As I spend a lot of time drawing in a very anti-social manner I often like to have the TV going as background noise and to keep my brain active when colouring gets a bit dull. It’s because of this I’m a fan of some really cheesy shows (as well as some classics like Sopranos, Mad Men, Deadwood and the West Wing).

I try to actually avoid quality TV when drawing because I’ll either stop drawing to watch it or I’ll miss some of the nuanced performances in a program. Sometimes if I’m really into the art I’ll miss entire plot points and episodes later be wondering when a character got pregnant!

So here’s where I make my confession. I admit some of the utter trash I love to watch. Top of that list are two shows. Smallville and Nip/Tuck. As different as they sound they are both watched for the same reason. The absolute ridiculousness of them.

Nip/Tuck has featured heroin smuggled in boob jobs as well as a trans-gender therapist who was married to Alec Baldwin but then started sleeping with virgins as they were the only ones who wouldn’t realise she wasn’t a real woman. As I said, bloody brilliant trash.

The other show, Smallville, is the reason I’m discussing TV today. I’ve started plowing through the latest series and the episode I watched yesterday left me utterly cold. A virus was sweeping through a little town called Metropolis (I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it?) leaving the city full of zombies. I won’t ruin the ending for you as I’m sure you’re all wondering if Superman survives, but also because I stopped watching it so I don’t know the ending.

Here’s my second confession, and it’s a bigger one considering the protagonists of this comic. I don’t GET zombie stories! As near as I can tell there’s a lot of shaky camera, a lot of screaming and everything is tinted “spooky”. Most of the leads in these films are utterly devoid of personality and apparently the only reason the viewer is supposed empathise with them is that they’re NOT zombies. Well that’s just racist!

Having said that there ARE zombie films I like because they’re NOT just that. Army of Darkness, Shaun of the Dead and Undead or Alive all inject light and humour into the genre. In fact those films could almost be described as comedies that just happen to feature undead supporting actors.

Am I doing justice to the genre? Please help me to understand.

-Trev

Putting a book together contains a bunch of steps, most of them painfully dull. Re-formatting pages for print, doing cover art, and fixing the inevitable typos that appeared as we rushed to get a page out every week (ok the cover drawing is a bit fun).  My favourite part of the process is fixing up artwork. It’s a luxury that i’m not often afforded in a webcomic where there’s a weekly deadline and i need to move onto the next page. As we’ve worked through the pages in prep for March’s book launch Jen’s been instrumental in helping me get a bit of clarity and making suggestions as to where we can improve readability.

Below you can see an example of these improvements. The script called for Martin to deftly step out of the way of the fight after being bowled over however the web version doesn’t really make that clear. I hope that in the book it’s a lot clearer and improves the story that we’re so proud of.

Melbourne folk! Block out the 3rd of March for the launch of the last issue of The Time Being as well as a whopping FIFTEEN  other local comics. I’ll have more details closer to the date but this is comics event of the year so you don’t want to miss out.

Meanwhile here’s the final cover to issue 4

2011 was a big year for me, in March I was married, I became an uncle to a handsome boy AND a set of gorgeous twin girls and work had a restructure which saw me doing a lot less fun projects as we found our feet, and the comic was featured a cast of thousands… Throughout this hectic period I overworked myself.

In fact I’ve been taking half my annual holidays for the last few years not even aware I was doing it. There always seemed to be something going on which meant I couldn’t get away.

So towards the end of the year I began to really feel all this and in December began to have a couple of panic attacks (my first ever yay!) and feel a bit depressed, perhaps even with a capital D. I began taking Fridays off and felt thankful it coincided with Arran doing guest strips so i could even rest from the comic for a few weeks.

It’s apparently pretty common with the art community that we can have black spells, I guess going back to Van Gogh’s ear cutting incident, but I’d never really experienced something like this, I’ve always been pretty light hearted.

Then I had a couple of chats. One with Ben Michael Byrne from Kranburn fame and we discussed our art processes and what drove us and he mentioned that on his next project he was putting as much effort into each panel as he does currently for each page and how it was all about pushing himself to be better and how good it felt. The other chat was with Katie Houghton-Ward. I managed to buy an incredible piece of her art as a gift for my wife and while picking it up I watched her work, her fingers never stopping. She spoke of how quickly she got bored and how she loved being creative. You could see she needed art like a drug.

And I picked up the tablet again and began to draw, and write and discovered that even though Arran’s fantastic guest trip meant I didn’t have to draw as much as I do usually, I needed to. Drawing helped clear my mind. I wasn’t stressed about work when I was drawing, in fact I barely thought when drawing, it was all about the next line, the right composition, the right colours. My wife talks to me and is lucky to get a response. The world slips away and my emotions are all about whether THIS panel is right or this page is a success.

Towards the end of 2011 I was considering ending Sawbones. It’s almost six years of drawing and it doesn’t pay my bills and taxes my time and the business/publishing side of it bores the crap out of me but I’ve discovered Sawbones keeps me sane so 2012 is going to see me push myself even harder. It’s already started with me writing this arc but I’ll be trying even further to mess with the formula. It that means occassionally the look of the comic changes for an arc into something you don’t like I sincerely apologise but I hope that the results are a better comic. On the business side this time has also refocused me but more of that later.

Thanks to Ben and Katie for the inspiration. I’m still getting some black days but comics makes EVERYTHING better.

Also, enjoy: