Friday, October 31, 2014

I'm back

Whew. Some good news. I've been blasting away on my new 250-page Trashed book for Abrams Comicarts, publishers of My Friend Dahmer, working 12-14 hour days, 7 days a week, in a mad rush to meet my mid-December deadline. That's been my schedule since Labor Day! I was going to make it, by the skin of my teeth, but then I got word the deadline has been pushed back to early Spring! Best of all, the release– Fall 2015– remains the same! So I can go back to 8-10 hour days and take some time with this. 

This is the reason for my radio silence over the past couple months. Now I can drop in a blog post or two. I know you've all been waiting with baited breath for my latest musings.


Of course, I didn't receive this reprieve until I had only five pages left to ink. Still, I'm glad I have the bulk of it completed. I'm quite pleased with the art. It's always fun to draw garbage.  And drawing a book in such a short time span gives the whole thing a consistency my other books, which took far longer, didn't have. Punk Rock & Trailer Parks, for example, took nearly two years to draw, and by the time I got to the end of it I noticed I was drawing the characters differently. So I had to go back to the first chapter and paste in new heads on everyone! I was a little more disciplined with MFD, but the opening scene was drawn a good year before the rest of the book, so I had a bit of the same problem and wound up totally re-drawing a couple entire pages. I don't know how creators who spend years on a project, like Jeff Smith did on Bone, do it.

Here's a two-page spread I just finished earlier this week.



My plan is to still wrap it up by late January, before I leave for Angoulême and another month-long  European book tour. I still have to lay in all the type, and the grey washes and punch out a cover.Then there's the edits and corrections. So lots to do, but at least I can take time off for Thanksgiving dinner.

More later.