This is an autobiographical piece about how I transitioned from the analog to the digital ways of making art. It had to pass the recommendations of two peer reviewers, and go through some revision, before its appearance in SEQUENTIALS 1.4 —an online academic journal from the University of Florida—one of the major hubs of current comics scholarship.
My commentary in the captions is probably unnecessary, and you can probably just skip over those, but it does reveal more about my process for anyone who might be interested…
When I saw this, I kicked out a hard copy, picked up a pen, and started thinking about how I might begin…
From the onset I knew that this had to be a first-person narrative, and so of course I needed to render a spokesman for myself.
In the original version, pages 2 and 3 were vertical in terms of orientation. The rotation to horizontal gave me more room to work in the autobiographical stuff.
Pages 2 and 3 were tricky ones for me, and when the draft came back for revision, two peer reviewers both offered good suggestions that I implemented here.
“Blue William” was one of the first comix I made way back in the early 1990’s. Being made of paper, most of it vanished over the years, except for this splash page that was glued to my study ceiling. It of course tore when I removed it to scan for inclusion in the story…but in so doing the new page gave me yet another way to emphasize the physicality of the old-school ways of making ‘toons.
The reviewers termed the story more “analytical” than “academic” and I was glad to hear that, since although I taught for many years, I wanted this piece to be from a practitioner’s viewpoint. Other than the McCloud quotation and this one from the grandmaster of comics, I didn’t use any outside sources—other than my own, of course.
This and the following are pivotal pages where I make the transition from black and white to color and the rest of the story should flow smoothly from there. The text-heavy pages vanish for the most part and the images and should carry the eye quickly forward…
These two panels are from stories still looking for homes…
The first two stories you can find on my Comix page. “Peter and Richard” and “Laying Low” are two stories still looking for homes…
It’s worth repeating how good this Take A Stand anthology is. You can find it easily on Amazon.
As soon as I heard about this, I knew it was the end of this particular story as well. You can’t make up irony like that, eh?
To see a photo of John’s tattoo, just click over to my Farrago page…