Come, come, come to the Sabbat (Patreon)

Hello, dear friends. I am in week six of my eight-week sabbatical. I spent the first two weeks trying to calm down. Week three and four I filled my time with chores. You wouldn't believe how neatly I repointed the flagstones fore and aft of my home. Week five felt like time to reconnect with drawing, and I filled a lot of sheets of copier paper with nonsense. A typical example is below:

After a week of this kind of nonsense, this week I have tried to apply myself to remembering how to make a comic. Not drawing pages but re-approaching the tools of my trade with a bit of distance. I find it difficult to switch from task to task, and switching into "goal oriented" drawing mode - the mode that the kind of comics I draw requires - is about the hardest of all the things I have to do, requiring ferocious concentration. I never achieve the "flow state" drawing pages that a lot of artists talk about. Unless a flow state is a perpetual sense that one is making mistake after mistake while repeating the same old shapes.

(I should add here that I absolutely can achieve a flow state plotting out stories - at the end of June I'll be posting a ~70-page PDF zine called "Poison Years" that is just that, with minimal annotations. It's all flow state work.)

After a load of daft exercises at my work desk, I reconnected with how I have traditionally got the job done. I'm sure it sounds ridiculous that after nearly 30 years I can lose the knack so easily. Sitting at the Cintiq felt very alien at first. I also drew pages on paper with every pen I could find, from fineliners to disposable brush pens to mangaka-style dip G-pens. All fun - a lot of fun! - but there's no secret sauce in there. It just looks messier. Eventually my brain snapped back into place. It was almost like I had to remake all the choices that got me to where I have been for the last 15+ years.

The hardest part then, is the one that should be the easiest - the writing. I've still been scribbling ideas down all through my break. They never stop coming and it is an easy way to kill the wait for a delayed train or an hour in a café. But I feel the same way I did when I realised I had to take this break - at the end of a cycle. More of the same won't cut it. Every project I've worked on is open-ended because that's how you write serials, you leave doors open for the next thing.

Every project I've done has been a response to a question to myself. Bobbins was "can I draw a daily strip?", Scary Go Round was "can I write stories?", Bad Machinery was "can I write books in a middle grade mode?", Giant Days was "can I collaborate and do a US comic book?", Steeple was "can I write and draw a direct market book?", Wicked Things was "can I make my own Mentalist style thing?", and so on. The continuation of Wicked Things as Solver was a bloody-minded response to my annoyance at it being cancelled without my being told. "Can I continue on my own terms?" I've conclusively answered that question for myself. It has reached a natural resting point story-wise. There's no second life for it on the comic app platforms to force my hand.

Financial reality means I have to start making something again in three weeks. I've been here before, the dead zones that I filled with bobbins.horse comics. Making for the sake of making, shall we say. In improv terms, brown-water work, clearing the pipes. Nothing major. It may be time to collaborate with someone new. Something will come along. At this point I can say that with confidence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGfBQ6kr-zw