Inspired by and Anton and Kazu I’m going to have a go at taking you through the process of making an editorial illustration. This was a job I did for Tracks which is one the more notorious Australian surfing magazines. The brief was to illustrate 24 installments of this outrageous space opera called “Cosmic Surf Wars” by the gonzo surf journalist DC green. I had to do one of these a month for two years.

DC sends me the copy and I read through looking for two things. The first is a general tone or impression for the piece, which becomes the starting point for the illustration. This was the last installment of the story, something like coda, in which DC positions the hero, Zak Carver, on an alien planet with amazing waves to live out his life in soul surfer’s solitude. This is a recurring utopia in surf lore and it is good copy for me because I prefer to draw landscapes rather than character drama. I have this strange obsession with what I call the line-up shot in surf photography. The line up shot is a photo that shows how life on land connects with the experience if life in the water, out the back. It’s a sort of a quiet, still moment that replicates the feeling when you’re in the car park and you get that first glance of the waves and get this excited hope that today might be one of the good days. When I read this piece I knew that I was going to be drawing a line-up shot, with some alien flora in the foreground, an old shack and some grinding barrels out in the water. Nothing really groundbreaking in terms of contemporary illustration but it’s important to remember the context for the image. This isn’t Juxtapoz, it’s a surfing mag and pictures of grinding barrels are the reason people pick up surfing magazines in the first place. Here’s a lineup shot of Bells. Grinding.

I read through the copy again and on the second time I’m looking for details. In this case I had, floating jelly fish, red ocean, right hand point break, bulbous fruit, naked midgets with red skin, skulls by the water, an and old shack with a thatched roof. I’m actually terrible with details and I’ve had a few experiences in the past when I’ve sent the finished art to DC only to find that the my character designs don’t match his descriptions or some important details has been missed, like, for example a character has lost and arm in episode 8 but I’ve forgotten about that and I’ve drawn him with two arms in episode 15.  So, the professional thing to do is to scour the copy with a pen underlining all the details that may affect the illustration, and even then I try to send a photo of the pencils to get the OK from DC before I start inking.

The older I get and the more time I spend doing comics and illustration the more I recognise that time spent in preparation is time well spent. A couple of years ago I used to dive straight in, scribbling like a mad bastard on the illustration board before I had even had a think about what I wanted to do. Working like this I tended to make poor decisions early on in the process and a lot of time an energy was then spent working around those bad decisions.  Now I try to thumbnail out at least 6 to 8 draft compositions, really quickly on the back of the board. I just splurge them out without too much thought, testing out different camera angles, figure postures, perspectives etcetera. Then I go off and do something else for a while and come back to my thumbnails with fresh eyes at which point it’s usually really easy to pick the best one.

The one I picked was a composition that I copied from an old photo of some guys loading cans of milk onto a boat. I found the photo in the Women’s Weekly book of the Australian Bush: Then and Now, which beats Google images as a source for reference any day of the week. I particularly like how there is an old shack in the corner where I imagined my surf shack to be.

Other reference material came into the illustration, namely a panel from Asterix and the Great Divide, which has some awesome otherworldly thatched-roof buildings and a panel of a hand that I found in some god-awful shoju manga. Shoju manga is excellent source of reference for feminine hand drawings because they use close ups of hands a lot to demonstrate those intimate romantic dramas. Even the male characters have feminine looking hands and they always seem to be impeccably drafted.

The last reference that I used was a page of comics that I found in an Indie Spinner Rack anthology by a guy called Jamie Burton. I feel like our art is a little bit similar although he is infinitely more innovative and confident. Anyway. I liked the way he draws plants rocks and dirt so I shamelessly aped it.

At first I was reluctant to show you the references I’d used because it seems like cheating or something. Maybe it would make me look better if people believed that I just pulled all of this stuff out of my arse, but… you know… I didn’t. I understand that a lot of illustrators and image makers would frown upon this sort of thing and I’m fine with that. My rationale is that I don’t really see myself as an illustrator, nor am I particularly interested in illustration. I’m a cartoonist and therefore, the “art” that I make is the story that I tell. Making images is not something that I consider to be at the core of my “art”, more, it’s just some annoying and tedious stuff I have to do in order to have my story told. When you think like I do then it makes perfect sense to ape, steal and copy any thing you see if you think it’s going to help get those stories told. I look at illustration jobs like these as opportunities to extend my repertoire of image making techniques, a means to a completely separate end, not as an artistic project in and of itself. A lot of illustration is fine art, I really believe that, but mine certainly isn’t. Ultimately this project involved drawing sexy female ‘primitives’ with coloured skin and flying jellyfish and seeing as though I’m aware that James Cameron already did it, badly, then getting all prickly about artistic integrity just feels a bit silly.

