Retrospective: Delilah Dirk and the Pillars of Hercules, Part 2

Here is the second part of my retrospective look back at DD3, or Delilah Dirk and the Pillars of Hercules!

Click here to read it!

As with the previous instalment, I'm hosting the actual post over on my own Secret Blog, for a variety of reasons I mentioned in the previous post.

I hope you enjoy it, and that I'm not embarrassing myself. As with all of these retrospective posts, the standard warning applies: I am going to speak frankly and critically about my own work, and if you think you might not want to hear that, please set this post aside. I would not want to hear Mike Mignola be critical about THE AMAZING SCREW-ON HEAD. I love that comic, and I don’t want to hear the slightest sour comment on it, even from Mike Mignola. What’s that, Mike? You’re unhappy with some aspect of that gem of a comic? Well, respectfully, shove it up your ass, you’re wrong, and if you try to tell me one more thing about it I’ll walk into the ocean.

If similar feelings might possess you in this situation, Dear Reader, consider yourself warned.

- - - - - - 

This instalment opens with the following realization:

My model for this whole “retrospective” series of posts is THE CALVIN AND HOBBES TENTH ANNIVERSARY BOOK, wherein Bill Watterson accompanies select strips with commentary and insight. Since it’s been a while, I thought I’d revisit that book with the current context in mind. I encountered this page, which I must have read many times. Unfortunately, I’d obviously never taken its message to heart.

Watterson's text:

This is a page from "A Nauseous Nocturne," a poem I did as a special feature for the first treasury collection. The treasuries reprinted all the cartoons that the annual books had already reprinted from the newspaper, so I named the treasuries The Essential, The Authoritative, and The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, because the books were obviously none of these things. In an effort to give the treasuries more reason for their existence, I took it upon myself to draw extra stories and poems for them. Books offer considerably more design freedom than newspapers, and I took advantage of the opportunity to paint all the illustrations in watercolor, which permitted various subtleties and effects that I couldn't get in the Sunday strips. Unfortunately, this was an insane amount of extra work on top of the newspaper strip and the other books.

Insisting, as I do, that I write and draw everything myself, this extra work kept me in a perpetual deadline panic and it wore me into the ground. This exhausting schedule contributed to the need for a sabbatical several years later.

It gives me a new appreciation of Bill Watterson. Hearing him describe his workload, either he was putting a lot of work into the daily strips (I imagine lots of writing and sketching, and/or revision after revision after revision), or there was a lot of ancillary work involved, or Watterson looked after himself so well — he had such a healthy idea of work-life balance — that his threshold for being over-taxed would be low compared to the common view of such things among cartoonists working today.

Regardless, I think Watterson models a healthy approach to his work that I try to emulate. Certainly, with DD3, I end up feeling the effects of overwork, as we will see.

- - - - - - 

Don't worry, it all ends happily… in next week's instalment. :)

I hope you're all well and happy.

Until next week,
I remain,
walking into the ocean,

TC