Mint Condition
Looking at my phone I see on Thursday I walked a grand total of 298 steps. When they say the creative life is about sitting your ass down and doing the work, they weren't kidding.
My ass sits and my stylus pecks the glass screen of my tablet like a demented woodpecker in a laboratory experiment. From the outside it must look very dull indeed. Weird, even. The intense stare from behind my spectacles reflecting the glare of the screen. Rapid and exaggerated expressions skim across my face as I mimic the facial contortions of the characters I am drawing. Occasionally I will utter a weary epithet after drawing on the wrong layer for the millionth time.
I resemble one of those poor creatures padding backwards and forwards behind bars at the zoo. Stuck in an obsessive pattern of behaviour brought on by lack of stimulus. My own compulsive circuit is the studio, kitchen, loo. If I finish a page I can reward myself with a hot drink. Back to work and then inevitably that tea has to exit somehow. This is how I rack up a heroic 300 steps a day. Sisyphus with a weak bladder.
The sullied flesh may be inert, but the life of the mind is fizzing and sparking like a Van de Graaff generator. I am thumb-nailing. That is the part of the process of making a graphic novel where I take my detailed synopsis of around fifteen thousand words and break it down into rough approximations of what the page will look like complete with rough sketches, speech bubbles and dialogue. This is where I make or break a book.
It's brain-heavy work. The hill sprints of comic making. It leaves me tired, queasy and questioning my life choices. It's making those choices that's the hardest aspect for a ditherer like myself. In any other area of life when presented with a thorny dilemma I can affect a Gallic shrug and say, I don't know, I'm only a cartoonist. When you are a cartoonist this is the one area of life where that won't wash.
There are countless ways to tell a story and in my head I'm choosing all the wrong ones. I think I know what I'm doing. I should know after thirty years of doing it, but we're all susceptible to self-doubt. The anxieties bleed from the day into the night.
I dream about hosting a comic convention at home. It's a big room full of trestle tables, none of which would fit in our cosy terraced abode. People mill around. I am sensibly hiding behind the chair in my studio. Across the room I spy Dave Gibbons lean over and run a finger along the rim of the wheel of my bike. A thick layer of dust is disturbed. Dave straightens up and shakes his head. He's not angry, just disappointed.
The room soon empties and I am left sorting through a big pile of abandoned cardigans. I hold them up to the light one at a time to try and deduce who they belong to. The con guests return to find the mint condition packaging of an Alien toy has been mistaken for litter and torn into strips. No one says anything but the atmosphere sours.
It wasn't me, I want to squeak. I was sorting out the cardigans.
Books
Books. Sate your appetite for new reading material by buying these fine graphic novels from all the places fine graphic literature is sold (book shops, comic shops, online etc). And if you enjoyed them, please write a positive review online. We will be forever grateful.
Simon has made prints from both books and they are gorgeous. Drop by his store and snag one for yourself.
I have a patreon which I update regularly. Tuesdays and Saturdays I post process and behind the scenes stuff such as Punycorn colour pages. Thursdays I post a one page comic story.
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I still have books out in the world, Kerry and the Knight of the Forest & the awards nominated The Book Tour. Support my efforts through my store – digital comics – patreon or by leaving a positive review online