A reset

Feel like a reset is in order. I’ve been spending so long in the moment, by which I mean neither keeping track of the work I’ve done nor scheduling it in any meaningful way, simply trying to draw as much as I can when I can. This has lead, I think to burnout (if not total burnout at least early symptoms). No past, no future, only constant never ending present.

Sometimes the work will stop, every line feels wrong or you find yourself battling with the idea of drawing itself.

Iv’e taken a couple of steps. Step one, restart with the pomodoros, this is usually enough to stop my brain thinking I’ve spent hours on half a panel when in fact it’s only been five minutes.

Secondly, I’ve restarted noting what work I’ve done in a diary. I always fall off that, but I need to try not to.

And thirdly, I’ve decided to try and reset back to do doing TWO things per day. Two pages of pencils or two pages of inks. If I can do that without pause it’ll still represent 30 pages (or so) per month. Way ahead of what I need to do.

That’s largely a nominal goal, if I do more, brill. If I do less, that’s fine. But once I hit my goal I’m allowing myself to relax and not worry about any more work for the day. That’s where I’ve really been punishing myself, do more, do more, do more and you never did enough.

In other news, I’ve been regularly walking with my pal Jim Lavery most days for the past few months and then a couple of weeks ago we started couch to 5k together. He’s a lot fitter than me, but I’m now fitter than I was a few weeks ago. Oddly, now we run Mon/Wed/Fri I find myself not going for walks on the days between and that’s not so good. Will try and correct for that.

I dunno if I can guarantee I’ll blog more, I feel like I’ve spent the last twenty years alternating between promising I’ll blog more and apologising for blogging less.

I’ve been off twitter for a while, and there’s a big part of me feeling sort of done with all social media, and actually a lot of online stuff. Thinking more and more about retirement, it’s a good decade plus off, but I never remember it preoccupying my thoughts any where near as much. True to most comic artists, my retirement will likely look less like someone not working and more like someone who will inevitably die at the drawing board. But then, maybe I can keep getting better and better at drawing and – like Hokasai said “When I am 80 you will see real progress”.

The PaperClip Problem

The paperclip problem, except none of the paperclips can actually be used to hold paper together, and only sort of look like a paperclip from a distance and people are telling you how brilliant the paperclips will be eventually even though they never seem to get any better.

Source: PJ Holden.

I’m quoting myself, which is TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE form. But I’m largely doing it to see if I can get “Press This” working again, a feature I used for years on word press that seemed to have slowly disappeared. It allows me to blog on whatever website I’m looking at, straight in to my blog.

Anyway if this works, maybe I’ll tempt me into more reliable blogging.

Dublin City Comic Con

Was at Dublin City Comic Con this weekend, well, the Saturday (the Sunday was mother’s day and ended up staying home for that)

Was good to be at a con again, I suspect it’ll take me to go to a few to find my feet at the things again, covid having done a number on everything really. Met some new friends (hello Alan and Ellie) and to my suprise and delight, actual fans. (Not as suprising to me as it was to my son who was also there)

Anyway, did some portfolio reviews and gave some advice, so, to the best of my recall, here is some of that self same advice:

If you want a career in comics, make sure you have three months worth of living expenses in the bank at ALL times. Any less than that and you’re in trouble. Here’s why – if you’re looking for work, it could take month. If you get the work, could take a month to do it. Once you finish and invoice for it, could take a month to pay – simple. Three months. Though, to be perfectly honest, if you can, you owe it to yourself to bank six months at all times, this industry is HARD.

If you’re a writer with a submissions package, figure out what your end game is, I think some people see the submission’s package as some sort of “if I built it they will come” but it really helps to know what your goal is. A graphic novel with a publisher? Pitching short stories? Self publishing?

And honestly, in many many cases all you really need is a single page synopisis of the complete story (including any exciting twists and turns and plot twists it may contain – you want the reader to know it’s got twists, but you want the publisher to know what those twists are) and maybe six pages of written story comics. If you’re pitching to a publisher, some will also want six pages of the story drawn, but it will depend and you may find yourself with an accepted pitch where they love the story but want a different artist (surprise! this has happened to me more than once)

Some lettering no/nos – if you’re lettering yourself good lettering will rescue a comic and bad lettering will destroy it, if you’ve a budget pay a letterer and if you don’t then try and learn how to do it right – plenty of good resources (I’d avoid names like CLINT and words like FLICK – and the unfortunate sound effect UNTSS UNTSS UNTSS which went behind a moon and read like an entirely different word! make it UNZZZ UNZZZ UNZZZ)

If you’re starting out and you’ve a partner who has no real interest in comics but wants to support you, draw a comic and show them and ask them to describe what’s happening in the unlettered comic (and don’t give them any hints) where they get it right, you did a good job! well done! where they get lost it’s confusing and you need to fix that!

