100 Days Project, 1,050 days later...

Day 89 of 100.

  If someone asked me what the one thing that kickstarted my career making comics, I'd have to say without a doubt that it was my involvement in the 'Hundred Days Project'.

Set up by comedian Josie Long, the project ran from December 1st 2009 through to March 10th 2010.  For those one hundred days each person pledged to the project had to do one thing once a day that would hopefully make them a better person.  Some took up an exercise or a craft, learnt a new word, made more of an effort to talk to strangers, or deleted a friend from Facebook(!).  Many others took on a creative project, writing poetry or taking photos.  I chose to create a daily webcomic.

100 Tiny Moments... Kindle eBook

My first autobiographical comic work '100 Tiny Moments' is currently off sale in my webshop to make way for 'Grow'.  However, I have now made the comic available to buy from the Kindle store.

Once a day for 100 days I drew a comic based on my life.  Drawn from memories of the past, events from the present, and imagined hopes and fears for the future, it's at once a diary and an experiment in daily creativity.

"There is imaginative and poetic potential in the small details of life that surround us, and very small details can encapsulate the most important things about life."
- Josie Long, in her introduction

Hourly Comic Day 2012

On a whim yesterday morning I decided to take part in this year's Hourly Comic Day, a challenge held every year on the first of February.  The idea is to draw a short comic about the last hour for every hour that you are awake.  By the end of the day you have a wee story about your day, and everyone shares what they've been up to and rejoices!

Anyway, it turned out to be a fun challenge.  It's been three years since I did '100 Tiny Moments From My Past, Present and Future' (where I drew an autobio comic once a day for 100 days) and it was nice to get back to doing some good ol' fashioned autobiography.  It's two very different projects, but I do feel that this glimpse of my life three years down the road is a nice counterpoint/afterword to the stories I told in '100 Tiny Moments...'.

If you enjoyed my hourly comic, I hope you'll have a look at '100 Tiny Moments'.  Even better, you can order a limited edition printed copy from my shop.  Also, don't forget to check out the entries by other people, which you can see over here.  Hourly Comics Day is a fantastic idea that is a pleasure to see in action - something that reminds you of what a great comics community there is out there, and reiterates the potential we have to make comics every day.

If you weren't following my hourly comic in real time on Twitter, you can read the comic in full below...

Maps to Live By - Making of

Solipsistic Pop vol. 4 is just about to be released to the public.  We received our advance copy the other day and I have to say it's more wonderful than I imagined.  Editor Tom Humberstone has crafted a top class anthology, and the artists involved have all pushed their work into new and interesting places.  It's on a par with any comics anthology I've ever seen, reminding me of the quality seen in the pages of Best American Comics or RAW, and it showcases a breadth of talent that evinces the healthy state of U.K. comics today.

I'm really proud to be a part of it.

I thought it would be nice today to talk about the making of my own piece for the anthology.  For most of my comics career so far I've been creating documentary style comics, mostly about film theory and parasitology.  It's an exciting niche to work in, but one that trains certain tendencies and neglects others.  My work up until this year had generally been very un-sequential and has had very little storytelling in it.  This year I decided to work those other muscles, first with my wordless piece for Paper Science 5, and then with this, my short story Maps To Live By.

The story was sparked off when I met up with Tom in May while he was planning this fourth volume of the exemplary anthology.  Over a game of the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame (honestly, it's amazing) he talked about his idea for the volume.  The theme of maps struck me straight away, as well as his insistence that the artists should explore more complex formal and narrative themes than in the previous kid friendly edition.

I started to see in this a story of my family's complex maps: my Grandfather's childhood in India, the son of a Scottish man and an Indian woman; my father's childhood in Scotland, with his Anglo-Indian father and Swiss mother.  It wasn't just the idea of physical maps of course, but those deeper, more complex maps we experience: the maps of race and culture and identity that we're expected to read, follow and understand every day.  It was the idea of receiving a map you're not sure what to do with, or a set of maps that conflict with each other, and show you there's no simple route to follow.

This family history I'd explored before in my autobiographical project '100 Tiny Moments From My Past, Present and Future', and it was a theme that I felt and still feel has more to be said about it.  These are ideas and debates that sit right at the heart of my family's experience of the world, and I wanted to look at them through this comic book lens.

