My son (aged 16) and I (aged er… not telling) opened up one of my boxes of original art, mostly containing stuff over a decade old (and some older) – which sounds like a long time ago and feels like no time at all. This was largely Dept of Monsterology (which I wish had been more of a success than it was), Numbercruncher and some bits and bobs of Dredd.
A couple of things struck me during this deep dive. Some of the art I liked, some I didnt – the mission was to separate good pages which I might be able to sell from bad pages (or at least harder to sell) I’d bin them, in the end of the pile of binable stuff barely made a dent (which isn’t to say I’ll ever sell the others, because the work involved in that would be substantial, and so it’s more likley they’ll sit in this box for another 30 years until my kids are left with the job of disposing of them in some manner, probably in a tip. (It’s ok though, they’re simply the building blocks for the comics that they become)
When I began my comics career, I kept all the art I drew, eventually I had too much and just started keeping finished comic pages (as opposed to the odd nice drawing) then I started only keeping the pages that were published, and even with that I still have a massive pile of artwork (one of the many advantages of going digital is I no longer keep pages and pages of paper)
One of the benefits though of looking through this old stuff is seeing where the quality varies, though I often don’t have a clue why it did – too mcuh confidence? lack of confidence? I don’t know, but some pages are much more amateurish than others – even in the same run of a book. I dunno how much of that is detectable by a non artist, but it feels painfully obvious to me.
Some of my inking is too clunky, even as the drawing is nice. Though often the clunky is better than the other stuff, where the inking feels weed-thin, like a strong gust will blow it away. There was a more explosive energy to a lot of it (but maybe that was the material – Monsterology, especially was a kinetic fun thing). Also, this work is about 10 years into my pro career, so I can’t even blame it on my own growing pains.
Also, I redrew a lot of stuff – I joke about it often, and it’s something I had a reputation for, but it’s much wilder to come face to face with two pages and NOT KNOW WHICH ONE WAS THE FINAL ONE. I mean, why? I used to say (and I still sort of believe it) I can redraw any of my own art and it will be fractionally better – but sometimes those fractionally improvements are so small, and yet at the time felt so important.
That Dept of Monsterology page? I think I drew a third version of that. Ugh.
I dunno if I can draw any lessons from this, I wish I could. I wish I could see exactly why the bad pages were bad and the good pages were good.
It’s not all bad, a lot of the work I look at and think “actually that’s pretty good” and even the weak ones I think – well, the colour probably made it harder to spot that was weaker.
Anyway, putting that box away for another decade might help. We’ll see.