When my composition is decided upon I flip the board over and rule up the page with a light blue Primsa-color pencil. As a rule with my process the original should be no less than double the size of the printed picture, and often I draw at considerably bigger sizes. So this drawing was ruled-up at A3 size for an A4 magazine page. From there I make my first marks on the page which are always these sweeping strokes of the pencil, preferably done at the standing desk, which delineate the major elements of the composition in an ultra-minimal, blocky 3d form.  If it looks wrong I tweak it until I like the composition. This is the best point to make changes because the decisions that I make from here on in have other elements built on top of them. Things become very difficult if those decisions are the wrong ones.

Then it’s time to sit down and start drawing. As have I said in earlier posts drawing is really, really hard, and for my part it isn’t much fun. I get a lot of pleasure when I have done a good drawing but that doesn’t mean I enjoyed drawing it. In the early stages there is a lot of scribbling going on. I figure that I have to draw a line about 12 times before I draw one that I like. There is a lot of repetitive movement of my hand and then some light erasing, a redraw, then some more erasing and another redraw, until I’m happy with the line. Almost every great draftsperson that I know uses a similar technique. I have watched animators draw with a light blue, then with a red, then finally with a lead pencil, other cartoonists like Charles Burns draw several versions of a drawing on different layers of tracing paper, refining and perfecting the drawing with each visit to the light-box. I guess that the most important lesson that I have learned as a draftsman is to interrogate every mark that is made with your pencil. The first line that you draw is such a tyrannical character. Each mark has its own survival mechanisms and will constantly appeal to your inherent laziness. It says “why don’t you leave me as I am”, or, “go on, save yourself the effort”, or the old “you’ll never got a line as good as me no matter how long you work on it.” But of course each line is a conniving and manipulative bastard and if you don’t fight it you end up with a gammon drawing. My way of fighting this tyranny is to draw several lines, then rub them all out, then to draw several more a little harder this time, then rub them out, and do it again. Eventually, elimination allows the best line to survive. It’s just as tyrannical as the first line, but at least you know that it’s the best of a dubious bunch.

Drawing an illustration like this usually takes me about 10 hours of work. I can do it all in one go if there is a deadline looming, but I prefer to do it in smaller burst over a week. This allows for what I think is the most important part of my process, which is cooling off and refreshing my gaze by looking at other things for a while. Maybe some people have instant good taste but for my part I am never able to tell whether a drawing is any good while I’m working on it. I need distance, and I get that by doing other things. So, my number one rule of cartooning is to never ever ink a drawing on the same day that I pencilled it. It works well and forces me to get onto beginning a job well before it’s due. In this case I started the picture on Thursday and added to it on Friday, Saturday and Sunday before finishing off and inking on Monday (wild weekend huh?). In the in-between periods I put the drawing on the wall, look at it from far away and look at it in the mirror, look at it through the iphone camera, during which time all of the gammon bits will hopefully present themselves to be corrected.

One of the major corrections that I made here was to alter the position of the girl in the foreground on the left. The reason that I made the change was a political one. I wanted to talk about this in this process post because the politics of image making is something that not enough illustrators actively engage.

Depictions of women and women’s bodies is a contested issue within my drawing practice. I’m constantly feeling the obligation to draw hot chicks, especially when I’m working for surfing magazines. While it’s something that I’m not particularly good at I’m acutely aware that it’s something that appeals to the editorial staff and the readers, and often the copy that I have to work with calls for some buxom pin-up with balloon boobs and an airhead expression on my face. I loathe drawing hot chicks. Not because it’s really difficult (which it is), but because it’s clichéd and boring and tends to be offensive to anyone with half decent politics. One of the things I appreciate most about a lot of visual communicators if their ability to show nuanced beauty in a place that I have never thought to look for it before, and one of the things I find most pedestrian about a lot of modern illustration is the idea that the best place to look for beauty is in between the boobs of some pin-up girl.

People get obsessed with certain images and can get an extreme amount of pleasure from creating and recreating their particular form of fetish. This is rampant in the illustration scene. Some people like drawing heroic dudes with dynamic anatomy, some like drawing Cadillacs, or guitars, or skulls and there seems to be an ever hungry audience for the images. My fetish forms are breaking waves and Victorian terrace houses. I could draw them all day. Hot chicks are obviously the worlds number one fetish form. I know of artists whose pleasure in art comes from churning out hot naked chick after hot naked chick, and by god there are a lot of them. That’s fine. It doesn’t worry me too much, but for my part I don’t think my dwindling energy is best spent putting more images of hot naked chicks into the world. I’ve always leaned toward ugliness in my art. I like ugly people, ruddy complexions, fat arses and awkward teeth. Give me Basil’s ladies over Boris’ any day of the week.