I immediately knew as well that this story needed to be told by both myself and my father, Peter.  It's his story at the heart of all this, and his voice that told the tale to me.  These events have been part of the family oral history.  Very little of this is written down, and what was interesting is that as we compared notes with the documentation that does exist, we found that not everything added up.  Thus, this story is not so much a factual reconstruction of events, as a continuation of that oral history, complete with those half-truths, grey areas and convenient fabrications that exist in every family's story of itself.

The writing process was a fantastic experience.  Peter and I would meet up with these half formed ideas and chip away at the scenes we'd imagined.  We work well together, and it was amazing confronting all these pieces of family history, and getting to know each other better in the process.  I'd say the writing of it was more like sculpture than anything.  We started by trying to put it all into words, soon finding that a better way was to piece together the pictures and words simultaneously.

We actually moved the writing into the physical space, printing off the sketches I'd done in Photoshop and re-arranging them on the carpet, re-writing them as the pieces slowly sifted together.

Then, I'd work up a more finalised composition of panels and content..

Before moving on to the digital pencilling process.  A lot of these images were based on real family photos, hopefully giving the scenes an air of authenticity.

Finally I inked and coloured the piece.

I don't want to give too much of the piece away, so I'm going to leave it at that.  It was certainly the most complex and challenging comic I've ever written, in so many ways.  From the layouts and narrative structure, through to the content itself, I've tried to do my best to live up to both the nuance and complexity of the story we took on, and to the quality of the artists on show in this latest edition of Solipsistic Pop.

I definitely recommend ordering a copy when it comes out, so keep your eyes on the website here or on my twitter, since I'll no doubt talk about this once it's out.
 

I should also finish by saying thanks to everyone who helped in the making of this short comic, which was such a big undertaking:  Mary and Margaret for checking it over and making sure it made sense, Tom Hunt for his input and advice on the story, and Anita for digging around the family history.

Autobiographical Comics and Constructions of Happiness

I was recently asked to write about my '100 Tiny Moments' project in relation to the concept of 'Construction of Happiness', which is an arts project by Astrid Bussink.  It's been a year and a day since I started the hundred days project so I thought it would be a timely moment to post the piece.  You can explore Astrid's project here.

Comics are simply the meeting of words and pictures.  But as the great comics autobiographer Harvey Pekar once stated “You can do anything with words and pictures”.  There’s something sweet and childlike about this philosophy - the idea that by matching words and pictures we can create a new more perfect artform, full of possibility.  It suggests that the comics artist is a pioneer, constantly able to reinvent visual language through new combinations of word and image.  Because comics utilise these two factors of visual communication (two factors, incidentally, that stimulate different sides of the human brain), the comics artist is free to shape representation in a way unparalleled by any other medium.  And when we shape representation, we can shape our own realities, constructing a vision of our world more perfect and more desirable than the real one.  As a result Comics are perhaps one of the artforms most suited to the construction of happiness.  

MCM London Report

Last weekend Mary and I hopped on a train and journeyed down to London to attend the MCM Expo, where I'd booked a stall to sell comics alongside the fantastic Luke Pearson.  For all three of us this was our first convention, and the first time any of us had run a stall selling comics.  The whole weekend was an amazing experience, meeting dozens of talented comics artists from across the country, and witnessing the full-on madness of a convention where over 40,000 people attend over the course of a weekend.

Most amazing was the huge number and variety of cosplayers you could watch walking around the hall.  Dressed as anime and manga characters, superheroes and computer game icons, these people were amazing to watch go by, even if I didn't recognise 80% of the characters on show.

 Riddler and Penguin at MCM. Photo © Mary Campbell 2010

100 Tiny Moments Book - OUT NOW!

The '100 Tiny Moments' books arrived the other day and now have been hand numbered, assigned a badge and packaged.  They look beautiful, and I'm proud as anything to have my first 'proper' book out.  You can buy it over to the right of this page. 

I'll also be selling it in person at the London MCM Expo this weekend.  Please come along and check out my stall (table C87), which I'm sharing with the super-talented Luke Pearson.  I'll be selling '100 Tiny Moments' as well as a lovely printed version of my 'Simple Knot' story.

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For those who didn't follow the series, '100 Tiny Moments From My Past, Present and Future' was my response to the 100 Days challenge - to do one thing, once a day for one hundred days to make yourself a better person.

