Knives Up - scrapbooking (Patreon)

Ever since the Big Career Trauma (also known as release history of Protector*/First Knife**) happened to me, I've been feeling gradually more and more disgruntled for the American comics industry, as well my own place in it (if not in the medium itself); and I knew that this mix of emotions and thoughts was quite far from being adequate - even with the list of grievances as justified as mine - because it didn't just made me wary or cautious, but caused me a great amount of self-doubt and crippling anxiety - so much so that earlier last year I ended up dropping all this stuff on my therapist (good grief). I was beginning to doubt my ability to keep up with pace and workload required for the job EVER again, while time and opportunities flew by me at rapid speed. The sense of loosing time had probably caused me the biggest amount of distress: I couldn't work on smaller things because they won't get me any closer to the Big Thing, but can't work on any Big Thing, either, because it's definitely gonna cause me more trauma and grief - and how one is even supposed to function inside such set of convictions?

Anyway, I'm still working on this. Understanding is the key to a problem, so now, armed with this awareness,  I'm trying to rewire some things inside my head, shifting my concerns from existential to at least more practical ones. 

And speaking of practice - lately  I was very unsure about my storytelling chomps (way more than my  change of art style or anything like that, which is another can of worms completely). Usually, when working on a comics - and it doesn't even matter if the comic is 10 or 100 pages long - I run out of steam sometime after the middle, and resort to "defaulting" to very by-the-numbers page layouts and storytelling decisions. So, for several months now,  I've been putting on my best analytic glasses, and going through dozens and dozens of different comics, mostly old manga - Mikiya Mochizuki, Kenichi Muraeda, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, Ken Ishikawa - but also nearly completely unknown guys like Flavio Colin. Basically tapping into the pool of references that seems to be completely outside of the usual Western comics-making scope - which, I guess, made be double-snobbish in light of the recent plagiarism scandal. Swiping anything from a comics that is less than 30 years old? HA!

Anyway, I'm saving and cataloguing the pages and sequences I love, hundreds and thousands of them, pondering at my archives and constantly doodling in my First Knife sketchbook, trying to break  down the pages and figure out what works about them, what makes ME  jibe with it specifically.

Also, I'm still doing tiny memo paper (I think it's called "index card"?) scribbles - you can find a lot of them "scrapbooked" into the sketchbook; just random thoughts, incidental doodles, textures and forms. But if you want to see how some of those incidental doodles end up turning into Final Ideas - look at the first page of the post, and then check out this old geezer:

*Speaking of Protector: congratulations to the team on their newest release! Now it is finally safe to say that the legendary series, the PROTECTORs have survived, uninterrupted by any outside forces, for more than 5 issues. And that’s a feat worth celebrating.

And who knows, maybe First Knife can survive a 5 years gap in its release schedule and then patent troll someone, too?

**It's really funny how still, after aaaall this struggle and pain, the only big book I really want to work on remains First Knife 2.