So the copy that I had to work with was this “The local women are petite and gorgeous. There is no marriage on New Dense. Men and Women enjoy non-jealous friendships and sexual relationships with whomever they please. It took me many weeks before I became so horny, I finally yielded to the firm yet gentle persuasions of three lithe sisters” and DC had requested that the sexy naked midgets be in the illustration. So at first I did the whole body of a sexy naked midget in the bottom corner and to be honest I was very happy with the drawing, but for the next 24 hours the image of that faceless female body made me feel uncomfortable. The drawing was fine but the image was wrong. In the end what made me change it was the amazing illustration Sammy Harkham did on the cover of Kramers Ergot 7 which I have sitting by my drawing table. Now, here’s the sort of images of women that I want to put out into the world. Sweet post-apocalyptic women with grubby bare feet and dumpy arses. These women are my kind of sexy. Two seconds looking at this made the dumb drawing I did seem obnoxious and predictable. Time to get out the old eraser, rub that shit out and redraw the sexy midgets as something a little more real.

I’m happy with the changes that I made too. The women are naked but not overly sexualised and they look as if they are just as capable of cutting of Zack Carvers doodle as they are of stroking it. I often imagine what the growing population of female surfers think about the way women are represented in the surfing media. Things are improving in great leaps and bounds but there is still an uncomfortable gulf between the images of women that are presented as objects of grommet’s desire and the women that are presented as objects of a grommet’s sporting admiration. Women that surf have the gravel in their guts to compete for waves with the hyper-masculine knob heads that you meet out in the water. These women have freckles and reef scars and salty hair and this awesome steely gaze. They don’t give a fuck if anyone thinks they look sexy because on that last wave they got shacked like a motherfucker. I guess I was trying to draw them.

I included all this stuff because it’s as important as any other part of the process. Making an image takes time and energy and if we aren’t really reflexive about what it is we are actually doing then what’s the point? Putting the same old images into the already image saturated world then we are just wasting our time and our precious creative energy.

I slowly make three or four passes over the drawing, tightening things up, fixing wonky bits and figuring out exactly what is going to be black and what is going to be white. The girl on the right’s hair was pretty annoying. It’s important for the reader to be able to regognise the various forms in the drawing so a lot of time is spent simplifying things. If you are using a cleanline technique it’s easier at the drawing stage because you know that the colours will help differentiate forms but if you are working in black and white or in a more underground comix style then you spend a lot of energy managing clutter on the page by shifting areas of light and dark around. Because I’m unsure of myself as a draftsman I usually try to replicate things exactly as they’ll appear when the inks are down, which usually means a final pass over the drawing blacking in the blacks with graphite. This is time consuming and probably detrimental to the drawing because I’m pretty sure that it robs the whole thing of this mystical spontaneous energy that you see in the work of cartoonists like Paul Pope or Mandy Ord, but I’m an insecure idiot and I can’t bear the though of having to make a decision with the brush in my hands so I do all this tedious planning beforehand.

When the brush comes out it’s a relief. I put a good podcast on and just enjoy the sensation of working with ink. There’s more on the inking process in a post I made previously.

I read in an old Comics Journal that Dan Clowes describes the final stage of inking as a battle between black and white. I like that. It’s a good feeling to get out the white stuff and correct things because it makes you feel like a small god, completely in control of pattern of light and dark. I usually use gouache for corrections but for this illustration I used some white inks I bought. Generally white inks suck because they aren’t opaque on the first coat and you have to go over them, which was the case here. Gouache is opaque and it dries fast but it sucks because it’s chunky and terrible to draw over, especially with a nib. I’m still looking for the ultimate correction fluid. I’ve heard the seppos talk about something called Process White but I‘ve never seen it in Australia.

After all of the corrections and a thorough attack with the eraser to get rid of all the pencil lines I scan that sucker. My drawings are always too big for my scabby $100 scanner so I scan them in six to eight pieces then use the photomerge tool on Photoshop to assemble them. I scan as greyscale at 300 dpi which is usually fine because the drawings are way bigger than the print size. So when they get resized they end up being at something more like 600dpi, which is more than any printer’s resolution. I bump all of the greys out using the threshold tool, which converts all of the pixels to either solid black or solid white and then immediately use the magic want tool with the tolerance set to 0 to select all of the black and cut and paste it to a new layer. Some people think this process is crazy and prefer to use levels to bump out all of the greys and then use multiply on the line-work layer, but I never figured out how to get this to work properly for me. Well, this is among the most boring paragraphs I’ve ever written. Maybe the cavalier thing to do would be to follow it up with a photo of some stationery.

