Weekly Update - 205 - 2/12/24 (Patreon)

I'm trying to be a little more ambitious with The Next Page... squeezing in 11 total panels, in an effort to slow the pacing of the page a bit, featuring all different poses and expressions. It's an experiment, really. I'm also focusing in on trying to get the sketch as correct as I can before moving onto inking the page, and it's... slowed me down a bit. Suffice it to say I don't really know if I can finish it by Wednesday.

But I'm gonna try!

Also the new Riley voting button is done, though I haven't seen it in action yet, hopefully it looks as good as I imagine it when it's all hooked up with mouseover and such. Should be going up this week!

Drawing: Page 186

Playing: Cyberpunk 2077 and WoW

Ramble:

I spend a lot of time thinking about the creative process. I want to analyze it in myself, in others, and kind of ferret out what tidbits I can from that analysis so I can learn and improve. (Mind, I'm not very good at this, or anything really, but the most important thing for me is always to just keep trying!) I know at least some of you have your own creative projects you're working on, and every once in awhile an idea pops into my head that feels as if it might be important enough for me to share with you all. Granted, I'm probably fooling myself, thinking that any of my thoughts are as insightful as they might feel to me, but whatever. Writing something down has never been worse than not writing that thing. Though... let's qualify that by ignoring all of Twitter. And... most of the rest of the internet. Okay just forget that one, it's a bad quote. Perhaps I'll fall back on one of my old standbys: the writings of the past are no excuse to avoid writing in the present. Or something to that effect. I keep changing the wording of it but I think it's pretty solid advice. Anyhoo...

Where am I going with this? Well, the core of my most recent tickly brain worm comes from a simple saying: "The first thing we create is never the best thing we'll create." I particularly like the wording of this quote, because it doesn't suggest that anyone will constantly be improving at a consistent or even a noticeable rate. It merely suggests that as long as a person keeps creating, their theoretical best thing is often still ahead of them. There is always a better to reach for. Which is, I think, great advice for creators in general but especially great for those that are just starting out. The first thing(s) a creator makes might not be great. It may not even be good, and that can be discouraging, but we all need to be okay with that so they can keep going and strive for something even better down the road. Funny to think that for as much thought as I've been giving this quote this week, I don't actually remember where I first heard it from. It's just been haunting me ever since, and it's been eating away at me recently as I realize that God Slayers is technically a first thing for me, in many ways. It's also NOT my first thing, in many other ways.

One of the reasons my mind keeps going back to this is because there seems to be this prevailing assumption that creative projects are born out of nothing, from people who were just magically born with talents, and that each masterpiece somehow effortlessly pours from the fingers of a master. I think that people are starting to learn that nobody is actually born with talent. It's just that some people pick up skills and knowledge faster or more easily than others, and I believe that's because they are more interested in those skills to begin with, so putting in the extra effort and hard work required to conquer those skills is a joy for them to indulge in. The sheer amount of work that someone must do in order to become a master of a craft is often invisible to the rest of us. When I think of all the ways that God Slayers is NOT my first thing, I think back to a long history of drawing and doodling comics, just in my free time, for my own amusement, hundreds and hundreds of pages, drawings in the margins of my homework, in my notebooks, on whatever I could draw on. And when I think back to just how much time I spent doodling and drawing comics in my youth, it's honestly sometimes a little discouraging I'm not better than I am today. Then I remember to forgive myself, and shift the blame over to that ten-year hiatus I took from art to pursue a different career.

As I stand here today, God Slayers is still a first thing for me in many ways. Ergo it may very well not be the best thing I'll ever create. It might not be my first story, or my first comic, or even my first webcomic, but it is the first project I've committed to for several years where I'm almost entirely on my own, telling this story that I like, and hoping you all like it as well. It's the first story I've written where I've completed Act 1 in its entirety and started to enter Act 2, and that's honestly a little anxiety-inducing for me. Almost every story I've written before has never made it this far. I've written countless beginnings and more than a fair few endings and I'm scared that I might make mistakes as I try to navigate the middle of this story. Then again, mistakes have already been made, and anyone looking closely enough through my story might spot more than a few of them. Mistakes are a powerful tool, however, an excellent teacher, and aren't something worth being afraid of because I can learn something valuable from each and every one.

And..... I've lost my train of thought, too many distractions today. So whatever, I'll stop typing. At the end of everything, God Slayers might not be the best thing I'll ever make, but I've got plans to do more in this setting, with this universe and these characters, and that just makes me more excited for what might come next.