Nerd Doctor Comic Process: Thumbnails, Failure, Finish, Thoughts

The page sat around in the studio for an extended period of time, I'd pick it up and mess with it whenever I was blocked or or bored or happened to see it while the ink was drying on something else. It would get shuffled into some papers and disappear for months. 

The thumbnail is pretty typical for a gag strip of mine, mostly dialog breakdowns and pacing, a stab at a main character design. Most of the work went into the second image, the page I abandoned after I got sick of working on a lousy piece of paper that fought the pen and correction ink and won. I scanned the unfinished page, printed it out larger on several sheets, taped them together and reworked it on the light pad. If you look at the three pieces you can see changes in dialog, character design and incidental bits of business/art. Fielder's choice stuff, mostly, losing a textured background, adding a textured background, going more heavily into background detail or paring it down. The interesting thing about a comic page is how many choices the cartoonists is called upon to make over the course of production -- conceptualizing, writing, paneling out/pacing, character design, location design, lettering, drawing, inking, revising, detailing, adorning/texturing. Like driving a car, most of it is done subconsciously. Choice after choice, until it's done, maybe hundreds of little choices just for a simple joke strip. 

I can only imagine what connections and decisions are made in the brains of the great cartoonists -- do they sweat everything, do they just shrug it off? Are they barely conscious of the process, working on auto-pilot, mechanically, the motions and choices ingrained and "effortless"? Or do they white-knuckle through sections of the work, if not the whole thing? 

I white-knuckle everything, to this day. Even casually drawing Milk & Cheese, which should be second-nature but somehow isn't. I still surprise myself with a line or detail I didn't intend or expect, my brain wonders what the hell my fingers were thinking, my fingers wonder what the brain was trying to tell them in a language they couldn't understand. It's a battle, I am always fighting the page and it never feels comfortable, even on a throwaway one-pager I'm not getting paid for and nobody was waiting on. 

So why even do it? Because every finished page, even the failures or misfires, is a thing done. Someone might get a kick out of it. It gets the idea out of my head and onto paper and then I can let go of it and get to the next idea or five. Writing and drawing is difficult for me, but I really enjoy having written something, having drawn something. If I could only streamline the process, then I might really be onto something.