Colouring illustrations if the most agonising and intimidating parts of the whole process for me. Making an image is a tactical assault on the senses of your audience, and colour is the vanguard of your assault. It compels an immediate emotional reaction from the viewer and if you get it wrong you will discourage them from engaging with the other elements of your image like the form, the composition and the content. If there is some dodgy drawing or a bit of unbalance in the composition then often it takes a good long look for anyone to spot it. Fuck up the colours, however, and everyone will know it the instant they see it, and not only that, you might as well have scrawled “you are a useless knob-head” on the illustration because every time you look at the drawing you will be instantly reminded of your failure.

How hard can it be though right? All you have to do to get the colours right is just pick some colours that you like and start smearing them around, right? I think that a colour is like a strong smell. When you first encounter a strong smell you feel completely overwhelmed but it’s only a few minutes before you become distracted and the smell fades into the sensory ambience.  Half an hour later you couldn’t consciously isolate the smell it if you tried to. You’ve been sitting in your bedroom playing Left for Dead 2 in you filthy socks and your yellow y-fronts, farting and burping and pickling in your own stench, you leave the room for ten minutes to go make a pot of tea, then when you go back into your room after acclimatising to the outside air and you can’t believe your own putrescence. Colour is like that. You can only truly know whether your pallete is a winner when you approach it with fresh eyes, and on deadline day, when you’ve been staring at the bastard of a thing for 6 hours, you probably won’t have a clue what you are doing.

I’ve always preferred working on paper rather than working in a digital environment but seeing as I never went to art school and didn’t really study art in high-school I find more tangible colouring tools like watercolours, pastels, and paints foreign and terrifying. It’d be fine if I did the colour work at the start of the process but because it comes at the end I invariably find myself colouring on deadline day. I had a few goes at working with watercolour under this sort of pressure and it always ends in tears. I don’t know how to mix paints properly and my colour theory is non-existent. So, in situations like this I fall back to good old Photoshop because it’s the creative space most forgiving for bumbling fools who don’t know what they are doing. Apple-Z is my salvation.

Again. I shamelessly take reference for my colour palette. I don’t feel the need to justify myself in this regards because the reality is that every palette possible has been used by someone at some point. All artists borrow palletes. When you spy a combination that appeals to you then you should get out your camera and take it for your own. I often take colours directly from spray paint colour charts because the limitations appeal to me, but in this case I took direction from Carol Tyler’s incredible cover to Best American Comics 2008 and the packaging from a box of digestive biscuits that I had on my desk. Packaging of cleaning products are really great examples of really refined colour palettes. These designers know their shit and the marketing people seem to really understand the emotive signifiers of colour. So when I see a packet of dishwashing liquid that gives me a wistful feeling from childhood then I get out my camera and steal that shit.

Once I’ve picked a few colours I spend a little bit of time doing what an oil painter or a watercolour painter would call a colour study. Photoshop allows me to do it under the actual linework. It’s just a quick mock up of the colour composition. I try to make all of my decisions here, in this frantic few minutes at the beginning, because as soon as I become acclimatised to the pallete then the decisions I make are ill informed. If I keep changing my mind as I work then invariably I end up de-saturating and simplifying the colour until all I have is grey brown mud. Case in point, here’s one of many pictures I destroyed with the desaturate slider:

From here the process is pretty simple. I don’t like my stuff to be heavily produced. I kind of prefer to leave things flat and simple and let the old fashioned linework do the heavy lifting. Also, by this stage I’m probably sick of noodling on a computer and keen to finish the fucken thing so I can get on to my own comics. It’s pretty simple from here on. I just schlepp the colours around with the Wacom stylus. It’s no different to colouring-in at primary school. I put that gradient on the sky (doing skies is the only time I’ll ever use a gradient ) and I put a few semi opaque transparencies over the top of the colour to make it all the tones sit more comfortably together, but the general philosophy with Photoshop is one of restraint. I‘m very suspicious of filters, crazy brushes and anything that feels like a trick. As a general rule, if it’s something that doesn’t feel like a digital version of a more traditional non-digital process then I avoid it. Photoshop us like a pit bull puppy, it will twist your arm off and eat you alive if you don’t make a point of setting boundaries very early on.