I decided on creating a series of autobiographical comics examining my life - from memories, through current events, to imagined futures.  Over 100 days I created 100 comics, and in that three month sprawl you really can see a change in me.  From those early, scruffy attempts through to the increasingly complex and lovingly created pieces that emerge in the weeks that followed, there's a story to be read between the lines and panels of these comics.

It seems long ago now, but it was a fantastic project to be a part of.  Working to that kind of schedule is tiring and draining, but it does get results.   I learned a lot in that 100 Days, and I think it shows.

If you've not read the strips, you can still read the whole series here and see if you like it.  I hope if you enjoy the project you'll be able to support it by buying a copy of the book.

100 Tiny Moments Book - Preorder.

"There is imaginative and poetic potential in the small details of life that surround us, and very small details can encapsulate the most important things about life"

- Josie Long, in her introduction.

Almost a year after I began work on the 100 Tiny Moments project, and finally the comic is ready for print.  I have brought together all 100 strips from the project, with an introduction by comedian and '100 Days' project leader Josie Long. 

 I am selling 100 copies of the book: each one is hand numbered and comes with a different 100 Tiny Moments badge.  You can pre-order your copy now through paypal and I will pop your copy in the post when the book is released at the end of October.  Just order your copy from the 'Shop' section on the right of this webpage.

 

'100 Tiny Moments From My Past, Present and Future' - 116 pages, black and white. Available for pre-order now.  The book will also be available to buy from me in person at MCM London (29th - 31st October).

100 Tiny Moments: The Best of Days 68-100

So the Hundred Days project wrapped up with a show/exhibition in London on the 10th of March, and now it's all over.  It was a great show, with some fantastic final work from Josie Long et al, and the Hundred Days exhibition was pretty much the 8th Wonder of the World, full of amazing art and curiosities.  I managed to pick up some lovely souvenirs, including a new word by Chrissy Williams, a lego stegosaurus by Daniel Weir and a pretzel postcard by Kellee Rich.

Looking back at the project, I'm pretty sure it made me a better person.  I set out with a few self-improvement goals in mind:
1.  To improve my discipline, and show myself that it's not that hard to work towards a goal a little each day.
2.  To work on my art, and try and get to a level of quality that I'm more happy with.
3.  To show other people my work, and try and decrease my fear I have of doing so.
4.  To be more open with myself and others about my life and about personal matters.
5.  To have a completed comic after 100 days.

Well, I'm definitely more disciplined, having forced myself each day to draw a comic, no matter my mood.  There were days that were definitely a struggle, days where the quality dipped due to a lack of energy and inspiration, where I wished I could just give up and watch TV.  But then, there were days where I was close to giving up and a spark of inspiration allowed me to create work that I am really pleased with.  And I am pleased with the level of quality I managed to achieve, especially in the last 20 days, when I really tried to push myself further, and to avoid lazily resorting to a four square-panel structure.  Looking back at some of the early strips can be a little painful in comparison.  I managed to show people my work, and have become more confident about the concept of that, helped as well by the fact that people seemed to really respond to my honesty and openness.  And of course, by sticking with it, I've come out the other end with 100 short comics.

Above: This comic was a bit of a turning point for me.  It was a day with a bit of extra free time, and I was presented with a story I knew I wanted to tell.  Instead of the usual mad dash to come up with an idea late in the evening, I had a lot more time to mull it over, and the opportunity to make more of the layout than I usually would.  I realised quickly that it wasn't necessarily easier to create a simple four panel layout, and what extra time I might spend discovering the best layout of panels would be offset by the satisfaction of a good looking layout.  This story was also interesting for its notable lack of dialogue, though I now wish I'd had the confidence to have absolutely no speech there whatsoever.

 

Above:  This, and its prequel, were strips I had planned in my head for a while.  There is something sad about the idea that as we grow older we get left behind by culture and society.  I don't like to think it, but there is always that chance that one day my views of morality and propriety will be considered outmoded, bigoted even.  This was a strip, I have to admit, I was a little worried about being misunderstood.  Being called a bigot is no small thing, and that label hangs heavily over my future self's head.  I don't like the idea of it one bit, and feared that people would interpret the offpanel action as something specific that we accept in modern times.  Quite the opposite, what might make me and others bigots in the future is something we probably can't even imagine right now, or at least something we think we could never condone.