Black placement on a page – try and use blacks to help tell the story and direct the reader’s eye – sure, it’s important to get light sources right, but also you can make up light sources! comics are super flexible that way!

Establishing shots are important, in a scene where two characters interact you’ll need to show the reader at least ONE panel where we see them both together, without that it’s hard to know if we’re cutting between scenes or if there’s any connections between them at all.

Writers: for the love of god, start small! Write one page complete stories, get an artist. “I’d like this to be an eight page miniseries” – ME TOO! But realistically, big names can’t get eight issues of a miniseries out there, it’s a hard market. You’ll have more luck with a graphic novel, and even better luck with short stories. You cut your teeth on short stories, those are the things that build your craft muscles up quick (to mix some metaphors)

Finally, if you’re after advice and that advice takes a long long time, because you’re not really clear about what you’re trying to do and then after 45 minutes say “well, I’m really trying to make a six issue miniseries about an NFT character” do not be surprised if whoever you’re talking to folds their arms, gives you a stern look and tells you they’re not that interested.

oops.

Slightly big oopsy doo there, I connected the blog to my patreon and did not anticipate 150 blog posts coming across. Yikes. Apologies if you were thinking I’d gone post crazy. Don’t think it’ll happen again (but then I didn’t think it would happen in the first place)

My studio is located facing the outwards at the front of the house, behind me my bedroom and my son’s room. So I heared what I thought was my son come up the stairs when the following took place:

me: “hello Thomas”

Wife: “It’s not thomas, it’s me”

Me: “Oh. I’m heading out at 3 for a walk with Jim”

Wife: “3? that’s earlier than you thought”

me (thinking) “that’s a weird way to respond to that”

me “Yeah. just the usual”

wife “Do you need any money?”

me(thinking) “Why on earth would she offer me money?”

Turns out she was having a conversation with Thomas (also going out at 3) and I couldn’t hear him, but I could hear her.

Speaking of Thomas, owing to the appearance of the Sidemen on netflix (which I keep mispronouncing to sound like spider-men) we’ve resubbed to netflix. So we’re cancelling paramount+.

One in one out for streaming for me from now on. Though even when you do cancel you end up with around a couple of weeks of streaming on credit (easily the best thing apple ever did for subscriptions, and I’m quite sure no company would’ve ever let you do that – have you every tried to cancel an adobe subscription early? madness)

Our tv watching is so diffuse now we’re all watching different things, nobody watches anything together, and honestly, it makes me a little sad. Sitting watching quantum leap with my brothers was one of my fav things growing up as a teen. Or star trek, even. Shared watching was great.

Another fine example of technology doesn’t always make things better.

(Have decided to try and burn through the last series of Star Trek Discovery, which I liked the first series of, and it got more and more weirdly convoluted each series. Star Trek: Brave New Worlds is a banger though)

One of the things that became obviously harder over the pandemic was the need to cook two meals every single day for a family of four. I suppose we could get away with sandwiches at lunch but even then you’re still cooking at least seven meals a week, 31 meals a month and 365 meals a year (and double those numbers of a sandwich isn’t going to cut it). Obviously, It can’t always be spag bol. Though it frequently is.

And I actually enjoy cooking, but it’s time consuming. One great thing about being in the new house (over a year now) is getting the new kitchen complete with dishwasher. It’s only small, and we frequently need to run it twice a day, and god knows what that’s doing to our electric prices, but suddenly a big chunk of the dishwashing burden is removed, and you have more time to cook.

