The long and the short of it

I have been doing comics for quite some time. For over thirty years, I worked for the magazine Massad, which was published six times a year, and for every issue, I would do six comics pages. Sometimes they would form a larger story that played itself out over years, but always, whenever I had concluded such a long comic (one of them ended up being over a hundred pages) I felt a compelling urge to return to concise, six page stories again.

And of course, after doing a few of those, I felt the need for a larger canvas once more. And so I kept going back and forth, long and short, over the decades.

But as everyone knows, the printed media came in a tighter and tighter spot over the years. Harmony Concepts, one of my largest publishers, collapsed.

And although Massad still exists, it became impossible for them to keep me on, due to the slinking market. Other publishers vanished as well, and I was forced to jump into something I knew totally nothing about: the internet, and start a website. That was some fifteen years ago now.

On the site, I published all my comic work, among a host of other things.

But after re-booting the site two years ago, I thought it would be nice to present some new pages to the members, and I set out to make one of what was meant to be one of my larger stories.

Man, was that a mistake! After only five or six pages, a massive writers block presented itself, and, after not having done this for so many years, I just found myself frozen at the drawing board. In my despair, I started another one: same story (pardon the pun).

For years, these two rudiments were just there on the site, going nowhere, standing out like a sore thumb. Then I remembered what used to work for me in the past, and I decided to try my hand on a short comic, in this case, a very short one, only four pages. And to my amazement, it worked! I am now working on a second one (see the sketches below), and I hope that through the coming months, I can build up a compilation of new short comics which hopefully people will enjoy! Fingers crossed!