That’s it. At this point, I’m exhausted and the work is done. I save a flattened version and send it off to the editor of Tracks. It’s always anti climactic to send work away via email. Usually editorial staff don’t have the time to get much feedback to freelancers and readers don’t seem to make much noise. Kind of feels like throwing a paper plane off the top of a skyscraper. The deadline anxiety slowly seeps out of me over several hours in the afternoon, I stuff the original art into a dog eared pile of thick paper and go for a walk.

Two months later the magazine arrives in the mail wrapped in transparent plastic and addressed to me. I tear it open and furiously flick through the glossy pages. I find it and inhale deeply as I look at it for the first time with truly fresh eyes in the context of a magazine chock full of competetive imagery. I look at it for ages. I think about how I would have done it differently given the time again. I take careful note of every single one of the awful mistakes.

Fifty two pages into BLUE. Some days I still have energy left for the sketchbook.

I’m pencilling the first 50 pages of my book at the moment. It’s agonisingly slow. I’m eight pages in, and I’ve lost hope of ever seeing light the end of the pencil-work tunnel. The word ‘drawing’ is all too apt if you ask me. I’m hunched over the drawing table with my claw hand furiously moving over the picture plane literally coaxing the shapes that I want out of a tangle of leaden lines. I am a country fisherman. There is a lump of rotten meat attached to a string, which I am slowly drawing toward myself in the hope that the gnarled form of a comic-book yabbie might be lured from the graphite murk on the bottom of the dam. Pencilling comics takes patience, physical stamina and the ability of defer self-loathing.

I stay sane by playing little games with page composition and trying to make things formally interesting. This provides a small amount of respite from the unbelievably tedious project of drawing pictures but in the end I have to grit my teeth and return to what is, without doubt, a horrible job.

It all eventually pays off because late this year I will allow myself the pleasure of inking these pages. Laying down ink is pleasurable for a number of reasons. The first is the simple tactile pleasure of using a brush. The mechanical pencils I draw with feel like uncooked spaghetti, the waxy non-photo blue pencils are like cheap cheese gone hard but my Winsor and Newton Series 7 is like rich, smooth chocolate mousse, freshly made with the best ingredients. A good brush, good ink and smooth ivory board make magic together, and they make magic most often when I’m working over really tight pencils.

The second kind of pleasure, and perhaps more of a lasting one, is the feeling that the agony of drawing is finished. The brush works as an eraser as well as a mark-maker as it rubs-out all traces of indecision and insecurity that are implicit in my pencil drawings. With the brush in my claw I make everyone believe that I had always known the exact arrangement of light and dark, that the vision came to me complete. Laying down the ink is so intoxicating that it for a while I forget how difficult drawing is for me. I make myself believe that the pencil-work was the effortless game of a distracted genius.

Drawing with a pencil is about finding new ways to see. Inking over a drawing is about convincing yourself that you’ve always seen that way.

Sometimes I worry about myself. It’s just not healthy for a cartoonist to be this impressionable.

When I’ve been reading Tom Gauld I want to make panels large and characters small. When I’ve been reading Crumb I want to draw neurotic lines with a rapidograph. When I’ve been hanging out with my mate Michael Fikaris I want to try and render the haphazardness of stoner conversation in comics. When I’m reading Jason Lutes I want to try to draw something impossible, like what it feels like to live in pre-war Germany and hear jazz for the first time. As an artist I’m a vile, parasitic sponge. I soak up anything I lay my eyes on and then try feebly to squeeze it back out of myself. Although there are a lot of elements in this pathetic comic-nerd malaise the thing that worries me the most is the thought that I might come off like a Chris Ware wannabe. A poor-man’s version of my hero. An unbelievably poor-man’s version. A hobo’s even.

I’m sure this happens to other cartoonists and there are some really fertile grounds for discussion around this problem. I feel like there’s a genuine tension in the development of the art form that must have arisen in the 40’s and 50’s after Eisner and in the 60’s after Kirby.  When we live in the shadow of great cartoonists like these we are compelled to recognise that the language we are working with has been changed forever and we have to choose how to behave when we find ourselves staring at that next blank piece of paper. The question shouts out at us: Do we use the storytelling tools that these contemporary masters created? Or, do we choose not to use them for fear that our work will look, in the short term at least, like a cheap rip-off? I guess that depends on what sort of cartoonist you are.

Observe these two cartoonists. They share a studio in Footscray:

Mz Tibbetts likes art comics. She’s interested in outrageous unruly comics that offer a window into someone’s lonely phychosis. She likes Sammy Harkham, Jim Woodring, Martin tom Diek. She thought Spigelman was better before Maus and she bought Kramer’s 7 on pre-order.

