4/9/2020

In my gradual descent into madness, I am beginning to once more appreciate the necessity of weekends. Or, at least, momentous breaks. While I would most certainly call the past few days productive, I have hit steady burnout – not that the work has been getting any more difficult (albeit page 6 has certainly given me opportunity to play with dramatic writing, expressions, and even to some limited extent body horror), it’s just that I’m finding myself confined by the nagging urge to do literally anything else. Hence, my lack of motivation has artificially prolonged my work and taken away from the time that I could (and in fact seriously should) be reaching out to the artists Harrison Kassen in his eternal glory has set me up with, working on my internship and sketchbook and finally finishing up Catch-22.

My patterns have become a lot more sequential now that the obligatory exposition dump part of the comic is over, meaning I can experiment a lot more with character dialogue and design. I’m trying to strike a tone between caricature-y and realistic, where they look ever so slightly like political cartoons, given the comic itself is set in a geopolitical dystopia. I am finding that the dialogue, even with large, sometimes exaggerated lettering, so far fits pretty nicely into the confines of the panels. That may however very well change as the comic becomes more dialogue and exposition-heavy.

I am going to take the next day or two to research the first person I am going to interview, a writer/letterer named Jed McPherson. From what surface-level research I’ve done so far this man could be an excellent jumping off point, given he appears to be a largely independent webcomic artist with a background in journalism. I will do some research and then attempt to reach out to him, here’s to hoping that doesn’t fall through.