So, to that end I’ve been trying to do one from-scratch side dish every so often with a regular meal, and seeing what new things I can do. At the moment I’ve had a right old go at Hassleback potatoes (almost no hassle at all and so pretty!) and potato dauphinoise, a little more work, and need some basic ingredients, but actually pretty simple and very nice, especially with steak (or chicken … or any big chunky main thing)

Anyway I grabbed both recipes from the bbc here: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/dauphinoise-potatoes (I find about 250 cream and 250 milk with three large potatoes does three/four people comfortably) and https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/hasselback-potatoes (it calls for garlic and rosemary, I just did mine with a bit of butter and again a big ol’ baked potato) and actually if you’re doing a nice dinner, I do recommend doing both kinds of potatoes cus it’s pretty easy and dead impressive…

And despite spending two days traditional paper and ink, I’ve gone back to digital. This constant oscillation between these two states annoys me more than you’ll ever know. I lack the space to give over to both fully, and even traditional is tight for space, but it’s so much more satisfying to draw a GOOD line with ink, and yet I’ve got to face facts, I think my digital inking is better than my pen and ink…

Spider-Killer

From my new weekly web comic series “Null Space” – you can keep up with it over at www.pauljholden.com/series/null-space  

(I’ll try and put them here too, but if you wanna cancel your patreon, that’s cool – on the other hand, it’d be really cool if you didn’t then I could passivily collect some dosh for just doing silly comic book stuff without worrying about it!_

A4

I have spent yesterday and today making a fun little zine. I tend to do a small print run and drop them off to some local comic shops and see what happens (what’s the worse that could happen, right?)

It started with the idea of using an A4 sheet to produce something, I thought “micro-fiction!” that’ll do! So I took an A4 sheet and did exactly that, I fancied the logo being right in the centre with stories wrapping round it, and it looked like the above image (you’re getting a bit of dredd in there too!)…

Then I tidied it up a bit and typed it up and dropped it in to Affinity Designer (which I’m not terrible comfortable with but figured this isn’t THAT complicated) then it hit me, I could fold the comic around the central logo 

And it worked surprisingly well! In fact if you fold it right it’s sort of self standing, making it it’s own little presentation thing too.

Anyway, some hand drawn images and now we have this…

And you can have it too…

(The trick to folding it is fold the left side behind the logo, then the right side then do the bottom and then do the top and boom, a freestanding ‘zine)

Well April got away from me.

I’ve barely tracked what I’ve done and it felt like I did nothing. Partly just down to me not being abkle to keep the workload straight in my head, but it turns out I did more this month than I expected (with the caveat that I can only invoice for completed pages (pencils and inks) and I need to do about 18 to make enough money to pay the bills and service debts and pay the tax man every mont).

So the top level how much work is pencils: 24 pages, Inks 14.

I finished inking Wormy and Me – a 10 page short for Ahoy comics.

Then I pencilled and inked 12 pages of Dredd – two episodes (I though I was running late, but two in a month is ok)

And finally, pencils on a Medal of Honor story (true stories of American soldiers who’ve won the medal of honor which pay ok(ish) and require an insane amount of research not to mention the moral headache I have every time I do one – so this is the last one)

And, upon discovering that I’m due to have a leopard from Lime street finished, I ended up pencilling a chunk of that over the weekend. It’ll be late, but the editor tells me I’ve plenty of time.

Didn’t enjoy not tracking it all, week by week I like knowing if I’ve done enough, this month I felt like I hadn’t (and really I sort of haven’t)

Outside of that, we filmed part of the short film we’re doing as the final poart of this short film course for making short films I was on. So that was a fun non-comic day.

(Yesterday was the 28th year of me meeting my wife, so I didn’t do much work then. just lots of emails first thing in the morning)

Coming up this next month:

Dredd ep4 and ep5 and finishing leopard (6 pages of inks) and inking the Medal of Honor stuff (maybe – we’ll see)

No time for fiddling in the world of the 64 page digest, nor even for doing this other creator owned pitch. I need to have a 48 page month before I can bank the time to do anything else…

Anyway, new month, let’s go

Fascinating Folklore

Thought you’d like to see the cover… it’s gonna be a gorgeous looking book. 56 comic pages, linked to essays, each essay has been individually hand designed to integrate with the art, it’s properly lovely looking and I’ve seen and felt the quality of Liminal 11’s other books, and they are incredible. Very excited for this.

Witness

So, the 64 page graphic novella has a title: Witness.

It’s a fun thing to write stuff. I frequently forget because I do it so little. For me it’s all a puzzle box, how can I tell the plot in the pages I have, lets split them up in to sections, how to get from that section to this section. Eventually you get it all vomited up and then you start looking for what your story is about, early doors I introduced one new guy into this band of fierce soldiers and it was gonna follow him, from the kickoff I had him as the toughest dude around, he proves himself by beating the crap out of everyone else in the room. Then I wrote the whole thing and realised, no, this makes a lot more sense if this guy is unsure of himself, and they don’t trust him – so he went from someone who introduces himself by telling everyone how great he is at combat, and flying (which sets up the fact that later he’ll be the only one capable of flying a ship) to him becoming someone whose great at combat and flying – as per simulations and written exams, so entirely unproven.

