preparing to ink my first page of comics this year

getting over the flu and being more artistically productive over the last couple of days -- feels good to pick up a paintbrush again

I dunno if I can say that Secret Story is The Mighty Pat's best album, but it's one of his most approachable and appealing, and it's the one I find myself listening to most often. And, a while back, a moment on that album helped me crystallize some of my own thoughts about myself.

The Longest Summer is one of many stellar tracks on the album. This one in particular stands out because it prominently features Pat on piano as well as guitar. I love his piano playing on this track, I find it gorgeous.

It occurred to me that there might be people who wondered why he didn't get a Real Pianist to play this. He knows many of them. His buddy Lyle Mays, pianist for the Pat Metheny Group and one of the finest pianists in the world, was available -- and in fact Lyle appears on several other tracks on the album. There might be people who listen to Pat's piano here and think that they know of "better players" -- more technically proficient, more dazzling. And, granted, it's clear from this song that Pat is much more adept on guitar, which is his "real" instrument.

But, for one, I figure he must've wanted to do this one himself, because he did. And he could. And, for another, he did fine. What he plays fits what the song needs, it's attractive and satisfying, and it completely works. Would the song sound more gorgeous or more touching if the piano were flashier? I would argue no. Pat's piano playing on this song is not just good enough, it's Plenty Good Enough®. This was the moment where I stumbled upon this concept.

I realized that, if I try to evaluate my own work as a cartoonist as objectively as I can, I would say that I am Plenty Good Enough®. You can easily find lots of cartoonists who are technically better than I am, whose work is more dazzling and impressive and arresting than mine. But my goal in my comics is to tell a story, and my work tells that story with clarity and with some appeal. The story wouldn't be better if my work were more "eye candy" than it is. My drawing works for what I do, more often than not.

While Pat is not the most amazing pianist you ever heard, he is still a better pianist than most people you know, primarily because most people you know aren't trying to play piano at all. Similarly, I am a better cartoonist than most of the people you know. (Even though you know, or know of, quite a few who are much better than I am.) And this doesn't mean I'm not trying to be better -- but I do that for me, because I find pleasure in becoming a better cartoonist. But as I stand now, I feel like I am Plenty Good Enough®.

I remember it was in 1985 that I started attending school in Toronto to work on my Ph.D. (which I never got, but that's another story). And it was around this same time that I was corresponding via snail mail with Scott McCloud and he got me into manga. Besides having him tell me about it and what he was getting out of it, I would at times mail him some cash and he would mail me back manga (untranslated in those days) from the bigger bookstores in NYC. No place around here carried them then.

But the bigger comic book shops in Toronto were starting to carry anime-related materials, including "anime manga" -- books created using stills from anime instead of B&W manga drawings, and then provided with word balloons (again, untranslated -- I wasn't the only geek willing to buy comics he couldn't read). It was these anime materials in Toronto that introduced me to Captain Harlock.

Not only was I fascinated by Reiji Matsumoto's unique drawing style, but the anachronistic mishmash of his visuals expanded my mind and helped wean me away from strict literal-mindedness in my enjoyment of things. Harlock struck me as so cool, he was the first time I was ever really attracted to the pulp trope of space pirates. Not long after, I got the first bee in my bonnet about creating my own space pirate comic.

My initial designs were heavily influenced by anime and manga, of course, but I deliberately drew upon other influential artists of those years to try and craft what I hoped would be a distinctive look. I settled on the name Vant for him, primarily so that its possessive -- Vant's -- would be a tribute to Jack Vance, one of my very fave SF writers.



Over the next few years, I found myself doing reams of research for the sake of world-building for this series. I learned so much about the planetologies of the solar system, the mechanics of space flight and space living... but never actually wrote my story.

I had my pirate but had no idea what he was gonna do. A few half-baked notions came and went and got discarded. One story made it to twenty pages of script before I lost faith in it. And then life circumstances intervened and derailed the whole project for years. But I never lost this urge to create a rollicking adventure space-pirate comic.

And then, several years ago, I stumbled across a couple of volumes of Valerian I had picked up in Toronto back in the 80s, and finally actually read them. And something clicked, and I wanted to make my space pirate again. Since then, I have completely re-done my world-building, this time more directly influenced by Vance -- the only thing that survived was Vant's name. (I still dunno if I love the name, but have yet to think of anything I like better...) And I have spent the time sketching and tweaking, trying to nail down the visuals of my cast and incidentals of their lives, re-thinking my entire approach to the tone and theme of the series...



....but I still don't have a story! I have my pirate but I dunno what he is gonna do! A couple years ago I got as far as a new twenty-page fragment of a whole new script before I lost faith. Really hoping that writing this down will shake my brain out of this time loop and get me actually creating an actual story that I can actually draw and actually get people to read!

coming up with a new character design during my recent doodles -- I find this one interesting and kinda exciting, I can see story possibilities in it

doing some brush inking and getting a few good lines down -- not consistently perfect by any means, but enough good stuff to encourage me to keep trying

drawing some Christmas-present toons and being fairly happy with how they turned out

gaining a new fan who can see what I'm aiming for

almost done!