Q&A 5: telling the truth and tiny rules

Brian Durcan writes:

"I saw one of your live streams (during the recent amorphous blob of time in which it's hard to know when specific things happened) and you said something that stuck with me.  "Your pencils have to tell the truth." 

I'm wondering, do you have any other aphorisms like this one that might be helpful? Either for drawing or for writing."

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"It can't be easy all the time"
"There is a price for getting ahead"

When drawing pages, I tend to have a few weeks of plain sailing creatively, before I start to feel that things are getting difficult. So I try to remind myself that this is normal. It's important to recognise the exact point where you begin to flag, and ask why, My tendency is to gallop ahead with a project, and exhaust myself, then wonder why I'm exhausted and making lots of mistakes, because "things were going so well!"

"Don't show anyone too soon"

An idea is never as exciting to me as when it's new. I can sometimes feel almost drunk with the excitement of it. But I have found, historically, that while this excitement can be contagious, the reality is that letting a good new idea out into the world on day one is a bit like asking your two year-old child to drive a taxi for a living. No matter how much you love them, they will crash pretty fast. 

When the excitement fades, a lot of ideas reveal themselves to be a. unfixable or b. a lot more boring/derivative than you first thought. More than once, a friend has served up one of my mad ideas, revealed over a good dinner, back to me, as if it was their own, a few months later. They'd forgotten where it came from, and I'd pretty much forgotten I had it and told them about it because three days later, I'd realised that I didn't want to do anything with it. You can't take offence, I'd successfully sold them a pint of snake oil. I'm sure I've done exactly the same thing in reverse.

"Your pencils have to tell the truth"

This is a good one, and one that when my concentration goes (see "there is a price for getting ahead"), I tend to forget. Pencilling comics is a mysterious art. Some people can draw a few shapeless blobs indicating a vague position of page elements, and ink out a perfect comic on top of that. Others will render a rough pencil outline, a tighter set of pencils on top of that, then something that looks like finished inks (and would certainly pass editorial muster as such) before then painstakingly rendering final inks. 

No approach is wrong, but your under-drawing (as it is called in manga) has to contain all the information you need to finish the page to your own satisfaction.

It's easy to draw something full of energy, crazy facial expressions, something that feels great, but that it is absolutely impossible for me to render neatly in a final version. While small elements of it are superior, most it is, in every case, a terrible mess. Character proportions are off. Backgrounds and perspective are a squiggle. Eyes are huge. 

I doubt there is a working artist who has not taken a particularly vivid "rough" for a page and tried to ink it, quickly realising that there is very little that is useful there. So I have to tell the truth, which is that I am  going to have to finish the page, and in my comics, that requires a consistency within the work.

"Who is this for?"

The answer to this question can never just be "people who like comics." My wooliest projects have been my least well-received. It's 100% fine to please yourself entirely, but it's also entirely possible that no one else will be interested. The longer I go on, having generated a huge pile of books with my name on them, the more I ask myself "who is this for?"

I'm sure on a different day I'd think of a completely different set of aphorisms! Your rules have to be the ones that work for you.

"Choose your gurus carefully"

There's a very famous piece of instruction by the cartoonist Wally Wood, "22 Panels That Always Work", a quick guide to illustrating comic scripts with boring, dialogue-heavy panels. Comic artists go on about it all the time. I think, when considering these rules, it's important to remember that towards the end of his life, Wally Wood said: "if I had it all to do over again, I'd cut off my hands."