Of course she loves Chris Ware. He’s a classic insane genius. How could she not be seduced that bleak American Midwest that lives outside Ware’s studio door and what appears to be a fathomless self-loathing? She loves how Ware manages to channel his neuroses and furthermore, she see’s the perfection of those diagrammatic pages as an indication of genuine obsessive compulsion. As far as Mz Tibbetts is concerned Chris Ware is among the finest of fine artist. She knows about that sort of thing. She grew up in Fitzroy.

Mz Jobberts, the other cartoonist, is a different sort of fish entirely. She came to comics because she is one of those people who lays awake at night aching just to communicate with other human beings. It doesn’t matter how. She’s tried poetry, prose, clarinet but comics have a certain communicative ‘pop’ that attracts her. Her favourite comics tend to be the master storytellers, creators that have interesting things to say before they even sit down to write. She likes Eisner, Sacco, Satrapi, Shaun Tan and she’s owned three different copies of the complete Maus. She’s just as interested formalist aspects of cartooning as her friend, Mz Tibbetts, but her interest in form lies in her appreciation of careful deliberate communication. She likes Chris Ware for these reasons even though she’s not really interested in much of what he has to say. She’s a bit bored of stories about the cruelty of children, the loneliness of modern life, and the bleakness of modernity but, having said that, every time Chris Ware approaches this material she gets a flutter of excitement purely because of the way has communicated these things.

To sum up their differences in a sentence, Mz Jobberts finds comics more rewarding when they communicate clearly and deliberately and Mz Tibbetts finds them more rewarding when things are more muddy and uncertain. They both love Mr Ware despite these differences.

Mz Tibbets spends her time trying to channel her own kind of madness through a lack of structure. Strange and profound things happen when she draws because the never thought to follow the rules. Mz Jobberts is the exact opposite. As far as she’s concerned the rules and the structure are there to help her realise a well thought out intent. She often goes back to the masters for reference, to see how they dealt with a certain problem, which is something that Mz Tibbetts scoffs at because Mz Tibbetts prefers it when problems aren’t dealt with in the most tried and true approach.

Here’s what happens though. Mz Tibbetts finds a copy of Chris Ware’s book Quimby Mouse at the City Library and takes it back to the studio. She leafs through it with great pleasure but after running her eyes over those pages she goes back to her work with the same approach she always takes. Her way of making comics. Her work hasn’t really been affected by the book. The story is different when Mz Jobberts leafs through the book, however. When Mz Jobberts devours Quimby Mouse the results are truly seismic. There aren’t many comic books in existence that contribute more to the lexicon of cartooning language than this book and when she sits down at the drawing table a little bit later her approach has been irrevocably changed. It’s not that she looks at Ware’s pages and says to herself, “I want to do that”, more that she realises that the vocabulary of comics at her fingertips has just expanded and she want to use these new additions to her cartooning lexicon to communicate her own message. She is now working in a post Chris Ware environment and she can’t pretend that the language of cartooning has not been altered forever. That would seem to her to be a sort of dishonesty. One thing is certain: The city library will write multiple overdue notices pertaining to that beautiful volume before they see it again.

Mz Jobberts’ next comic strip comes off of the press and Mz Tibbetts comments with a perceptible scorn that the work feels a bit like a Chris Ware strip. It is clear that in Mz Tibbetts’ eyes this comic is somehow less pure because of the obvious influence. Mz Jobberts blushes. She felt she made an honest approached to the strip but sees now, how to others it might come across as dishonest or uncreative. The area between adopting cartooning techniques and stealing style is a grey one.

I’m a bit closer to figuring this whole thing out now. Mz Jobberts’ conundrum is possibly better perceived when given a historical context. There must have been moments in the short history of cartooning like the aftermath of the great Kirby earthquake for example, or the seismic events known as the Underground Comics Movement, when accusations of style-biting came far too easily. The first people to adopt new innovations were seen as try-hards and imitators, and perhaps a lot of them were, but as time passed the innovations became less a part of the style of Kirby or Crumb and more a part of a broader practice of cartooning. If you draw a panel border without a ruler these days you’re not likely to be thought of as a Crumb imitator but maybe you would have been had you drawn it in 1969.  This is how our language evolves. This cycle has made cartooning great and will continue to improve it. It’s unfortunate that those that are the quick to recognise and employ a new cartooning vocabulary are the ones who find themselves at the mercy of the style-biting inquisition.

