start

Ok. This is my second blog. When I started my first (viewotron), I assumed it would evolve naturally, over time, into a public extension of myself and my process of working. But it never became that. I hadn't realize how much questioning myself was part of my process. If I was going to write honestly about cartooning, there would be lot of whining and self flagellation. It seemed unbecoming to whine about how hard it is to sit on your ass and draw. Since I could never get over that very first hurdle of making my internal struggles public, by blog never really became anything. Which brings me here. Well... that's not entirely true. The movie Julie and Julia brings me here.*

Watching the movie, I realized that I lost the last year of my life. I've created two mini comics. And I finished a movie that should have been finished at least a year earlier. But really, I lost it. I've started living like a normal person. Working an average job. Keeping a cleaner house. Going to the gym. Reading a lot more. Going out for drinks a couple times a week. Coming home and saying "I'm so tired I'm just going to cook dinner, watch the Daily Show and go to bed." I piddle around in my sketchbook so that I think I'm making forward movement but I'm not. So, in seeing a year go by with almost no forward movement, I asked myself what had changed in the last year.** I realized that one year ago I gave up on my big comic book.***

The book was a long fairy tale called The Beauty the Boy and The Sea. I'd worked on it for two years. It had always been there. It had been there when I came home from four different jobs in four different cities. It had been there through the end a major relationship and all the tumult that followed. It was, for a while, the only real constant in my life. That was a time of huge change for me, and that was, unfortunately, evident in the comic. The art varied from page to page, the authorial voice was inconsistent. When I began drawing it my only rule was that there would be no rules. No stiff page layout. No encumbering storytelling structure. No rules about how to draw. Every new idea I had got thrown in. I didn't plan anything. It was all in my head. I worked in a frenzy. I drew chunks of the story as they came to me. A page here. A page there. I went through dozens of theories about drawing and layout as I went. The result was that when I stood back, started putting it together an a dummy it was a wreck. The story got lost under style. And an uneven style at that.

So I had to let go of it. No use doing CPR on a dead patient. So it's been a year of working on other projects, and I think I am ready to get back to it. Start from scratch. Tell the story right. But this time I need to plan it out more, set goals and hold myself to them. That is where this blog comes in. I going to try this out in the open.

Julia Child made the trials and frustration of the kitchen seem effortless. Julie Powell's blog was filled with trail and error and frustration. Her blog was about mastering the art of being human. I'm not sure I'm up for that, but I can whine about life with the best of them. Powell got a fancy publishing contract and learned how to be a better human being. I just want to finish my comic book (insert dork snort).

Below are some of the pages from The Beauty the Boy and the Sea.

*Anyone who knows me might be surprised that I saw it, in the theater, at full price (I'm not a foodie, or a woman, nor do I have any girlfriend who would drag me to see it, but my friend Katie accused me of being close minded to movies about women, so I went to see it, fully intending to hate it, just to prover her wrong.). I saw it, and it inspired me. I'm as embarrassed for me as you are. Anyway... The movie is a parallel story between Julia Child and discovering French cuisine and coming to write her seminal book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and Julie Powell, a 30 year old ivy-league grad who works a shitty job, had friends that make her sweat with jealousy and has no anchor for her life until her husband suggests casually that she blog about food, and she sets about setting the rather insane goal of cooking her way through all 5oo+ recipes in 365 days. In the course of it she finds herself... blah blah blah.
**I am rearranging some of these revelations to make them logical than they really are. In fact much of this though process happened over the course of the last few weeks. Forgive my fudging of facts.
***I don't like the term graphic novel.
****My new working title is The Sailor and the Stone.