PanSpec

Ok, so here we are on the last day of Inktober 2023. Usually by this time, I am very burned out, frustrated and making excuses for how/why I haven’t completed the challenge or how I didn’t do so bad. Well, I did even worse this year - 15 pieces (16 if today goes well…) compared to the average of 17 and a high of 21. That being said I feel better about the output and about things in general. The “story” and constant surprises (my own, I’m not sure what you have discovered in looking at them) kept my interest level very high and enabled me to push through most of my creative blocks - which honestly would have likely happened anyway, but this year I kept going, rather than becoming disillusioned and taking a week off, or giving up after week two. I’ve been drawing this pretty much everyday, even a bit here and there on a weekend or at times when I normally would be loafing the couch (though that couch has become a bit of a villain in its own way waging a war on my posture-beleaguered

Well, here we are, 2 weeks in. So far, so good - only missed a few days - though they are piling up. I had set myself no real goal this October other than “get shit done”. This project had been sitting around for a while and I thought this would be a good way to get a start on it. In that, I feel vindicated. Another change I made was trying to do a little less. On my previous comic book projects I spent a lot of time figuring out the composition of a page and how best to fit the layout to the topic of the page. I enjoyed doing it and liked twisting the rules to get interesting layouts. However, it also led to a bit of procrastination and overvaluing their role in storytelling. Most of the little layout concepts were likely just ignored by the viewer. In the Bikura project, I reduced the format to a sort of “bande dessinée” style, trying to manage the story in less chunks and with a simplified form. It felt a lot better slapping in concepts and ideas into a 1-4 panel page, than

Each year, I pull myself from deep hibernation like a demented groundhog to see how long his own shadow (the 5 O’clock kind…) has grown and pledge another year to Inktober, a challenge I’ve never actually finished. This year, I’m going to try something different and not use any Inktober prompts and instead try to illustrate a small comic, with each page (or more likely, panel) being its own prompt. That comic is based on my character “Bikura” inspired by the music of an old friend and the comic “Spacegirl” by Travis Charest. Spacegirl is a comic where each panel is a page, allowing the story to shift around outside of a standard “stream of time” format of normal comics. For me, this allows for each page to be radically different to the page before, both in style, pacing and plot - awesome for a disconnected illustrator/writer like me. So, each day I’m going to try and tackle one part of the story, armed only with a vague idea of the story imagined in the script, of which I have 10