I’ve been fixing some of the panels of A Coming Out Story, and it’s been very rewarding. I’ve not drawn in so long I was afraid I might be losing what little ability I had developed over the years. But at least the computer part of the process not only comes back to me, but I am still getting better at it. 

Occasionally I get a visitor to A Coming Out Story, which is a cartoon series about how I came out to myself way back in the early 1970s, after crushing hard on a classmate, that I am hosting here on this website (click one of the links to read it!). When I get a visit I will often go and look at the episodes my visitor looked at, trying to guess at why some got their attention and some were just passed over. I like to think I’m a good story teller, but the fact is my drafting skills are not the best. And that is where revisiting some episodes can really sting. I see all my mistakes, and sometimes it really disappoints me that I let some of those panels get out without fixing them first.

I know why I did it. I am so slow at getting the episodes done that I end up rushing myself to finish and put the artwork up. It’s good enough I think, in my hurry to get it out. But that is poison to let into your process. Another reason is lately, after the heart attack, I’ve worried that if I don’t put the artwork up now, Right Now, I might keel over dead before it has a chance to be seen. It’s stupid but there it is, and it’s why I reordered some episodes to put a kinda sorta end to the story up.

And then I’ve just let it sit there. There is so much more to that story. And then feeling guilty about not doing more of the story makes it all worse.

It’s a Lot of work. Even the single panel political cartoons are a Lot of work, and I haven’t done any of those in a long while because I don’t like being so angry all the time at what’s been happening to my country. The level of concentration I need to maintain just to get it out of me onto the paper is immense; more than anything I experience while I’m programming. And more often that not I have to go back and fix things even before I start the process of inking the drawings. And then I often have to fix things in the computer again after I’ve scanned the artwork in.

My only consolation is whenever I see the roughs that professional cartoonists let the rest of us see in their process. I know it’s hard painful work for everybody. The master David Low once said that every cartoon of his took three days: two days in labor, and one day removing the appearance of labor. But the finished work of the professionals still seems so beautiful and effortless compared to mine. I am perpetually dissatisfied with how static and two dimensional most of my drawings look. But that’s because it takes me a lot longer to break out of that 2D zone into the 3D one and I am always in too much of a hurry, so I take the easy path, so I stay inside my comfort zone.

So after I got a few visitors last week I’ve been making some fixes to some of the panels of A Coming Out Story, to at least not keep seeing mistakes that make me cringe Every Time I look at them. And happily, something deep inside of me reawakened. 

I’ve fixed a bunch of stuff so far that probably nobody will even notice, but I can’t help but see. Mistakes in perspective. Mistakes in anatomy. I start drawing the heads first and then the bodies, and sometimes they aren’t scaled the same. Cartoon heads can be slightly bigger than the rest of the body, but not too much bigger. I get the hands slightly wrong. The tilt of a three-quarters head wrong. But I don’t see it right away because I’m so damn focused on the details I stop seeing the bigger picture. And I’m liking the artwork much better now that I’ve fixed a bunch of that. 

There’s a lesson I need to take to heart here. I’m not a very good draftsman. And I end up concentrating so deeply that I stop seeing the whole for the detail I happen to be working on at that moment, and I rush it out in too big a hurry. That is how mistakes get onto my web pages. The lesson is to not be in such a hurry. To put the work away for a night before I post it here, and then look at it with fresh eyes the next morning. And the next. And the next. Until I stop seeing mistakes.

And to get out of my static pose, 2D comfort zone. Did I mention that comfort zones are usually traps?