Anyway, I’m gonna give you the prologue – right from the start I wanted to show a team and then for them to lose one person so our hero can step in. 

Warts and all, is what you’re gonna get, so here’s my prologue notes:

Prologue, we establish how tough these guys are and what a formidible team they make. They are introduced to the new guy, “Green” – the new guy’s father is a well known politician, and they don’t understand why he’s with a bug hunting crew. Green, determined to show he’s committed tells them he’s trained in close combat, alien biology, explosives and is a grade 2 pilot “holy shit, that’s more than you captain!”

Because this was a draft, I hadn’t really realised the prologue was really that first sentence – everything after that is part of act 1. Prologue then became a seven page section. Nice big intro page, then trying to make use of the fact odd numbers are page turns, I set to work with the bullet points:

Prologue

  1. Opening scene, epic battle, troops vs alien creatures, on an unknown planet, the sergeant turns to us and screams “Vasquez!”
  2. Vasquez, chewing a cigar, hears the sarge shout “Light em up” we pull out, Vasquez Vasquez, “With Pleasure, Sarge!”
  3. We see aliens, burn, we watch as the troopers lay fire in to them.
  4. One of the troopers looks happy as a clam, firing into the monsters, We see behind him a creature has escaped the fires.
  5. Cut to another trooper, he’s shouting over “DeMarco!”. Demarco turns, but is gutted by the creature from behind.
  6. The original trooper blasts the creature to kingdom come. And runs over to DeMarco, who’s essentially cut in two.
  7. Demarco, close up “It’s getting dark” trooper, “Man, you good, you good, stick with me Demarco, we’ll get you home”. Pull out to reveal DeMarco is missing most of his insides.

I thought that was a fun little seven pages – couple of good big actiony splashes and a neat little twist trying to give a reason to go from page to page and especially get you turning the page.

Next, scripting this (I’ve literally just scripted this first seven pages, we’ll see how it goes when I get a full draft of the script done)

Tried to stict religiously to the bullet points (and for clarity, this is digest – about A5 size, so I can’t really do too much in one page)

Page 1

Full splash, a team of eight soldiers (though incl Sarge we’ll only see seven here), being led by the Sarge are attacking some sort of weird bug like alien which , there are hundreds of bugs clambering over some sort of civilian transport. The sarge has turned to us and is shouting at us…

CAPTION I dropped into these men’s lives in the middle of tragedy.

SARGE VASQUEZ!

Page 2

Panel 1

Vasquez, heavily armed (maybe a mech suit?) chewing a cigar, cocking a fire arm.

SARGE (OFF) Light ’em up!

Panel 2

Close up of Vasquez, smiling.

VASQUEZ With pleasure Sarge!

Panel 3

Close up of Vasquez’s weaponary unleashing hell.

SFX BUDDABUDDABUDDABUBDDABUDDABUDDA

Page 3

Panel 1

Bugs are being blow apart

Panel 2

Close up of Demarco, watching the carnage, he’s no longer firing his gun.

DEMARCO Hahah, lookit them!

Panel 3

He takes aim at one lone critter, smiling as he does so.

DEMARCO Now, where do you think you’re off to you,

PAGE 4

PANEL 1

He fires, behind him something larger lurks. (maybe a bigger bug like creature, or some sort of assemblage of them)

DEMARCO HAHAHAHA! GOTCHA!

PANEL 2

Rodriquez, aiming at the creatures, spots tthe thing behind demarco

Rodriquez DEMARCO!

Page 5

Splash, Demarco gutted by the bug monster/thing

SFX SPLEURCHHHH!

Page 6

Panel 1

Close up of Rodriquez as he sees Demarco

Rodriquez SUNOFA…

Panel 2

Rodriquez splays the demarco gutting creature with gunfire

Panel 3

We see the creature get blow away, Demarco is on the ground.

Page 7

Panel 1

Rodrueqiz is nursing the head of Demarco

Demarco It’s… It’s getting … dark.