 

Above:  As the project wound towards the end, I think I became a little fixated on death.  This was at once to do with the looming end of the project turning my thoughts towards themes of mortality and endings, and the fact that I was increasingly aware of those gaps in my history that I'd left.  I think this is one of my most visually beautiful and poetic strips, and one that relies both on pictorial and textual elements to achieve its full effect.  Also, at this point I knew how I wanted to end the project, and the "Ashes Part I" title was a deliberate foreshadowing of "Ashes Part II", the third to last, though spiritual end to the 100 Tiny Moments.

Above:  This was another strip that I knew I wanted to do for a long time, though it took me a while to muster the courage to tackle.  I think I took a bit of a risk using actual photographs, but when I set out to begin drawing I realised there was no way I could capture this once vital human being who I had never met.  There was something so wonderful and tragic in those photos that I knew I couldn't capture.  The alternative universe ending to that strip was also quite hard to write, but I think an important choice.  Showing that other world only highlights what we have lost.

Above:  These last two strips were I think a good end to the project.  The idea of my passing into insignificance offsets the egocentrism of the whole project by suggesting that every one of us is only significant for a tiny moment in history.  We will impact on the lives of our friends and family, our children and theirs.  And we might be remembered beyond that if we're very lucky.  But that doesn't matter, and turning to dust doesn't scare me.  I hadn't originally intended to end with the final present day conclusion, but I think it was a good choice to return to that heart of the strip.

I'll leave the final word to the eloquence of Chrissy Williams, who discusses her feelings on the project on her blog.  I can't think of a better summary of what this project was for me, as well as the very thematic heart of "One Hundred Tiny Moments From My Past, Present and Future", than this:

"We affect other people, so what we do affects them. Small things accumulate into big things. This means that small things matter."

 

100 Tiny Moments: The Best of Days 34-67.

The Hundred Days project has just passed the two thirds point and I thought it would be another good moment to reflect on some of my favourite comics from the last 33 days.

Above: Sometimes memories just spring to mind out of nowhere as I sit staring at the blank page.  This was one of those, a memory that's often recalled, unexpected but fondly received.  As the weeks have passed I've tried more and more to experiment with the layout of my page, but it's only ever possible when time allows it. It's interesting to look back too at how what I'm currently reading informs my illustration, and there's more than a hint of Alison Bechdel in this piece.

Above: This was a memory I knew I wanted to deal with right from the start.  I guess that day it just seemed like the right time.  Setting pencil to paper, I knew that the chances of this working were pretty low, what with the challenges of capturing awesome natural beauty with my limited skill.  I decided on a simple visual technique in the end, less realistic, more expressive and suggestive. 

Above: Something I've wanted to avoid is becoming too self-reflexive with the strip.  For me, a comic commenting on itself closes itself off from being universally interesting, and limits its significance in the longer term.  But when an act like drawing an autobiographical comic becomes such a big part of your daily life, at times it needs to be commented on.  I only hope that I haven't crossed that invisible line and stepped too far into self-reflexivity.

Above:  Some comics are a joy to draw.  There's not that many opportunities to draw slimy, creepy monsters in an autobiographical comic, so when that gift presents itself, you have to just go with it.

100 Tiny Moments From My Past, Present and Future.

Things are going well with my 100 days pledge. Unfortunately it means other projects are showing signs of neglect. You can see all the comics over at 100tinymoments. Here's some of my personal favourites from the past 34 days...




Above: The first tiny moment where I flash forward into my future. It's strange, but visualising your own demise is quite enjoyable. It's the catharsis of it, I guess. Stop worrying, start imagining.

Above: One of my most favourite, but maybe others found it less entertaining. I just like the visual simplicity of it, the lack of pretension and the sense of fun. The last few days have not quite presented me with such small joys, and I guess I'm a little jealous of my past self.



Above: One of my most moving strips, and a big departure from others, it being entirely digitally painted over an old photo. Day to day it's hard to maintain such a high standard, and I don't think I've met this one since, at least on a visual and technical level.


Above: A piece of New Years Eve sentimentality. A vision of the future not involving my death or decay. I featured some of my friends in the pictures: Jamie got beardy, Tom with a scar and a son, Adrian looking just the same and Pete with middle-aged chubby cheeks. I dunno, it just makes me happy looking at the future this way, even if it'll probably turn out so different.