So, I made an announcement on this site on 9-13-2008 that my “sabbatical” from comics was over, that I was, once again, going to make comics come hell or high water.

This was not a lie. Unfortunately, however, it has been slow going. I won’t go into details, because I don’t want to offer up any excuses, but let’s just say that picking a project has been difficult (the one I was going to pick conflicted with the writing of my novel from NaNoWriMo, which I am still finishing), and so has making time (didn’t I just say I wasn’t going to offer excuses?).

Today I begin the process of fixing the latter problem, which is making time, and hopefully I will have some decent output that I can show off before launching into a bigger project. Starting today, I get up at 7:00 AM, along with the wife, and while she gets ready for work I will be at the drawing table for an hour/hour and a half. It was hard, especially since I’ve been incredibly tired of late, but I made myself do it.

And how’d I do?

In high school, not having a story to draw didn’t matter much. I could just make it up as I drew along. Nowadays, however, it’s difficult to do that because I know more things and I think about my craftsmanship constantly. That, and I hate everything I draw (I spent too much time trying to draw a close-up of lips this morning… ugh). In any case, I find that stream-of-consciousness comics are not something I’m good at. I have to have a story, something to improvise on. Any small ideas I had ended up being garbage (to say the least). In the end, I came up with nothing but a bunch of doodles, and I didn’t have any fun.

I’ll try again tomorrow.