Current Comics (you can enjoy these now!)
Background
As a child I drew quite a bit and always enjoyed it. I gave it up for decades though, as other creative outlets and real life replaced the urge to draw.
In the early 90's I almost got into it again, as I had an idea for a comic/character that I thought was pretty interesting, but that never panned out. I didn't forget about the idea entirely, even though years flew by in handfuls.
In October 2018 I decided it was finally time to make it happen, and since I didn't have the skills or experience to pull it off myself, I started looking for an artist to collaborate with me on the project. Understandably, all the visual artists I talked to had their own projects and weren't interested in working with somebody with an empty portfolio.
So in November 2019 I put pencil to paper and started sketching out a story. Not THE story from the 90's, but a new story that was shorter -- something that I thought I could use to hone my skills, discover and learn digital tools, and just prepare me for the REAL project. That story became Closely Look Away.
My timing was pretty great for once, as the Covid-19 Pandemic gave me extra time to focus on this, so I wrote the entire story, and sketched out all of the panels -- about 450 total. Then I scanned all of the pages so I had a backup copy and digital version that I could work on. To learn what tools I could use I watched a lot of SkillShare videos, read some great books on creating comics, and took inspiration from some longtime web comic artists who clearly started "publishing" their work before it was polished, but then evolved and improved over time.
About 15 months later I had about 1/3 of my story "finished" in digital form, and went back and reworked the initial frames since they were pretty rough. Then reworked them a second time. Then realized that at this pace it would be another 2 years or more before this story was finished and could be published. Knowing that I couldn't wait that long to get some work out there, I started Thinking Turtles, my single-panel random idea comic.
Guess what? Single-panel comics are actually pretty difficult, and Thinking Turtles started interfering with Closely Look Away, so I backburnered it. I do intend to get back to it sometime...
What's next?
That comic idea I had back in the 90's? Initial work on that has started, although I'm not sure I'll be able to start publishing it until Closely Look Away is finished. We'll see though!
(you of course realize if you've read this far that my concept of "soon" may not be the same as everybody else's.)
Random frames from my ongoing story " Closely Look Away":
A few samples from Thinking Turtles:
