this stuff off, even if only as a “discarded scene”.

All the Boy Scout troops come here for breakfast and dinner. I can’t remember from my own Boy Scouting experience if lunch happens here too. I’ll have to decide that at some point.

At the camp I used to stay at, there was a second set of grounds specifically for troops who cooked their own meals (cooking your own food is really the Boy Scout camping norm, it’s just at this special week long Summer camp where there’s a dining hall), but at the moment I’m leaving that out of the Troop 142 story.

This picture might look different in it’s final form. There probably should be a lot more people outside of the building. When I was drawing this, I was more focused on trying to get better at drawing trees, and kind of dropped the ball on putting the crowds in.

I’ve begun putting up pages from my new comic, Troop 142. Right now I’ve got the prologue chapter, SUNDAY, posted, and have started putting up pages from the first chapter, cleverly titled MONDAY. I’ve got more of this book done, but a lot of it’s in various states of completion. My plan is to post the material as it gets finished.

I believe I talked on an episode of the podcast about how this particular story has been a bit of a stop-and-start struggle for me. My thinking is that putting the material out there will help me get over some of my mental blocks. I really want to avoid getting into the habit of continually restarting, which is something that’s happened a few times already.

Plus, I’d like everyone to have a chance to check out all my pretty pictures!

I should also add, the content is sort-of, kind-of, “Mature audiences”. It’s not too bad, yet, but is definitely a little coarser than Freddie & Me.

Since I think I’m going to be working on this story for quite some time, I’m trying to decide if and how I should get some of it out there. I think I’d like to print it as a series of mini-comics*, but I also wonder if putting it on the web might be best. Maybe I’ll do both.

* This idea is really appealing, because I’ll have a lot more incentive to get myself to more conventions in 2009.

Key quote:

In the first chapter, for example, Hallinan posits that people take information in on a purely need-to-know basis, without even thinking about it. He then mentions an experiment conducted at Cornell University, where participants were instructed to ask strangers for directions; the twist was that the conversation would be blocked, literally, by two men carrying a door. In that split second, a door-carrier switches with the stranger, and the directions-giving continues as if nothing went wrong. Hardly any of the experimentees noticed the change, and Hallinan follows with evidence that you, the reader, wouldn’t have either.

An interesting little anecdote. It made me think a little about character design in comics. I’ve sometimes worried about my own inconsistency in that area, especially because I tend to design the character “on the page”. By this I mean I draw them almost for the first time when I get to the page when they first show up, and develop/evolve their look as I progress. A particularly egregious example to my eye is in Freddie & Me, the character of my friend Rob in High School. He had appeared in quite a few scenes before I felt like I really got his design down, and the character started looking more consistent.

The quote above makes me wonder if readers even notice stuff like that though. They probably don’t. Nobody has ever asked me why the Rob character had a longer head when he first appeared, and a potato shaped head later on. I think as long as a reader can always tell who’s who, then the small changes in character design probably don’t register much at all.