This is a continuation of the previous post.
People always ask why the characters are not human. in the beginnings of the project they were still always the kangaroo lizard aliens, but originally it was just because i was an edgy teen who wanted some sci-fi spice. that was really about it. but now i am a boring adult who wants some sci-fi spice but also realized how useful a non-human is as a tool to make the reader re-evaluate their expectations.
i was looking back through some of the old drawings and realized i sometimes forget how different it is now. the first official page was only completed in 2017 after i graduated college. it was a good seven years from its inception until I began to work on it in earnest. a lot changes in that time.
tastes change over the years of course, but people really don’t. i have pretty much the same underlying motivations as an adult as I did as a child. I’ve come to realize that understanding is one of the most important things to me, though that understanding can manifest in different ways. I want to understand the motivations of people and I love playing with ideas strange and mundane. the comic has always been about that and almost everything I make has that motivation somewhere at the core.
of course, ten years helped me understand people a lot better. it helped me understand myself better as well.
i’ll never claim to be particularly fast at working on things. nor am i a particularly fast learner, art included. i’m a pretty slow boy. long story short: this page process took way too long. it wasn’t sustainable while getting pages out at a rate that didn’t wear thin on the patience of others or myself. i learned from this that I needed to do it in monochrome and simplify the workflow. which is fine. i never cared much for color anyway.
even the first published chapter of the comic took a lot longer than the subsequent ones. people occasionally note that it looks a bit different in style compared to the others and they are correct. some of that is that I switched tablets and software that made certain line types either more or less difficult. but honestly most of it is, again, I found that i needed to simplify the workflow more. chapter one was created between 2016-2019 during a pretty dark period of my life. i worked around eight jobs over the course of a year and realized later that I was also putting undue pressure on myself with the comic. I was driving myself nuts in addition to difficult circumstances. i had to ease off a bit.
I definitely enjoyed working on the comic more after i eased off. chapter 2 and especially chapter 3 were much more fun to create in the day-to-day. ‘professionals’ in the comic field crank out many more pages a week than I do. four is about the max I can do, usually fewer than that, sometimes none at all. but this is just how I’m wired. all we can do is the best with our gifts and our circumstances. I’m definitely a lot happier in life when I give from what I have and not from what I don’t. and trust me, i’ve tried to change who I am. I wanted to be more of a hustler. but you can’t really change how you’re wired. I’m more at peace with that now. does being slow or unproductive make one a bum? maybe, but you would only know by comparing yourself with others. comparison never ends well. it will either fill you with arrogance because you see yourself as superior, or it will lead to self-hatred because you think you are worse. neither is good. we all have our strengths and struggles for a reason.
so where do we go from here? one day at a time, as always. I’ve found there’s no use worrying about the future. God will provide and he will continue to meet my needs. I have invaluable worth apart from my work. I personally need to ease up on the self-pressure. if I’m a slow man, forcing myself to be otherwise isn’t sustainable.
perhaps in another ten years i’ll revisit this topic and see what’s changed by then. 🙂 hopefully this journey can bring encouragement to others who struggle with similar hurdles.