I try to go to the Wooly Pig Farm Brewery at least once a year. Out in the hills near Coschocton, OH, where I get almost no cell service, this place is a peaceful haven where I can spend an afternoon drawing without purpose or distraction. It can be healing to make art that isn’t “content.”
Though during this last visit I did spend some time making development drawings for the upcoming Doctor Baer game:
And the third Doctor Baer story:
At the time of this writing I have 20 pages of pencils, 24 pages of inks, and 30 pages of colors left in The Case of the Mummy Express. And while this is a shorter story, and I love working on it, I am ready to make some other art. Maybe I should say I’m ready to explore story concepts, character voices, and themes again. Making the artwork is fun, but it’s only one part of what keeps comics interesting for me.
I’m longing for that confusing and delightful bit of puzzling through the narrative and expressing it in sketchbooks and thumbnails. It’s the piece of the process that’s harder to measure or spreadsheet. It feels more mysterious and emergent. Lately my work has been more of knocking pages out and checking the boxes on the spreadsheet. Again, it’s lovely work that I’m grateful to do, but it doesn’t always carry the romance of the chaotic early stages of a story.
That’s the journey, though–the early stages are full of potential and hope. The story could be anything, and you have all these big feelings of what it could and should be. But as you make the thing it becomes more and more specific, and there’s a kind of grief you experience in saying goodbye to what it could have been just as you celebrate the birth of what it is.
Speaking of art becoming more of what it is, game development art will be coming! Rob Stenzinger, my partner in making the Doctor Baer video game, has a Discord where we’ll be sharing development updates. Join us there for sneak previews of the game as we build it.
