Process: Meet the Panel That Killed Me

The final Eltingville Club story was my attempt to out-do all that had come before in the comic. The idea of having the characters destroy a comic convention had been in my mind for a long time, and I figured wrecking the San Diego Comic Con would be a fitting send-off for the club and the comic. Unfortunately, I was going through a very serious -- perhaps peak -- period of impostor syndrome in my life and career, and in trying to outdo myself I wore myself out, damaged my drawing hand, screwed up the book's schedule and dug a financial pit we're still dealing with all these years later. Huzzah.

I think I blew a year on this book, largely because of overworking panels like this one. Not only was there a lot going on, but I kept reworking it, reworking it, and reworking it to death. I was so anxious and worried about people not liking the wrap-up I wouldn't finish it, I just gave myself more pointless revisions to do, more over-detailed backgrounds to noodle on and more revisions to try to make things perfect. Which is nuts, because I'm not a "perfect" cartoonist, I never turn in work as clean as someone like Charles Burns or Jaime Hernandez or all the other people I'm in awe of.  But I'm also a fan of creators who work less clean and precise, but I won't give myself a break when I do anything I think looks sloppy or off.

I'm always losing control of my drawings, either by not planning things out well enough due to impatience or in letting my anxieties dictate changing my plans (a lot of overcompensating can kick in during the process). I break promises to myself (don't overdo this part, don't ink that before tightening the pencils), I become overly critical (that sucks), I work when I'm too tired trying to finish instead of resting up to complete something. And I micro-manage. I get worked up over details that no one will notice, especially in the way we read comics panels, but when I stare at the lines I fixate on what's wrong with them and how they stick out and show off my incompetence. I often don't know when to stop or leave something alone (also true of my life in general).

I think I spent two weeks on this panel. Something awful like that. By the time it was finished, I had done patches of the Ecto-1 car for Sarah to drop in digitally -- a real pain in the everything because of how the car is covered by figures. I also re-worked the Slimer figure. And a lot of other parts of the piece. That's why I haven't tried to sell this page, it's in pieces. A lot of pages from this issue are heavy with digital and/or physical paper patches because I got too worked up over something. I have a page of nothing but little heads of the characters that had to be dropped into the last three pages of the comic because I over-worked the inks so much the textures muddied everything to black. Whee!

In typical Eltingville form, the collection didn't make back it's costs or make much of a blip. The time for the book to have come out would have been the early 2000's, which is when I started planning the last two issues. The first three pages of the comic shop story were done at a pace of one per year back then, But the situation with my publisher SLG became untenable, and working on the animated pilot turned me off from dealing with the characters, so I didn't wrap things up until years later after I had moved over to Dark Horse. By that time the market was flooded, and a lot of my readers had moved on. It was a costly lesson -- and one that came later in life than I would have liked.

That being said, I'm pretty happy with of a lot of the material in the last two Eltingville stories. And those folks that liked the wrap-up/collection, really liked it. I can see where I went overboard and self-sabotaged, where I wasted time and effort, and where I worked against the pages. It is what it is, and Eltingville was about escalation and excess (like a lot of my work, for good and bad). And I'm happy with the collection. I'm glad it's done. It's the only solo series of mine that I wrapped up on my own terms. I just wish I made a bargain for better terms.

If you run through the images in reverse order, you'll get a sense of the my process in getting it done. There were other steps, I don't seem to have scans of some rough layouts and drawings done at the beginning steps. But it gives a pretty good sense of the noodling and reworking and obsessing that went on. And kind of looks like a rising swarm of ants filling up the panel. (Edited to add a rough of the Ecto-1 I found after first posting all the images above).

FYI, there's one "real" person depicted in the crowd among the cosplayers, shoppers and red shirts. Someone a lot of us associate with Comic Con, and who draws lots of crowd scenes without sweating it, now that I think about it. That's pretty funny. I never picked up on that before.

Heh.

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