The Old Horse

Drawing takes too long, especially when it's hot. To-day I pencilled page seventeen of my comic, wanting to have finished page twenty four yesterday. Or something. Not that I'm comparing myself to Alfred Hitchcock but I'm reminded of hearing about him being on set of his films of the late fifties and later being bored out of his mind because he basically considered a movie finished once the script was done, the actual filming being a sort of formality. This makes sense of the fact that he's said to have hardly given any direction to his actors, like the famous story of Cary Grant walking through the hotel in North by Northwest and it being the actual hotel Grant was staying at so Hitchcock had simply said, he knows how to walk through this hotel, let him do it.

I wish my drawings would just act out my scripts on their own. I should just have to draw a character once and then let her do the rest. Maybe I should watch Cool World to-night, I've never seen it.

I've done so much work on this comic and still only a few people have seen it. What's weird is I'm a little reluctant to submit it to publishers, even though I think it may be the best looking art I've ever produced, because I can't shake the feeling that it would be read by less than half the audience in print form than it would be published online. Maybe this is an illusion created by the fact that I spend more time online than at comic book shops. But I envy people who get to perform in front of an audience, getting some feeling of rapport with an audience must be nice instead of spending months with your material in a bottle before you feel it's ready to be shown, and only then knowing how people will take something that you came up with six months or a year ago, nevermind the stuff you thought of last week.

I was tempted to post some concept art at least to-day but the time still doesn't feel right. Here are some doodles I did at university orientation last week:

I really need to review how to draw horses. I do find them a lot easier than most other animals for some reason.

I signed up for a pretty full roster of classes for fall--I'll be at school all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays and most of the day on Mondays and Wednesdays. I'm hoping I'll still be able to make three pages of comic a week so if I do make this a web comic I'll probably release at a pace of eight pages every three weeks instead of my usual two weeks. At least the classes sound fun--I'm taking a class devoted to John Milton, a class devoted to Shakespeare, and another devoted to African Literature. That's for Tuesdays and Thursdays. Monday and Wednesday I'm studying pre-colonial Latin America and Star Trek. Yes, Star Trek. I needed an elective and all the more useful sounding ones were already taken. Anyway, I'm hoping I'll have more spare time since most of the classes I'm taking are things I already know a lot about.

Oh, you may ask, just how much do you know about John Milton? Well, maybe not as much as some but I have, over this past year, read all his prominent political pamphlets, his History of Britain, two biographies of him, several of his letters, and all of his poetry. So I guess I'll go ahead and tell you one thing about my comic--John Milton's in it. Here's some concept art.

So John Milton's one of the people I've been stuck inside with. I was vaguely planning on driving across country in August but I decided I'd be better off saving my money and staying in and getting some drawing done. Oh, but the outside . . .

Twitter Sonnet #779

Cable hair keeps the forest mind in town.
Jigsaw wedges complete the puzzle legs.
A steamer trunk full of acorns was brown.
Moving stacks of smoke fry the flying eggs.
Ribbon stilts'll buckle below the belt.
Accessory weight dampens the murder.
To touch the pen or hat is two ways felt.
There's protein in ev'ry Frank-N-Furter.
The yam finger says I am a starch thing.
A brain hits hard enough to enter skulls.
Quiet colludes like garnish to the bang.
Barnacle pin-ups glimmered on the hulls.
A chip has too much salt for the old block.
An incredible feat broke the tube sock.