I’ll finish up with one last thought. One of the fundamental technologies in the evolution of comics is the development of the moment-to-moment transition at the hands of Rudolphe Topffer in the 1800’s. Without this technology comics would not exist. Now, imagine yourself an art critic at that point in time. You could be forgiven for thinking that the moment-to-moment transition was really Topffer’s thing, his style, his inventive genius. You could also be forgiven for thinking that the second person that you saw employing a moment-to-moment transition was a blatant imitator, a rip-off artist, a style-biter, a dirty Topffer wannabe. But then a third artist took it up, then a fourth, then a fifth, and all of a sudden a gaggle of “imitators” became a movement that laid the foundation for cartooning and comics. 150 years later the moment-to-moment transition is woven not only into the way human beings read but the way we perceive a world full of screens and panels. If the artists of the time, terrified of the “copycat” stigma, had chosen not to play with this transition then maybe Topffer’s technology would have remained his and died when he did. That’s not what happened though. Artists used moment–to-moment transitions and risked being dubbed Topffer imitators because they couldn’t resist nor ignore the implications of this new language. They saw that the world had changed and they changed with it.

When I think about these things I feel a bit better about my comic-nerd malaise. I’m actually a bit like Mz Jobberts. I’m not largely interested in the thematic content of Ware’s work and while I understand why he has settled into that modular drawing style, I’d never dream of trying to draw like that. I don’t want to be Chris Ware (Lord knows who would!) nor do I want to do what he does, but I’m sure as hell going to go on using the things that I’ve learned from him for the rest of my life. The line between taking influence and downright copying is a hard one to draw, and everyone is free to place that line where they choose. I know this, so if I get accused of style-biting then I’m happy to cop-it quietly.

There are two things that most like to do during these achingly long January days. I like to write and I like to do jigsaw puzzles.

I’ve never understood those writers who claim to have the entire plot of a story mapped out in their minds before they sit down to write. You often find these sort of characters among genre writers and also among writers of genre comics. I believe these people are one of two things: bullshit artists or hacks. Those that are the former use this claim of narrative clarity as a way of selling a story that hasn’t yet been, and may never be, written, those that are the latter always turn out to be re-packaging a story they are already familiar with. Either way, I am suspicious of anyone who tells me how well they know their story unless they’ve tried telling it.

When I’m trying to come up with a narrative I feel exactly the way I do when I’m working on a jigsaw puzzle. I sit down with this jumble of thoughts scattered all over the table, I push them all around with my hands for a bit, then I set about the tedious task of sorting them. Edge bits first. Then pink bits, black bits, funny textured bits and bits with eyeballs or faces on them. The first stage is so difficult because while I have an Idea of what the story will be like, I haven’t got a bloody clue how all these little thoughts will fit together. At this stage the job is time consuming, frustrating and the rewards are pitiful. When you are sorting your own ideas you feel like you’ve spent hours in front of the screen writing, but because you still can’t see any of the picture yet, you feel like you’re not writing at all.

You keep plugging away at the puzzle story though, and if you’ve sorted your thoughts properly they’ll start connecting into pairs, and soon they’ll start to snowball until you have these little clusters of story floating around on the table. It often seems to me that the more tedious the work is at the start of the writing the more ecstatic the feeling is when two or three clusters of story connect and you finally have a sense that there is actually a narrative in there among all of the chaos.

If you’ve never done a really big jigsaw puzzle you’re probably not sure why it’s fun. There’s a wonderful burst of pleasure when you get two pieces of coloured cardboard to fit together perfectly. It’s a sort of tactile satisfaction that also feeds a desire some of us have to find vision through organisation. We push the pieces together, tap them in with three consecutive taps and let out an inaudible gratified sigh. As the puzzle gets closer to completion finding pieces that fit together becomes easier, the flares of pleasure come closer and closer together and any drudgery associated with the sorting stage fades into the past. Usually the puzzle is finished in a frenzy of activity, and when the last piece pushed in and tapped three times, it comes with a special kind of triumph. When doing a puzzle with my mum, a crafty competitor in all manner of nerdy pursuits, I sometimes resort to hiding a piece of the puzzle until all the rest were in place to make sure it was me who got to put the last piece in and make those three jubilant taps.

Like a jigsaw puzzle, the pleasure of writing a story builds to a crescendo as you work but, unlike the puzzle, the moment of ecstasy comes well before the very end. That moment comes when you’re washing the dishes or pruning your toenails and thinking about the story and you get floored with an “Aha!” moment. Two or three large chunks of story just click together and now you have a veritable continent of story that if you’re lucky will connect nicely to the frame of edge bits you’ve almost finished assembling. You can feel the excitement welling up from beneath your diaphragm. You can actually see the story.  It’s there! All that remains is a frenzy of activity as you find all of the loose ideas that you still have scattered around the table and use them to fill in the gaps in between the well braced chunks of the narrative.

