End of the era of pencil-based EMPOWERED? (Patreon)

So. 

Here's a rambling piece I've worked up over the last few weeks, originally formatted for a Twitter rant (hence the capitalized EMPOWERED and so on), but here used as a Patreon post first: 

As I’ve said before, EMPOWERED vol.11 quite possibly marks the end of pencil-based artwork for me, as I now seem to get sudden-onset drawing-arm pain any time I push an analog pencil for very long. Not all that upset about it, though.

EMP11 features a great deal of inking—30% of the art, if not more—because I’ve been slamming headlong into the limitations of pencil-based artwork for quite a while now. 

All of EMP11’s nighttime city shots and every shot of Mindf**k’s perpetually silhouetted brother were inked with PITT Artist Pens and Sharpies, as I just could NOT render the intense values I wanted with a pencil—even a Turquoise 5B lead, the softest & darkest available.

I also wound up inking all the book’s speed lines and sound FX, as my super-soft pencil leads were far too smudge-prone for work like that. 

Same deal with very fine detail—if you look closely at EMP11’s pages, you’ll see that I had to use an Extra-Fine-point PITT pen for precise work on small figures and the like, as my 5B pencils are just too coarse to render that kinda stuff.

And while the pencil art reproduced just fine in the printed EMP11, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with how the originals look—not that this would matter to the reader, of course, but it still bugs the hell outta me. 

My one remaining workable combination of pencil & paper—and believe me, I’ve tried many, many such combos—results in annoyingly “waxy” and inconsistent graphite tones that appear notably inferior to earlier, better combos.

In theory, comics artists should only care about how their work reproduces in print, but in reality, I spend months or years looking at my pages’ originals and first-draft scans as a book comes together—

—and it really does annoy me to look at penciled pages whose graphite medium is perceptibly inferior to my no doubt excessively discerning eye. Sad, but true.

For me, much of the time, the act of doing the work winds up being the whole point. (Well, that, and getting paid for it.) I barely glance at the published versions of some books as, hey, I just LIVED the damn thing, okay?

The truly exasperating part is, I’ve learned a great deal about shading and anatomy from the last few years of life drawing, but my pencil medium often feels like it’s fighting me every inch of the way when I try to express that on paper.

Another issue signaling the end of the pencil-drawn era, for me, is that my up-close vision has deteriorated to the point that I can’t quite make out the finer details of what I’m drawing.

My hand lettering’s been hit especially hard by my vision issues, as often I have to just squint and “use the Force, Luke” while scribbling especially small fonts.

To properly focus on my lettering, I have to lean back from the paper 3”-5” farther than I’d like—and then it seems like I’m lettering at arm’s length, which feels maddeningly awkward.

Yes, obviously I could invest in some prescription reading glasses, but I’m a bit annoyed that I’m have to buy ’em mainly for lettering, as I don’t yet need glasses for actual reading. (YET, I say.)

I’m looking to get out of hand-lettering, anyway, as I’m irritated that I can’t quite letter at the size I’d like; my default, hand-scribbled font is just too damn big, no matter how much I try to letter just a leeeeetle bit smaller.

Plus, to be honest, my lettering seems to be skewing increasingly wonky, inconsistent, and misaligned of late, forcing me to make repeated “relettering” patches to paper over my error-prone text.

Looks like it’s time to move on to a computer-based font for my dialogue “body copy,” at the very least.

I’ve been a comics pro for 31 years, and have been writing and drawing EMPOWERED for 15 of those years; gotta admit, until adding those numbers up, I wasn’t aware that EMP represents the second half of my (so-called) career in comics.

EMPOWERED’s simplified, pencil-based art format supercharged my formerly pokey production speed to an almost ridiculous degree—remember that the first few EMP volumes came out TWICE PER YEAR, which I still find shocking in retrospect.

(Gotta admit, I’m still a tad resentful that few folks in comics seemed to notice this radical speed jump, from a pre-EMP maximum of 5 issues/120-odd pages per year to 2 TPBs/420-odd pages per year.)

I’ve written and drawn far more comic pages in the second half of my career—something like 2600-3000 pages, at least—than I ever did during the first-half era of DIRTY PAIR, BGC, TITANS, GEN13 and the like.

