TM Stuff- how to rewrite your entire goddamn chapter and not kill yourself (Patreon)

This is a post-mortem of Chapter 4, mostly a technical discussion on the difficulties of doing a complete rewrite spread out over the course of several years. It's probably going to be pretty long. I will also be straight-up explaining the plot points, which some people may not like since it is a bit of a direct approach, but if you don't mind it then lets go~

My general process for comics is: nebulous idea --> general notion of plot temperature/ info I want to share --> general notion of how that info should be arranged in order to build tension in the right areas and encourage some thought from my readers--> doodling out some garbage sketches to try it out/ acting scenes out to myself --> rough text --> rough thumbnail --> making the final comic + writing. I do things this way because I really dislike overly tight dialogue. I find that writing dialogue in advance of seeing the images gives a weird, disjointed product (for me at least) and additionally, I change my mind about things every 30 seconds. I really enjoy being able to change up stuff on the fly and not have a final, permanent product until the point that I'm posting for my readers.

Chapter 4 was originally based around the core setup of Angora and Pinter being together for the first time. Although the overall vibe of The Meek is cartoony, I try to make the characters behave along realistic lines, which means that, realistically, these characters would not know each other very well. So, learning to trust one another in a meaningful way was an important component to the chapter. I had several other bullet points to meet:

• Angora figuring out her powers/ showing her lack of control and "new" powers
  

• meeting overzealous Carissi fleeing from the situations linked directly to Chapter 2 and 3, showing the types of people from Caris
• furthering and expanding on Angora themes from chapter 1 (good vs bad, the right to judge others, who deserves help, is there a point or is it all for naught, the Teen Experience, etc)
  
• setting Pinter up for the next jungle chapter (about him)
• introduction of further lore involving monster dudes
• setting up characters in the next chapter
• other stuff I won't spoil

Semi-relatedly, it drives me nuts when people say things like "nothing happened this chapter" when in actuality, every single page is designed to drive the info forward. I have to keep reminding myself that a lot of these hooks will be invisible until a few more chapters down the line.

Anyhow, when I started the final version of Chapter 4 back in 2011, I realized that the sketch version was just terrible. The worst part was the tone, which was non-existent or just completely off. Back when the thumbs were drawn, I could only draw the pages when I had free time, usually around 2-5 in the morning. It was not peak operating hours. The result was a strange comic that was overly cartoony at times and heavy handed for the rest of it. The "mesya" line was originally intended to be a large part of the comic, but I decided to take it out entirely. Some elements, like the baby, were pointless. The root sickness ended up being an implausible sickness based on the rules (there are rules) involving Angora's healing abilities. And the final scene was just awful and flat. So basically the premise and ending had to be replaced with things that made sense.

In 2011 I decided to just GO FOR IT. Which is a really bad idea, haha. My thoughts were to replace the sickness with a physical injury, to push the concept of the weak husband and the tough wife, excise the pointless kid, replace the end scene with a real fight scene, and to reduce the "tell" in favor of "show" as much as possible (given there is a lot of talking head stuff as Etan filled Pinter in on current events... to balance that out I decided to use a lot of active color transitions and add a lot of movement and visual interest where I could). Most importantly though, the original version had Pinter and Angora overly familiar with each other already. I put the moon in most chapters to show the passage of time; between Chapter 1 and 4, 2 weeks have passed. I decided this would be a good tipping point for their tenuous lead/follow relationship to break down, and decided to push the tension as far as I could. The goal of the cover of every chapter shows the scene that immediately precedes the first page of that chapter, while also showing the general tone of the chapter. So the chapter cover for 4 starts with a bunch of slashes between the two, Pinter's frustration, Angora feeling awkward and insecure, and the threat of inclement weather/ tension hanging over the scene in general.

Anyways, things were going pretty good for about 8 pages, then real life hit. I found out some VERY bad news about the comic which utterly destroyed me. I don't know if I'll ever really be able to talk about it but it was a situation where making the comic would have been benefiting someone who was strangling the future out of it, which caused immediate resentment. I have been working on the story since I was 15 (so half my life by now) and I did not want to ever end up hating my work. So I decided to induce a comic coma, and not think about The Meek at all until I had resolved the issue. I won't get into that because it was just 3 years of torture. Thankfully resolution came in 2015, but picking the plot up after years of not thinking about it at all was not easy. I did succeed in preserving my good feelings about the comic but I also completely forgot everything I'd been planning, other than the pages I had already made. If you look up to the second paragraph, you'll notice there is not a lot of stuff getting put to paper until about the last few steps. I needed to start from scratch, again...

The way I did it was I mocked up a blank booklet of the comic. The booklet had about 45 blank pages, a cover, and that's it. Then I sat down and pretended to read it, with the 8 previously finished pages on a screen in front of me (I mentally projected them onto the paper). Then I "read" my comic. I got an extremely vague sense of what I wanted to happen and when (how long for the buildup? how long for the conflict? how long for the resolution and denouement?). Then I went to notepad and wrote out a draft. Then every single page after that was me like, clawing it out of the nowhere dimension and making it a real thing. The only hard part is that in those 3 years I felt like I had become a slightly less happy person (the three years were bracketed by the beginning and end of depression), so working in levity in spots to preserve the tone set by earlier chapters was the most forced/ artificial thing I had to do.

My ultimate secret is I have no idea what I'm doing and I just feel my way along based on my loose guides until something happens. I abide by my general comic principles, I have my bullet points, and other than that I just gotta cross my fingers and hope it works. It is so stressful, because I am extremely cognizant of the fact that if I forget one thing, it could potentially mess up the rest of the comic. But the stress is part of the fun. I don't want to overwork my comics; like overmixing batter, it's easy to agitate all the good fluffy stuff out and wind up with a flat dessert, so idk. I made you read all this for the reveal that it's all held together with spit. I know the chapter isn't perfect but that's okay. Perfect is a stupid concept. And as it turned out, the final version is very close to the idea I had in my head when I started. I got all the info in that we need to enjoy the next chapters. There are little tidbits there/ not there that will stand out on a reread but which you'll never notice the first time around. There are some moments where I laughed while making them and some moments where I felt actual happiness, and hopefully that comes through to you guys too. It's just a huge amount of work and labor and making this chapter happen through the threat of losing my IP forever, deep depression, gaining and leaving two jobs, moving out for the first time, developing a new comic, illustrating several books, and idk... comics are seriously torture sometimes but I wouldn't stop making them for anything.

Sorry this is so long, and thanks again for reading my comics.