Artificial crunches

Okay, so last month, in the midst of terrifying depression and massive work uncertainty I decided to draw 14 pages of comics in about two weeks, pencils to inks. And after finishing pencils it meant inking all the pages in just 9 days, which is pretty fast for me, all things considered. Turning in those pages ASAP was important, of course, but I knew that finishing them SO fast wouldn't help me. I just decided that I want to finish this issue BEFORE December, so that after my birthday I could have a few days of comatose "vacation". Which I just finished, haha! And yes, I did all the pages in time. And it felt good. In many ways, it helped me to at least push the depression back.

Still, I wonder why I even need to do such things, knowing that it could be dangerous--

--because back in January of this year I did something similar to myself at the very end of working on a monstrous 6-oversized-issues long book. End of January was set as deadline for the final issue a long time ago, and by the time I actually started working on that issue, it was pretty obvious that no one was expecting me to push it to that time too hard, because publishing plans for that book were changing quite dramatically (see how it's not out yet even almost a year later :)) Still, I inflicted the end-of-January deadline on myself, and ended up inking 30+ pages in less than a month.  And in the process I burned out so bad that for the next half of the year I was unable to work stably at all. All for some bizarre sort of pride, I guess.

How do they say it?..

"WOOF!"

(Good thing is - this time around I was realizing the presence of danger and ended up setting a pretty comfortable schedule for myself. It was intense, but very satisfying, and I will try to turn this into something of a regular schedule for the next months.

Still, need to think and reflect more!)

(Also check out pencils for this page:)