The first chapter/prologue of the webcomic is moving along quite nicely, thank you. First page took a full week to draw & color — considering this is the first time I’ve made a comic since I was nine or ten years old, that was not unexpected. The second page, on the other hand, took only four days. Now that’s more like it! I’m feeling a lot better about the new page format, and it helps that I was able to port over some drawing and coloring strategies from my hand-drawn film work. Sweet.
Soooo… are we there yet? Are we ready to release this thing?? Hardly! There are two criteria that must be met before I pull the trigger:
- I want to be able to consistently turn out at least one page per week.
- I want a sizeable stockpile of finished pages loaded up in the queue.
Taking care of item #2 will require a few weeks time, but it’s pretty straight-forward, although I have yet to decide how many images define ‘sizeable stockpile’. It’s that first item, however, that will be our trickiest opponent…
Maybe it’s the programmer/engineer-geek in me, but I love a good process. It’s a particularly good habit (vice?) to have when dealing with something as confusing and complex as film animation, and I’m finding that same mindset is desirable when making webcomics. Problem is, there’s a whole big bunch of DanBee’s Doodles randomness and chaos woven into the comic’s fabric. The exact opposite of process… it’s that goofy improvisational nature that has allowed DanBee’s Doodles to successfully resist anything resembling a process since its inception. And that same thing is going to grab every attempt to schedule webcomic progress by the ear and lead it into the nearest quicksand pit, laughing the whole time…
So, what am I trying to say? Hell, I don’t know. All I know for sure is I have absolutely no clue what I’m going to draw and/or write in any of these comic panels until the last second. Seriously. I’m going into each chapter with only a bare-bones story outline to work with… and that’s just the way I want it. The freedom to make things up on the fly. Although I know there are specific characters and events that must occur — with enough detail to incorporate foreshadowing where appropriate — I leave the majority of the itinerary up to pure chance. Scary, yes… but fun! In fact, I wish my filmmaking was more like that…
I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m going to shoot for completing a page a week, with no expectation I will actually get there. Somewhere in the ballpark will have to do. I’m only giving myself four days per week to work on this, with the remaining time reserved for Blender/filmmaking and Real Life (I have the option of stealing a day from Blender if worse comes to worse, but I don’t want to get into the habit of doing that). This is why item #2 is on the list…
Hmmmm… I think my ‘sizeable stockpile’ threshhold just grew. A lot. Wow!