Q&A 25: Music, age, mothballing (Patreon)

Aaron Hess asks: Music and bands seem like a massively important part of the TCU’s texture - do you listen to music while you work, or do you find it distracting during some or all of the process?

I do listen to music for part of the drawing process, but it affects my concentration, so it all depends how well I am drawing on a given day, what sort of page it is, and so forward. I never listen to music when I'm writing or doing the pencils for a page, I need to be very focussed on getting things right. When I'm inking the figures, I can listen to music I'm familiar with, but not news stuff, and nothing too distracting, or I'll find myself not really thinking about how thick lines should be, and the page can swiftly become a dog's breakfast. Also, I leave myself some detail work to do in the inks, and if there's a lot of that, or a confused shape (often a foreshortened arm), I have to be looking at it carefully or I'll mess it up. When I am inking in the backgrounds and colouring, I can listen to music, so I tend to do all the backgrounds after the characters are finished.

One of the things that made me want to work in art and design, rather than writing, was being able to listen to music while I did it. But 25 years of drawing has definitely given me a keen sense of when I am not paying full attention to what I'm doing. If my focus starts to go, I listen to a 75 minute rain and thunderstorm "moods" mp3 I got on eMusic many years ago. The pink noise makes my mind behave itself.

When we lived close by, I used to go to my friend Emma Vieceli's house to work sometimes, we'd gas up a storm while drawing our page for the day. Then the next day I'd have to redraw it almost entirely. I don't think Emma had the same problem. Some people will sit and draw their whole page with a TV show on! Crazy town.

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Michael Ben Silva II asks:How do you go about aging (and now with Shelley de-aging) your characters? Aging was central to Bad Machinery, so do you think it started there? How would you say that process has changed for you over the years?

The answer to this is quite predictable: I think about how old the character is, and I make adjustments accordingly, based on experience. How people age fascinates me, and it's interesting to track people in the public eye as they grow older. Obviously, part of that is remembering a TV show you watched in 2007, looking for the Entertainment Weekly reunion video, and saying, "yes, they are older now." But as I've got older, the thing I notice more is the development of character in people's faces as they move out of youth. The older I get, the less younger people look "finished". There's a charm to that, but also a sense that they occupy a different world to me. I think this is natural. Unless you're one of those actors who only goes out with women who are 23, no matter how old he gets.

So, outside the question of the simple physicality getting older, I also think about experience and how it is carried in the body - or not!

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Morgan Long asks:How do you decide which characters to keep writing about and which to stop? You cycled through Tessa and Rachael in Scary Go Round back to the Bobbins cast and only occasionally touch on the Bad Machinery boys.

When I run out of things for a character to say or so, they're done. I can lose touch with them. People think I'm joking when I say this, but I'm a big fan of the Australian daily soap Neighbours, I watch every day. And watching Neighbours closely as a writer is very educational, because you can see characters get worn out - or not. Some characters are seemingly inexhaustible, they're fractal, there's always more within. But others fulfill their role, and for a little while, I don't realise that they're done . But I become quickly aware that in retaining them, I'm bending them out of shape.

As I moved away from the whimsical picaresque of Scary Go Round, there was less capacity to bend characters out of shape into unnatural forms, because the narrative of Bad Machinery required more discipline. So I had to be more careful, in how I used characters, and how i disposed of them.

To go back to the prior question, some of the characters had less to say as they got older. What was charming when they were small became awkward as they got older and I had, effectively, to deal with a different character who couldn't do what they used to do because it didn't make sense. A few people have commented that I stopped using the Bad Machinery boys when that series finished. In truth, I didn't quite know how to have them make the transition to young adulthood in a way that was meaningfully different to anything I'd done in Giant Days.

One problem is one of bandwidth: I only make about 150 pages a year now, excluding work written for other artists. Twenty years ago, it was 250. Exploring any ignored character in a meaningful sense that addresses their continuity means suspending work in progress.

But sometimes, after a break, a character will begin to speak to me again. And if I can do them justice, they come back from their mothballing. Even if only for a short time.