Project Waldo

An unexpected and ironic side-effect of finishing a project like this is the overwhelming sense of having failed. You feel like you're driving a Rose Parade float at the Indy 500. Somebody else won the thing weeks ago, the stands are empty, and the reasons to pull over start to outnumber the reasons to keep going. There's only one lap remaining, but there won't be any victory milk waiting for you at the finish line. You go into something like this with expectations. You think your actions will bear fruit. You fantasize about your debut at San Diego Comic-Con, and how your heroes will invite you into their club. You've seen too many montages -- you think the world will pay you back for your effort, with interest. Then San Diego flies by, and you're not ready. That iron has gone cold and you never struck it. The thing is, this isn't your moment of failure. This is actually the most important chapter of  the whole odyssey. This is where you discover that wor...

Almost immediately after you get married, you start outsourcing stuff to your spouse. For example, I am now the toilet-cleaning guy. I did it a few times in a row, and now I'll be doing it for the rest of my life. Another example: Jiyoung waters the plants. I used to know how to water plants, but now that she does it, I've completely shut down the plant-watering part of my brain. I don't even know how to get the water from the sink to the plant. It's a mystery.  When Jiyoung went off to work a month ago, it was like half of my brain vanished. That half apparently included the machinery responsible for self-discipline. With her nearby all day, it was difficult to drift too far from the path. It's not like she was looking over my shoulder, but the house was filled with a general sense of focused productivity. With her gone, the house has quickly filled with a new sense of "let's play PS3, surf the web, take long lunches, and snack continuously." Well,...

If you're on the lookout for a good podcast, you may want to give  Radiolab  a spin. It's nominally a science podcast, but the hosts are so charming and the format so creative that it's easy to forget that you're also learning something. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have a knack for unlocking the latent entertainment in just about any topic, from archaeology to zoology. Their favorite haunt is neurology -- V.S. Ramachandran and Oliver Sacks contribute so frequently that they should probably be credited as co-hosts (I'd like to take this opportunity submit my nomination of Sacks for Most Huggable Scientist, and if such an award does not yet exist, somebody needs to get on that). I can't pretend that I completely understand the mental machinery they describe (I'm not sure anybody does), but there's a common thread that connects every interview: this idea that the mind is not a unified entity, but is instead a loose coalition of independent operators t...

My wife got a job!  I'm so proud of her -- it's hard enough for locals to find work in America these days, so you can imagine what a coup it is for a Korean to land a job here. Not just any job, mind you, but a good job! I'm reminded of how helpless I felt when I was looking for work in Korea - I couldn't have gotten a job as a dishwasher, let alone something resembling a career. I know I don't really have the right to be proud of Jiyoung, since I didn't raise her or anything. But whatever. I'm proud and a little awed. She's so freakin' smart ! And brave. And employed! She's also cute. This development is relevant to this blog in a more direct way, of course. I still need to make some money at some point, and the sooner the better. But there's a lot more runway ahead, and there isn't a brick wall at the end of it anymore. The idea of turning comics into a career just got more plausible.  Meanwhile, Project Waldo is getting pretty clo...

When I was a kid, I had this recurring dream in which I'd get into a fight with a bully, but the air between us would somehow slow down my punches. Like an animal trapped in tar, the harder I pushed my fist toward my adversary, the greater the invisible opposing force. That dream pretty accurately presaged the experience of creating a comic. The harder I've pushed for perfection, the more things have tended to bog down. The painful lesson that's headed for my forehead like a Tomahawk missile is this: comics are compromise. An artist's ability to finish a comic is proportional to her willingness to tolerate imperfection. This sounds simple enough, but it's a real bear if you're at all invested in the world you're creating (which, if you've decided to make a comic on your own, you probably are). Then there's the added burden of knowing that even if you manage to complete a "perfect" comic, you'll look at it again after a year of further...

Word balloons seem so simple in the beginning. The first time you make one in Photoshop, you just draw an oval with the Elliptical Marquee Tool. After a while, the symmetry starts to bug you, so you decide to draw your word balloons by hand with the Brush Tool. Really, really slowly. But they still look kinda crappy. Before long, word balloons have become a source of sadness in your life. Well, there's a third path. That path is Paths. Why are paths so good for word balloons? Three reasons. First, you get super-clean, super-even lines. Second, you can modify them (if you change the words -- which you will -- it's no big deal to modify the dimensions of an already-placed balloon). Third, they're reusable. You can save all your paths into a single file and use them in future pages. Here's how you do it (more accurately, here's how I do it, and I probably do it oddly, so please feel free to offer your own techniques in the comments section): First, let's make a pa...

Page sixteen is underway. The last time I'll need to draw any rocks, swords, or trees for some time. Eight pages to go. Two thirds done. I can't show any of the new stuff here, but rest assured that I'm mere decades away from finishing this issue. So slow. Here's what the grown-up part of my brain tells my inner Chicken Little when things get really bad: don't confuse speed with efficiency. Quality is a variable in the first case, but a constant in the second. Eliminating waste, automating repetitive tasks, honing drawing skills, and cultivating self discipline are all worthwhile efficiency improvements. If you're doing everything you can in these areas and people are still saying you're too slow, go to your local comic shop and look at the thousands of examples of what "fast" gets you. May lightning strike me down on the day I tell someone that they've got to draw a page per day to be successful in comics. That sentence really means "I ne...