Damn near every pre-EMPOWERED comic I created suffered in some way from pagecount limitations—the work wound up truncated, compromised, and much less successful that I’d originally imagined.

This is, of course, my own fault—faced with limited pagecount during my “conventional comics” phase, I could’ve cut back the number of events and character interactions covered, and explored that lesser amount more richly and thoroughly.

But nahh, instead I crammed too many scenes and plot points—and dialogue!—into my old comics, spawning hasty, frantic, overstuffed and undernourished stories that give short shrift to the characters and storytelling.

Overall, the loosey-goosey EMPOWERED format freed me to explore characterization and narrative to a degree none of my earlier, issue-based work ever did. Stumbling into this wholly unplanned work approach was “serendipitous AF,” gotta say.

Overall, EMPOWERED has, at times, achieved much more of what I’d hoped to accomplish with comics storytelling than any of my first-half work ever did. 

The EMPOWERED technique of “Original Graphic Novel, produced a few pages at a time like a webcomic” is, for me, Best Format—this keeps the creative process fresh and spontaneous, right up through the end of the book.

Compare and contrast that with the North American abomination of the OGN fully scripted ahead of time for all 160pp, then penciled for 160pp straight, then inked nonstop for 160pp, and so on. That’s a brutal, soul-crushing work process. 

A creator I know was finishing up an OGN via that godawful, misery-inducing “one work stage at a time” process at the same time I was finishing up EMP9.

Online, she seemed miserable and dispirited as she dragged herself through the final inking and coloring of her OGN’s endless pages; meanwhile, as I simultaneously neared the end of work on EMP9, I was all, “I’VE NEVER FELT MORE ALIVE.”

Problem: My once-speedy “scrawled on copy paper” work technique is none too speedy nowadays, as my pencils—and increasing amounts of inks—grew tighter and denser and, importantly, much slower with recent volumes.

During the two years or more that I flailed away at EMPOWERED vol.11, I never once cleared the psychologically critical threshold of producing 20 pages per month. (All too often, I barely finished half that number in a month.)

Keep in mind that the modern-era record for EMPOWERED productivity was 43pp/month during the climactic half of EMP8, a Hell-bound story arc that was fairly heavy on artistic detail.

I find myself more and more annoyed with all the tiresome, Rube-Goldbergesque rigamarole and cumbersome work-throughs inherent to drawing “analog” comic pages on paper.

If I want to resize a face or figure on a page, I need to either entirely redraw the g-d thing, or (more often) scan the image, enlarge it in Photoshop, print it out & lightboard it onto a new sheet of “art patch” paper.

Gotta say, though, I really did want to do one more book in the existing, pencil-based, 208pp format EMP while gaining experience in working digitally. 

Hell, if my drawing arm cooperates, I might still try to stagger my way through a pencil-rendered EMP12, though—as I’ve detailed—I’m deeply frustrated with the format’s limitations.

The existing EMP format has probably run its course, sales-wise, so ideally I’d like to do EMP12 “old style” to round out the B&W series with a fourth compilation. (We’ll see.)

I certainly have more EMPOWERED stories in mind, but I’ll have to take a new approach to telling ’em, both in terms of format (OGNs vs. serialization, etc.) and artistic medium.

My once-beloved pencils have proven surprisingly versatile, but as a medium they’re simply inadequate for the task of depicting the truly crazy s**t I have in mind for EMPOWERED’s second arc.

Beyond, that, I want to test out new art techniques on a new project (or two). One SF pitch I’m eyeing is so artistically demanding that I might never tackle it, TBH, but it might just be possible using a digital approach. (Maaaaaybe.)

In truth, I’m probably too old and too tired to attempt this Extremely Ambitious SF Pitch, but a year or two from now I’m not gonna be any younger and fresher, am I? Better attempt it sooner than later, I suppose.

I’m trying to get a few writing-only projects off the ground as well, despite a few recent setbacks. (More on said setbacks later, as at least one of 'em might be instructive.)

Anyhoo, that’s it for my ramblin’ about the pencil-based medium, which seems to be nearing its end for me. The ol’ graphite served me well, but I need to move on to a new approach, looks like. 

Hope you’ll come along for the ride as I flail off in a new direction, folks!