Blight sketch party (Patreon)

I did a lot of preparatory work for Blight. My enforced break through June and July was tedious but necessary, and restored my enthusiasm for the process. A lot of sketching in front of the TV. A lot of failed covers too, that was the hardest part of my brain to get to switch back on.

A big part of my crash was that I'd been tying myself up in visual knots for years, trying to be inventive with my layouts, which had made it very hard to call a page "finished". It started with Steeple, where I suddenly had the pressure of drawing a monthly direct market market book in an industry built on insane visual splash. I felt very exposed. And I only lasted five months! But I never quite shook the feeling.

After 7 years in this headspace, I'd put huge pressure on myself. I'd delete and redraw already-coloured panels, sometimes recreating 75% of the page having essentially finished it. Part of getting back to making comics was putting a strict time limit on drawing pages, and accepting that my normal basic late-1990s web-cartoonist thoughts were not only good enough, but perhaps a better mode of expression than trying to endlessly draw panels with three or even four "planes of action" in order to stack information in 1/6 of a page.

Preparing Murder She Writes for its re-run/reprint, I realised that I preferred the old comics I made, and I suspected that readers liked them better too. So I looked some of my very favourite artists and rediscovered the joy of concentrating on character acting over design choices. I started to enjoy making pages again. Hopefully that shows through in Blight.

Part 2 will be up here tomorrow.