Text piece re: perfectionism run amuck in my comics workflow, pt.1! (Patreon)

Here's the first installment of what will prrrrobably be a multiple-part essay discussing my ongoing issues with comics-production process and perfectionism, which will feature visual examples interspersed throughout the blather. BTW, note that I wrote this in I Am Empowered-style tweet-based format as I may someday post this on Twitter/ "X" or Bluesky at some point down the road.

Let's get started:

After my long stint of near-daily life drawing from 2017-18, the improvements in anatomy and shading I’d slowly and painfully gleaned from that study paid off during my work on Empowered vols. 11 and 12. (Example below;)

My artwork on those books was, as far as I’m concerned, probably the best material I’ve ever drawn, though rendered in a painstakingly precise, detailed, and fussily “clean” manner.

In the interests of further precision and line-weight control, I used more and more inks with PITT Artist Pens as the pages went on, while slightly deemphasizing the ultra-soft 5B-lead pencilwork that was the backbone of Empowered artwork.

The whole point of my life drawing binge was that I wanted to shake up my approach to anatomy and shading, which I felt had grown static, repetitive, and boringly unimaginative over the years.

So, yay, after hundreds of life drawing sketch sets from photoreference, I successfully managed to “level up” my comics’ artwork in the ways that I had wanted. *ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED*

Ah, but what I somehow didn’t quite realize, as I meticulously crafted the pleasingly improved artwork of Empowered vols. 11 and 12, was that this laudatory improvement had been achieved at a severe productivity cost.

At the very height of my Empowered productivity on vols. 8 and 9—which still featured notably detailed artwork (example below), by the way—I wrote and drew a personal-best 44 comic pages per month. Huzzah!

By contrast, at no point during my full-time work on vols. 11 and 12 did I ever clear more than 20 pages per month, with totals of 15 or less per month being aggravatingly common; hell, single-digit months of page production occurred from time to time.

Now, at least part of this slowdown was due to less available worktime. During my productivity peak on vols. 8-9, I’d stripped my life down to basically, well, nothing outside of work and was racking up ridiculously high work-hour totals.

I stopped all workouts (whether hiking or lifts), left the house only for mail and groceries, spoke to almost no one, kept my social media posts to a minimum. Cue 44 pages in a month, baby!

Compare and contrast with Empowered vol.12’s protracted production, during which I did keep working out and spoke to a few more people; moreover, I garnered a series of, shall we say, time-intensive personal responsibilities that are still ongoing.

But while working on EMP12, I still left the house only sporadically, attended no conventions, and did little on social media other than a helluva lotta Patreon posting. Not exactly a leisurely lifestyle, if less demanding than the EMP8 era.

Nonetheless, my artistically improved output demanded up so much more drawing-table time that I could never even approach the 20pp/month threshold during the book’s subjectively endless grind.

Wellp, looking back, my latent streak of artistic perfectionism took roughly 15 or so years to gradually choke the life out of Empowered’s freewheeling and spontaneous early format and slow the series’ production to a crawl.

Empowered’s unfortunate descent into protracted creative grinding isn’t without precedent, given that essentially the same thing happened during the first half of my comics career—which wound up leading to the creation of Empowered, in fact.

In retrospect, I only needed 12 years, from 1988-2000, to completely ruin the process of producing conventional, American-format comic pages for myself.

You see, 23 years ago I swore off drawing full-size comic pages after laboriously dragging my sorry ass through the four issues of the 1999-2000 miniseries Dirty Pair: Run from the Future.

My workflow by the end of my time on Dirty Pair had calcified into a numbingly repetitive series of redundant steps—sketchy roughs to ridiculously tight (and fully lettered!) “layouts” to even tighter pencils to even tighter inks to the final, noodly details of lettering and color guides.

In a cruel bit of irony, note that my original workflow on the first few DP miniseries was, in fact, the most efficient and time-saving approach I’d ever use.

For all my DP comics up through the final issue of the Plague of Angels miniseries, I worked up very loose and sketchy page roughs, then (as far as I can recall) did all my developmental pencil work directly on the Bristol board. Here's an old-style rough from DP: Dangerous Acquaintances:

..and the finished page:

Inexplicably, on the final issue of DP: Plague, I suddenly began drawing teeny and incredibly tight “roughs” for each page, which would need to be enlarged, lightboarded and effectively penciled again on full-sized art board.

To this day I have no idea where the impulse to draw these wee, hyper-detailed page roughs came from, but I can definitely say that the results were catastrophic to my productivity.

This redundant approach not only began consuming far more worktime but also sucked the g-d life outta my creative process, as I had now committed myself to drawing the same g-d artwork over and over again at different sizes and in varying media.

Here's a relatively recent "tight layout" from a 2012 Marvel short story that nonetheless represents this process at its redundant worst, albeit with extra coloring stages:

Not helping matters was the fact that I was penciling and inking ginormous, full-sized American comic pages on 11” x17” art board, maxing out the worktime necessary to fill up all that blank paper and giving me too much opportunity to wallow in meticulous rendering of detail.

Note that I had completely forgotten an important lesson learned with Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal’s much smaller, almost manga-sized originals back in 1994: the smaller the comic page’s original art size, the faster the production.

In all likelihood, I didn’t continue with the BGC: GM format in successive projects because the smaller original size had degraded the quality of my inked linework to some small degree—not that anyone other than me had ever noticed said degradation, as far as I can recall.

As Dirty Pair: Run from the Future wheezed to its finale and I abandoned the drawing of full-size comic art out of frustration, my hope was to transition over to writing comics full-time, which briefly seemed like a viable option when I snagged the ongoing writing gig for Wildstorm/DC’s Gen13.

(And let us not even speak of the brief but exciting two weeks during that same timeframe when I was involved in developing an ill-fated Batman TV animation pitch, a halcyon moment in time when the sky seemed the limit for my brilliant career.)

<Essay paused>

Anyhoo, that's enough blathering for now, folks. If/when I get a chance, I may pick up this rambling later on, addressing both my recent failed stabs at "hybrid workflow" (with the latest unsuccessful process test from The Chaste and the Chained still to be posted here shortly) and the fact that I likely need to radically reconceptualize my artistic approach if I want to continue drawing as well as writing comics down the road. Yay?

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea, TBH, but something should be coming up in the next M/W/F slot. Let's find out together, shall we?