Rodruqeiz Naw man, stick with me soldier. You’re good…

Panel 2

Demarco, essentially missing the lower half of his body (maybe it’s around somewhere), Roriquez nursing him (upset, knows it’s a lie)

Rodriquez You’ll make it…

And… that’s it for the first bit. The caption at the start is because after I’d laid out the bullet points, I decided I’d add narration from our new guys POV throughout, something that’ll add just a little layer about who he his and his self doubt and his rising to the challenge.

Anyway, it’s aliens and I don’t care…

If I allowed myself any self doubt on this I will not do it, but by making a conscious decision to go “doesn’t matter if this is bad, it’s mine. I’m doing this for me” it’s been easier to get this far. 

Now I’m gonna do some character design and maybe see if I can draw a page or two of this silly thing… (before attempting more script!)

Untitled 64 Page Digest Graphic Novel

I’ve been thinking about doing a 64 digest graphic novel for some time, I love the format (if you’re from the UK it’s most commonly known as the commando comics format) and a few years ago I documented how I think such a thing could become an ideal kickstarter format. 

To run down the basics of it:

64 pages, digest sized (one – three panels per page) is actually, probably equivalent to a 16 page comic book. So actually pretty reasonable to get down while doing other work. Then you’ve 64 pages of original art that could be packaged and sold with copies of the book at a premium rate (lets say you split the pages in to A and B groupings, or say Splash and Continuity pages, and then you offer a fixed page price at say, £100 for a splash and £60 for a continuity page) which both include a copy of the comic, and say you have approx 40 continuity pages (a potential total of £2,400) and 24 splash pages (a potential total of £2,400) you’re looking at, at say 64 people being able to fund £ 4,800 of the book (I mean realistically you’re looking at a lot less people than that buying original art, but it’s NOT that outrageous and these are the ceiling figures).

Obviously, you’ve got to factor in production and postage costs too, but actually if you can get 4k out of sales of 60 or so people, then you can afford to print 500 copies, and the rest of the sales become pure profit.

AND — if you can do better than that, well, that’s amazing and actually makes it not only a fun little side project but a viable source of income in your career. Money from that can pay you to do the next one and the next and so on. 

But there’s a few things that have killed it – one has been covid. I was originally mulling this all over pre-covid .The other dampener, oddly has been feature creep and people volunteering to write stuff for me. I have no idea how long a project like this will take, and once you bring someone else in to it, there are expectations of and suddenly it’s not quite yours any more. 

I think, as an artist, I’m pretty good at subsuming myself into the story I’m telling. It’s rare I’ll add story elements unless I’ve talked it over with a writer and suggested things, BEFORE they’ve committed anything to paper. Once they’ve written it, it is locked in as far as I’m concerned. But I could spend two months drawing a writers story between things, and find myself running a kickstarter and getting a handful of backers and now I’ve let down myself and the writer… Anyway, I think in the back of my head I’ve always pictured this as being high risk, low reward, which is the worst kind of project to rope anyone else in to. So I needed to do one for myself, by myself. I mean, if it works and is a rip roaring success, let me tell you I will NOT be long in contacting some writer friends who I’m sure would love to do this (but I‘d only do it if I could pay them something like a page rate first)

Anyway, I’ve plotted a little story for one issue of this, a one off that – I freely admit comes out of love of various things and I’m gonna embrace the cliches, and is probably a little weak and not great and etc, but I’m doing this for me, so if it’s weak I’ll suffer through it  (it will be fun to draw, if nothing else) (I mean I’ve drawn for Rob Williams, Gordon Rennie, Garth Ennis, Kenneth Niemand, and more, so I’m used to working with writers who know what the f they’re doing…. so of COURSE it will look ropy in comparison).

So, the question is, how in to the weeds do you want me to get in this here patreon about this project (which may or may not hit a dead end?) I’ve got today to do some writing, and probably nothing for a few weeks, but then the how of writing might turn out to be an easier task than I thought (I’m writing it in bullet point fashion, each page is one bullet point, each bullet point contains one to three sentences with each sentence being a panel)

The genesis for the story is that moment in Aliens where PFC Hudson asks “Is this gonna be stand up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?” And while this isn’t aliens fan fiction (and isn’t space marine fan fiction either for that matter) we follow a team of Marines, as they encounter something much more horrifying than a bug hunt.

(am I tempted to call it Bug Hunters and ask Jerry Paris for both permission AND a cover? yes. YES I AM)