I’ve been making some tweaks to the artwork in my semi-biographical cartoon story here, A Coming Out Story, because I was unhappy with some aspects of it. Some of that is looking back on the skill I had when I began it two decades plus ago, versus the skill I developed over the years. But a lot of it is how bad it gets when I get myself in a hurry and just try to push it out of me. This applies to everything I draw. Unless I proceed deliberately, and carefully I am no damn good. But then I am slow. Combine that with the periods of time when I have no head of steam up at all for the work and I spend weeks doing nothing at all, and the episodes just come out so damn infrequently I am not at all surprised the story has very few regular viewers. So there were times I felt compelled to just Get It Out, and now in retrospect a lot of that artwork I am unhappy with.

That was especially true with episode 36, Moment of Truth. That was a super important episode for me because it is a critical shift in the story. Remember, I subtitled it, The First Person You Come Out To Is Yourself.

Episode 36 is where that finally happens. I needed it to be special, in terms of its artwork, and it’s tenor. But that meant it was a lot more work and by that point, after two decades plus of working on it, and I’m 70 years old and I don’t know if I have enough life left to finish it, I was getting anxious. Looking back on it, even after I finished and posted it, I wasn’t completely happy with the artwork. But I felt like it was “good enough” and I had to get it out.

That’s always a mistake, but especially with me. I am no professional cartoonist. I joke that I’m a hunt and peck draftsman for all the erasing and redrawing I do. I’m almost completely self taught, save for some high school art class instruction and the helpful tutorials Howard Cruse kindly put up on his website (I miss him so very much). I have to dig in my heels and Slow Down and be deliberate and careful. Something else I’ve learned over the years is to just let the artwork sit overnight and come back to it with fresh eyes.

So I’ve been redoing a bunch of my ACOS panels for the past several months, and I’m feeling Much better about the story as a whole now. But I’ve been saving most of my energy for that for episode 36. Because the artwork is much more detailed, and almost none of it is repeatable from panel to panel, it was a Lot of work. I’ve almost completely worked over the first three strips of two each (the entire episode is this) and I still have the final three to do. But I can already see how much better the artwork gets across what I wanted to get across in that episode.

I want to start work on the episodes I skipped over when, in my panic about my heart health, I posted the episode titled I Am.  That was not meant to be the final episode, more like the period at the end of the story arc of my finally coming out to myself, after the guy I was crushing on put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze (episode 34, Flirting In Denialville). But I saw I could use it to give the story some sort of closure in case I was unable to finish it. That’s not how it was meant to end, there is still a Lot left to do. I want to get back into it.

Episodes are Here.