Progress Report #3 - Kane Mesmer (Tiny Bricks)

Today I have mostly been listening to Bat For Lashes (gorgeous!) and the first season of The X-Files, over my shoulder.

Progress continues apace - I have now only two full pages of Kane Mesmer to shade. The trick now is to try not to rush to finish it and make a hash of it all. After that I have to go back and fossick about and tart the whole thing up, which would be easier to do if the sodding cat wasn't lying on the keyboard all the time. (How can it possibly be comfortable with the corner of the keyboard jammed into one buttock?)

Kane Mesmer, page 41 (ish)

At any rate, I'd love to be able to post some of the pages of the confrontation scene I've been twiddling with today, but that would sort of give away the ending. So I'm going to post another page, sans text.

My favourite bits are, I'm sure, completely unimpressive to anyone else: just the pages that came out well. Nobody else is going to care how long I spent drawing all the little tiny bricks and roof tiles on that nicely-realised suburban semi-detached on page 46.

Perversely, I think that's one of the things I love about comic books. The stuff that takes the longest time to draw will be the least interesting in terms of the narrative and will probably be skipped over. In fact, given how long it takes to draw a comic, it's sort of strange to think how quickly most people read them. So if you're going to draw them, you'd better make damn sure you enjoy the process for its own sake, because you really can't expect your audience to sit and pore over the images one by one. If you've done it right, in a way, they ought to be racing to the end. It's a story: it should have momentum.  If the reader is tempted to come back a second time and linger over the images, that's a bonus, but you can't expect them to sit there thinking, "Wow, lookit all those tiny bricks. That must have taken forever. I am suitably impressed".

I'm not saying, of course, that nobody lingers over comic art - of course we do! I'm saying only that you can't guarantee that they will, so don't hold your breath waiting for people to go into raptures about the tiny bricks. It's not art for art's sake - it's art in the service of a narrative. It has to serve that function first and foremost.

Or I guess you could post them online and draw people's attention to them that way. Lookit all those tiny bricks!

Seriously, they took forever! Ignore the car, though. The car's crap.