This project experience has been less about the discovery of completely novel concepts and more about the solidification of existing ones. In large part, the goal of the project was to put myself in an environment specifically tailor-made to exploit my habits and flaws. The comic, being the meat and potatoes of my project, is an extremely open project that required a lot of preemptive planning. The drawing process, which was the bulk of my actual senior project experience, while interesting, is ultimately a long, arduous, daily slog with a fairly unforgiving time limit (let’s not forget the week I had to do three pages in one day). At the same time, I inadvertently tacked on an additional challenge when about ⅔ of the way through the book I went completely off-script.

 

Now, in regards to which of my weaknesses and compulsive habits this appealed to, I dare say all of them. I’m horrible at working under strict time limits, if my SAT score is anything to go by. I’m not good at keeping a consistent schedule, especially when said schedule requires me to maintain a consistent output of solid work. I’m not good with aligning my time properly, and, if today’s discussion with James is anything to be believed, I’m not that good of a writer either.

 

However, given that I’m finally shipping up to college (hopefully) within this year, these skills are going to be absolutely integral. Upon the end of high school I realized there were certain attributes that I was still missing – diligence, a degree of endurance, certainly my attention span was still lacking and by extension harming my work speed. This is why I created this project, or at the very least fine-tuned it, to fit all of my weaknesses to the beat, so that I could work past them doing something I loved.

 

In this exercise in semi-rewarding tedium, I have discovered that old habits die hard, and habits actively perpetuated throughout the demolition derby that was my high school experience simply come back as zombies. The result was ultimately a mixed bag, with periods of clarity that allowed me to get my work done quickly and efficiently, and periods of swampy uncertainty where I almost drowned in details. It’s not quite the resounding success that I hoped for, not the monumental break away from my habits. But it is a step forward. Ultimately beyond the fancy tools, industry secrets and networking, the most important thing any comics industry worker is endurance. The endurance to push through, to keep pumping out comics, constrained by a century of continuity, on a meager pay, likely strangled by censorship, editors, frivolous fans, and often unreasonably tight schedules. You can push through once, maybe twice, but what then? Comics are a hostile industry. College is a demanding place. Both require a perpetual attention span, diligence and grit. Hopefully this project has been a much-necessary stepping stone in that journey.