Thread "Feeling a Sense of Accomplishment" in forum "Comic Talk and General Discussion *"

Posted at 1:05PM, May. 28, 2023

So this may get kind of long, and admittedly a bit pointless, but I completed a bit of a side project and wanted to share.

I don't generally think much of creators going back and re-doing old art on their comics, primarily because I've seen too many - even here on the Duck - get caught in an endless loop of constantly going back to redo old art and never advancing. Like, the old stuff will always be worse because you're always improving, so there really isn't a point…but when I went back to re-read the earliest pages of my most recent comics I felt a little embarrassed by how bad the background art was on some of the pages.

It's currently third on my priority list of the three comics I have running, so I've been experimenting a lot with how to do backgrounds quickly. At the time I told myself it would look stylized, but no, it just looked sloppy - distractingly so. I realized that as it is, I couldn't really even enjoy it myself, much less share it with others. I wanted to fix it, but I didn't want to let myself waste time on it like I've seen so many others do before. So I made myself a deal, I would rework only the pages that were bad enough to distract me while reading the archives and I'd only allow myself to work on this project when ALL of the other work for all three comics was already done for the week.

I ended up changing about 45 pages - many of which were just some minor color alterations that only took a few minutes, but a significant number of them (pretty much all of these came from two specific scenes that were the worst) were full-on breaking down and re-drawing the background which took a couple of hours each. It took a lot of weeks of just getting the work done in the margins whenever I had the free time, but I've finished it. The pages have been replaced in the archives and reading through it now is just such a relief. I'm actually proud of managing to accomplish it!

This isn't me promoting the comic itself. I'm not particularly good at either writing or drawing and this comic is like a 1/10 work - would not recommend. Even if the changes were fantastic, I didn't change all of them, so there's plenty of bad backgrounds still in it, they just weren't distracting enough to change. And it's not exactly exciting to check out the changes. Going from distractingly bad to merely forgettable isn't much of a draw…but it IS a significant improvement and I feel like I've learned a lot about improving my backgrounds just from this exercise so I just wanted to share that feeling of accomplishment with some people who might understand that particular feeling.

Posted at 8:05PM, May. 28, 2023

Honestly, I believe every artist looks back on their older work with embarrasment, and this happens to me a lot as well . . . even if at the time, I thought it was among my best work yet, and that I had really improved by then, I'll still come back to that work a few years later (after improving even more) and find myself wondering how I even thought this was my best work yet at the time - and that's true of any of the things that I do, from comics to YouTube productions, to other things. While I don't go into full George Lucas mode with much of my older works, I will sometimes go back to correct or fix glaring technical issues that maybe I didn't have the tools to fix at the time, but do now.

For comics specifically, I had actually considered redoing the initial 17 strips of VAMPIRE GIRL from 2011-2012, if only because I had to compress and downgrade a number of them because of Smack Jeeve's file size limits, and at the time, I was incapable of saving any backups of anything on my old computer, so unfortunately, what you see now of those original 17 strips - many of which are low-res - are the only versions available. If nothing else, I thought about redoings as a way of sort of "remastering" those particular strips, but I just ultimately decided against it for pretty much the same reasons: didn't want to waste my time with it.

Posted at 2:05AM, May. 29, 2023

I totally feel the same, especially when I look at the first like 20 pages of Molly Lusc, all of them analouge drawn, the first eight ones dating back to 2016. I've been very tempted to fully, digitally redraw and reupload those, but I've stayed my hand again and again simply because I've already lost enough time, having had these long hiatuses happening so I could tinker around with the writing part and ge that right.

So no, no redrawing anything for any of my comics until they are all finnished, period.

Posted at 4:05AM, May. 29, 2023

I redid my first comic Go a Viking! as Sword of Kings and left it unfinished. It's still hanging out there waiting for the final two thirds.
I started a fifteen year anniversary special edition of my first completed comic Attack of the Robofemoidsto update it a little as if there was a remastered anniversary edition of the movie. I actually have all the original full size files and can completely redo all the scenes to fix things I couldn't back in the day and erase a few gags that fell flat and add some snappy dialogue that might have ended up on the cutting room floor of the initial release. As I started I found some of original files were better done than I do today because it was before I'd developed so many bad habits.