I love putting dots at the end of my titles, heh. It’s like an unfinished thought which later evolves into a full post. But I’m digressing (and I haven’t even started properly!).

I’ve been thinking recently on how drawing comics as a kid was pure joy. Sure, these things were dumb, cobbled together from various bits of plots and ideas plundered from all over the place. The scan above is two pages from a comic titled “Ax: Xapur”, a roughly 20 page long “chapter” in one of my comics magazines. They were generally A5 sized squared notebooks running for 120-320 pages (although I recall drawing my Turtles comics in 32 page ruled ones) with various stories starting and often not finishing. Most went on for as long as my attention span allowed me to work on them, few really finished.

Ax remains one of the unfinished ones, but then again I never managed to draw a second issue entirely, so as such all the other comics in that book remain unfinished too. Total “plunderism”. The word Xapur is swiped from a Conan story, the clawed skeletons were inspired by one of the Ray Harryhausen films (forgot which one it was, I recall they had skeletons with swords and shields there though) or perhaps it was Army of Darkness? The crazy layouts came from me seeing couple of illustrations by Philippe Druillet, so did 2 panels that I attempted to swipe from a review of Druillet’s Vuzz (a failed swipe I must admit, neither the look nor the perspective were anywhere near that). Still, this story remains a pinnacle of my early teens creativity. And also one of the last survivors. I was made to throw out half of my notebooks around that age by my mom. The other half landed mostly in the cold and damp basement, thus rotting away and being thrown out too. There’s only a couple survivors.

I think I was one of the only two kids with any sense of perspective throughout my entire class. Everyone else drew everything flat… but wait, this isn’t an essay on how I drew back in the day. I’m digressing again, loosing my train of thought, perhaps entering the wrong wagon. Conductor! Where does this train go to?

Back on track.

The old. The joy of simply drawing with a blue pen on ruled pages, filling them one by one with no second takes. Any mistake becomes part of the image, any stupid idea becomes something you have to work hard to retcon in some fashion on the continuing pages. Just telling stories, while drawing on both sides.

I don’t like to draw with ballpoint pens anymore. The good ones have gotten expensive, while the cheap ones have gotten really crappy. Instead I fell in love with mechanical pencils, magnificent little things that don’t require any sharpening. Just click click and draw again for another half hour or so. I love that.

Well, if that’s the old then, the notebooks filled with art, what’s new?

Digital inking. I love it. I simply, simply love it. It took me  some time to find the right tools, the right software, the right approach, but at this point it allows me to be much better. I can still be as loose with the line as I want to, but I can also do all the tiny details I couldn’t do on the paper itself, meanwhile I don’t have to switch into larger format paper and go through the fear of empty page all over again (I got over that finally but it took me years to jump from A5 to A4 pages.

Digital inking, digital coloring, digital painting, digital lettering. Someone might say I am losing my uniqueness by going that way, but is it truly so? After all, what’s so amazing about being unable to achieve the level of detail you want to? Is that what I want to be remembered for? The guy who couldn’t draw fingers well cause he drew on too small paper and was afraid to switch to a larger page format? (not to mention that he’d have to buy a large drawing desk and spend a fortune on proper drawing board rather than using simple printer paper?)

Where does it all lead to? What is the destination? I know I am rambling, just as I knew that I would. The moment I sat down to the keyboard I knew it’d be one of these long posts that run in circles, tripping over ideas as they stumble through the thoughtspace.

The goal is near, please perserve.

I have this thought haunting me recently. What if I tried to combine the old with the new? The joy of filling notebooks with comic pages, in a way allowing me to see a finished book of sorts; all that joined with the digital mastery? Take a notebook, draw the pages in there. Loose or detailed, no matter, as long as they convey all that’s necessary to tell the story. The outlines, gestures, suggestions of lights and shadows, echoes of backgrounds, loosely handwritten dialogues and captions, raw emotions captured, gestures and expressions envisioned in loose lines. All that’s necessary to tell a story done that way. And then scan it, page by page, and turn these “storyboards” into the finished product, something worthy of publishing.

Would that work?