Somebody stop me drawing comics before I hurt myself
Submitted by Faith on June 16, 2009 - 14:58
I finished drawing The Fielding Course last Friday, and handed it in to First Second on Monday. Yay! Now I'm taking a week off to catch up on all the sleep I missed before diving back into revisions and other comic-related stuff. So with TFC done, that makes three graphic novels I've drawn in three years, in increasingly smaller time frames and fewer distractions from a day job. When I was working on Zombies Calling (2007), I drew 100 pages in nine months, while working a (more than) fulltime job in animation. I drew 150 pages of The War at Ellsmere (2008) over ten months, with a fulltime job that stopped and started, before completely evaporating midway through the book. And now I'm finished 150 pages of The Fielding Course, drawn in five and a half months (started fulltime in January, finished this past Friday), with no day job at all. So, very slowly and cautiously easing into the land of fulltime comic drawing, while furiously cutting back on my budget and trying to reduce my food intake. Whatever. I love it.
Hey, let's do some comic math!
Demonology 101 (& side comics): approx 800 pages (I don't know this for sure. I know the main comic was longer than 700 pages, and there were those side comics)
Ice: approx 200 pages
Zombies Calling: 100 pages
The War at Ellsmere: 150 pages
The Fielding Course: 150 pages
& all those miscellaneous comics I've done in the past; who knows how many pages those add up to.
= approx 1400 pages!!!!!!!??? Dear lord. Somebody stop me. Especially as I JUST started getting paid for my comics. Yeah.
And what's next? Oooh, exciting things! More comics! ... but those things merit their very own blog post, and I'm blowing this popsicle stand to go sketching with friends, so that's for another day. Oh, and tomorrow is URASAWA DAY! and volume 3 of 20th Century Boys is out. I plan to hike downtown to pick it up tomorrow rather than waiting till the weekend, because it's my week off and I can do things like that. Y'know, as wonderful as it is to have more of Naoki Urasawa to get my paws on, committing to buying 22 volumes of 20th Century Boys and another eight or nine of Pluto pretty much takes up all of my comic spending budget for the next two years, so I have to depend mightily on the library (which is awesome and buys pretty much everything I need) or the kindness of strangers (and comic book store owners) to read anything not Urasawa. In short, long live the library. But I still wish I had a bigger comic buying budget. Don't we all?