So the process of jigsaw puzzle writing goes.

A problem that I foresaw in using this unwieldy puzzle metaphor was this: A puzzle comes with a picture on the front of the box, and the method of finding a narrative through writing comes with no such convenience. Later I realised that the unwritten story does come with something like a picture on the box: my desire as a writer to create a certain experience for a reader. I know what sort of stories I want to read. I know what I want to feel when I am reading. This is my guide when I’m trying to create a narrative and find myself overwhelmed by the anarchic mess of little ideas scattered on the table.

This works within the metaphor because the doing of the puzzle and the finding of the story changes the way we see the subjects we are working with. Someone who has just finished the puzzle knows every element of that image with an offensive intimacy such that, in most cases, they don’t really care to look at the thing again. Ever. They set out to create a picture that looks like the one on the box and the tragedy is that when they have achieved it they are unable to see the picture they once saw. All they can see are the seams between the pieces. Similarly, if you’re a good writer, the story that you have found through writing might perfectly resemble the one you desired to read when you started out, but you’ll never be able to really read it. You will only be able to brush your eyes over the connections between all those tiny little ideas. The only time I ever see my own story from the reader’s perspective is the day I sit down to write it.

How does jigsaw puzzle writing apply to comics though? I think it can apply to all forms of storytelling, but having said that, I’m not sure that there are many cartoonists that write like this. Sometimes I worry whether I’m really a prose writer trying to pass myself off as a cartoonist, like Michael Jordan trying to play baseball, or Arnie trying to play politics. I think this way of finding narratives is useful for comics because when stories manifest from a nebula of thought particles, an amorphous mass of puzzle pieces, we find stories that have a structural balance to them. These stories are spherical, not in the sense of a narrative vector, but in the sense of a narrative constitution. Spherical stories of tend to have better structural integrity than this shoddy scaffolding that are the load bearers in stories created using the make-it-up-as-you-go method that a lot of cartoonists use.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about that. My summer puzzle has been finished after a late night session working on a harrowing block of solid black sky with my friend Adam. Thank god I’m not one of those losers who glues the finished puzzle to board so it can be hung on the wall.

I suppose that the first order of business would be to set a tone for this blog.

I have another website which has served me well as the vehicle for my persona here in the information super-highway, but lately it’s grown to look like the website of a gentleman who primarily makes comics for boofhead surfers. This is of course, because for the last 12 months I have been primarily making comics for boofhead surfers. But you needn’t worry. My head, though extraordinarily large and full of corners, is no more boof-ish than it was before I came under the employ of the surfing magazines.

While labouring away over intricate drawings of breaking waves and trying to find a place in the narrative for an obligatory pair of exposed breasts I’ve come to the conclusion that what goes on at the drawing table, under the weary gaze of the cartoonist, is really pretty profound. A lot of clever people are writing about comics these days. Everywhere you look you can find Literature Wonks, Cultural Studies losers, Social Theory try-hards admitting that first and foremost they were comic nerds. This is great. The more smart people that write about comics the less cartoonist will feel obliged to make dumb comics. But I’ve noticed that not many of these comic book critics have even the slightest clue about how comics are made. A lot has been written about the things going-on between the eyes of the reader and the comic book page as the language is deciphered, but not much about the things going on at the drawing table. So my project here is to write about cartooning rather than comics, everything that happens before the comic book comes off of the press to land, warm and fragrant, in our comic-nerd laps, and how those things inflect upon an amorphous poetic of the comics.

There’s my entry point right there. I plan on working my way into it, wiggling around for a bit, and hopefully finding some room for myself in this obscure academic discipline they call Comics Studies.

Oh, and I hope you like the décor. Maybe I should tell you about it.

When you work with a brush or a nib you have to clear the excess ink from the drawing tool every time you dip. I usually use the nearest bit of scrap I can find. More ink ends up on the scrap than on the drawing and sometimes, depending on the job, the scraps are more interesting than the comic. These bits of paper sit next to me for months and they often become informal records of a development in cartooning process. They document things like a transition from quill to brush, the changing of inks or even one-off things, like the day I bought my first rapidograph or the time I mixed that perfect watercolour palette that I never managed to mix again. These scraps of paper accumulate dust, half formed ideas, measurement calculations, daubs of white gouache and friendly thickets of  thick black lines. There’s something about them I like.