Weekly Update - 168 (Patreon)

Did a few more pages last week, still progressing right along! Went ahead and finished all the remaining text-only pages, did a couple more of the major ones. I think I'm going to go for a record this week and try to get a big chunk of them done!

Major Touchups - Pages that need not quite a full redraw:

Page 44 (In progress), 50, 52

Standard Touchups - Pages that will receive standard art treatment:

Page (1, 4, 9 12) 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 43, 47. 48

Minor Touchups - Pages that will receive only minor art changes:

Page 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 45

Ramble:

Why do I struggle to ramble these days? The easy excuse is that I spend a lot of time writing any given ramble and most Mondays I'd rather jump right into drawing so I can get this book out and return to doing what I enjoy the most. But I feel like there's a deeper reason, so I'm going to try and force myself to ramble today in an effort to maybe work through some jumbled thoughts and track down what it is.

I've written a lot of rambles over the past few years, and I feel like most of the interesting information in my head that people might want to read has already been written and shared (albeit only with the ~25 of you). There's a weird phenomenon (and I don't know if it has a name, tbh) where if a writer shares their story with someone prematurely, they often lose the motivation to finish writing it. I see it all the time amongst my friends, when they explain to me the depths of the plot and characters for this story they want to write, and then it never gets written. A far more famous and recent example of this is Game of Thrones. Thanks to the failure of Season 8 being rushed out for the show, people now know how the whole story ends, and last I heard, good ol' GRRM has stated he has no desire to write the rest of those books. Regardless of what he blames, the objective fact is that the story has been told, we know how it ends, and the mystery is gone. It's more complicated than JUST that, but I feel as though it's a pretty big contributing factor. When the writer can no longer surprise the reader with their ideas, share something new, I feel like that's a huge loss of what drives a writer to write. None of us really want to tell (or read) the same old story again and again.

And I think it applies to Rambles as well. I don't want to sound like a broken record, repeating the same core philosophies over and over again. I'm not here to preach at you about the things that keep me motivated and inspired and continually driving myself past all the things that have always held me back. But maybe that's helpful to people? Fact is, I don't know what people want to read. If I did, I wouldn't be a writer.

I do consider myself a writer, even though I am a writer of comics. A lot of effort goes into these stories, even though webcomics aren't exactly at the same level as classical literature... but then again, why not? I was told growing up that the works of those like Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Herman Melville were great. Yet aside from the fact that those stories have been analyzed all to piss by critics and experts for decades, I don't know that they are the standard by which "greatness" should be defined. They are good stories, I will admit. I enjoyed Tom Sawyer, Moby Dick, and Macbeth and Othello, but are they the pinnacle of literary achievement? I doubt it. I feel like most of us are simply afraid to criticize such stories because we've been told all our lives that they are amazing. Going back and watching old movies, for instance, is interesting because the old classics are often not as great as we might remember them being. They're still fun films, good stories, and very enjoyable media, but we have a bit of rose-tinted nostalgia when looking backwards, and we often fail to appreciate how modern stories, even the bad ones, can be a bit more refined than those old classics.

As our culture advances (hopefully), I believe our standards for storytelling also change and evolve. Storytelling being one of the oldest forms of human entertainment, I've heard it stated before that the formula for storytelling hasn't changed for thousands of years. I've also heard it stated before that every story has been told before. I've even said that myself. While there are certainly tried and true methods and formulas and structures for good storytelling that writers should at least be aware of and probably default to, I refuse to believe we can't keep pushing things forward and doing better. And while every story has been told before, how odd is it that writers keep finding ways to tell new stories?

Now I'll never argue that the comics I'm drawing are the next greatest story ever written, nor do I believe such an achievement is within my reach, but what drives me forward is to continue doing better than I've done before, and that IS well within my reach. I see no reason why someone's webcomic, some day, (or any other storytelling format for that matter,) couldn't be the next great thing, raising our standards even further and teaching us all a thing or two about good storytelling.