Eltingville Uber Alles (Patreon)

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the initial airing of the Welcome to Eltingville pilot on the Adult Swim. Holy yeesh, right?

I didn't know it was the anniversary, someone reminded me online after I'd posted something about the comic. They thought it was close to the actual airdate. Turned out it was the exact date. I feel old and weird tonight (I'm typing this at "night" but it's now the next day, technically. I'll always see the late shift as belonging to the day before, I've always been a night person). 

I'd love to go back and do some things differently, with the pilot, and with the comics, and my life in general. The comics and my life are kind of intertwined, because the production of the two-part wrap-up to Eltingville was a bit of a disaster. Well, more than a bit of a disaster. I blew the schedule, blew the page counts up beyond what was planned, added a ridiculous amount of detail to the already cramped panels and pages, ruined my income, caused a lot of stress on the household. I basically ruined at least a year of our lives, and in the end relatively few people cared and none of it really mattered. 

I wanted the series wrap-up to be really good, and to fit in with the older stories in a satisfying way. I have trouble with separation anxiety, and building things up, and being afraid of failing. So I turned Eltingville into my very own Mosquito Coast, the worst of all my project disorders, at least in comics. Tyrone's Inferno, the Adult Swim pilot I torpedoed by freezing up and also going off the rails, emotionally, might be the very worst of my personal messes.  At least on Eltingville, I kept working...and working...and working. Noodling, texturing, adding, redrawing, overdoing, muddying, redoing, revising, not letting go, overcompensating. For very, very little. I made nothing on the comics because I took forever to finish them, at the expense of other work and further income. The series and the collection barely got any press, its time had apparently passed by at least a decade (which touches on my not leaving SLG when I should have, because that made Eltingville impossible to finish back when I started the "comic shop" story, some time in 2001. Mistakes on top of mistakes...). The comics sold terribly, and the collection is still in the red. 

Am I proud of the collection? I am. I honestly am. I don't do many projects that have a final story built in, so it's nice to actually have a collection of my work that's finished and complete. 

Do I like those last two stories? I do. I know they're crowded and overdone and I see where the anxiety added more words, more jokes, more background information and details, more texturing, more "more". But a lot of it works. A lot of it looks really nice. It's ugly, but it's well-done ugly, and some of the images really appeal to me. They're the best looking comics in the collection. There are some panels in there I still really like looking at. I can't say that about a lot of my artwork. 

Was it worth it? Oh, hell no. No, no, no. I'm glad I got to the finish line on Eltingville and that it got done. I'd have hated not having it finished, left dangling. I'm proud of the book, and I can enjoy looking at a lot of it, with some years between then and now. But I fucked up a lot of things on those two issues. Even worse, I made life a lot harder for my family. I should have been in therapy back then. I fucked up. I don't blame the project, I blame the way I handled things. But it's hard not to see Eltingville as a train wreck in my life, between the pilot crashing and burning, the comics turning into a quagmire, and the effect it all had on our lives. I dragged other people down with me because of my emotional issues, and not for the first time.  

The image above is an example of how I mishandled the final issue of Eltingville, and how I made life difficult for Sarah (because it wasn't like I knew how to digitally assemble and clean these Frankensteinian pages). The last few pages of the comic have a grid-like approach, the angle static/continuing on the Club members inside the Ecto-1 as the SDCC attendees riot around them. Visually, I was worried the simple, static approach would look dull. I did want to concentrate on the characters and their acting, their expressions. I liked the idea of one continuous angle and the rhythm that would build. And it's quieter, and more focused, relative to the usual Club pages and sequences. I went with the sequence as planned, but kept doubting, and worrying. So, to compensate, I detailed the fuck out of the pages, crosshatching and texturing everything -- and fucking it all up.

I ended up adding so much texture to the scene that the character's faces were all too heavy with linework, they would look like absolute muddied shit when reduced for print. So, while the book was already late and I was also fucking up the big crowd scene preceding this sequence, which I spent like two weeks on or something insane like that, I redrew all of the heads across the three final pages. I put the pages on the lightbox, penciled a series of replacement heads for each character and whatever else needed patching, and then Sarah had to drop them all in on the originals and stitch it together. And I kept futzing with the lettering, and other things. I was going out of my mind and somehow no one stuck a paring knife into the nape of my neck. And twisted. 

There are a number of pages from the last two stories that I can't sell because the pages don't exist as a single unit. There are multiple pages of heads, patch panels, replacement dialog, etc. All of this had to be dropped in and stitched and cleaned up digitally. A mess. I still have emotional issues with my work, I still overdo everything and worry. But nothing on the scale of this debacle. I was practically crying some nights while working on the second issue because I honestly thought I was going insane. I could not stop. I could not let go of the pages. I could not stop criticizing and redoing things. Like I said, I needed to be in therapy back then, instead of at the board redrawing dozens of little nerd heads months after the book was supposed to have shipped. Fucking cripes. 

One day I hope to do some process posts about these goddamned pages, because beyond any interest in seeing the various patches and fuck-ups, they're a cautionary tale. It's hard to like your work when you don't like yourself, or don't think you deserve happiness or success. And it can take a long time to change your way of thinking about yourself, or at least change a lot of it. 

Twenty years. Maybe even more. 

Work in progress.