The other day I got really fed up again with only posting covers, them being the only new material to put up here.

I had this sketch around which seemed like an easy candidate to finish and make into a stand-alone picture: just two guys and a robot. You know, the sort of thing people post. Free-floating art on the internet. “Warmup” drawings. What ifs. Ads for more substantial things that don’t exist and probably never will.

I didn’t need it to mean anything, I didn’t even need to particularly like it. Just something small and sort of finished and new to put up¹, a throwaway image.

I found out I was too tired to even fully pencil and ink that one picture. But I added one more picture under it, with the two guys saying a few things² and I found out who they were, and that made it a page and it became something that I like.

That all reminded me that what I’m fed up with is being stuck with single pictures. I always like two pictures more than one (even in photography).

Pictures in a row are just the best. Amazing things happen when you put pictures next to each other. And I have missed that a lot for these past few years, being in too bad a shape to do anything more than covers and thumbnails for very long periods. Often less than thumbnails³.

The only actual pages I was able to do since the start of 2021⁴ were the “new years cards“, the A+M shorts. Since it was about time to get started on the card for 2024, I did that, which instantly made me go “oh right, now I remember who I am. This is what I do.” It’ll be 100% uphill to actually draw the pages, and that’s why I’m starting in September, but it’s nice to remember it all for a minute. Nothing is as exciting as pictures in a row.

Footnotes

1) This impulse is a problem of its own.

2) They don’t have to talk. It’s not about storytelling. I’m not an illustrator, but I don’t think of myself as a storyteller either. The sense of being is everything. And a different sort of time happens in two pictures than can be packed into one. This is a separate 5000-word topic for another time, but I had to bring it up.

3) During the worst days I think “maybe I can’t draw, but I can at least write while I’m completely out of it”. Yet it turns out writing also requires a working brain and two atoms of energy to rub together. Who knew?

4) I was already in bad shape earlier. I barely got through the few MADI pages in the summer of 2020, feeling eighty years old; I had to do just layouts for half of the pages I originally signed up for. The last issue of Skulldigger was finished during a brief respite that winter, before things got much worse for a very long time.

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