I just realized that I've hit a new hurdle in my ongoing progress towards comicdom ... because I'm having the exact same problem lately on both Raven's Children and Kismet. Why are the real milestones the ones that nobody ever told you about?
When you first start out, you know some of the walls that you'll have to push against and eventually overcome. One is just sitting down to do the first page. One is finishing the first issue. One is anatomy, one is perspective, one is writer's block ... etc.
Well, I've found a new one, a big one. It's coming to terms with the fact that this work is just not going to live up to your expectations. It can't. You've introduced dangling plot threads that you can't go back and correct. You have this one character design that you absolutely hate, but it's an important character and you can't just kill them off. You've carefully laid the groundwork for an important plot development and then got there and realized that the plot development CAN'T ACTUALLY HAPPEN, so you have to work some kind of lame-ass workaround to get to the next plot point.
Trying to cope with the fallout from bad plot decisions is turning out to make my problems with the art look like a cakewalk. I'm looking back at my grand masterpieces and seeing all these glaring plot holes and dangling plot threads and stupid plot decisions where there was supposed to be a coherent and unified whole, and I just want to have a big bonfire on the lawn and go work on something else for a while.
But you can't. You have to look at the mess and grit your teeth and do the best you can from here. And realize that most of your readers aren't going to have the slightest idea of how the stage looks like from behind the scenery, where you can see all the ropes and pulleys moving stuff around, and the actors half in and half out of their makeup. All your audience sees is what's on stage. If one of your actors trips halfway through the scene, they'll hardly notice or remember, as long as he gets back up and goes on with the scene. And if he turns the accidental stumble into a great ad-libbed pratfall, they'll never know that it wasn't supposed to be part of the play.
Your readers will never know about that grand death scene you had already written for Character Y, only to discover that Y actually can't die because you need him for Scene Z. They'll never know that the great climactic plot twist with the jewel hidden in the statue is only there because you'd completely forgotten until the last few pages that you forgot 3 issues ago to give the heroine her magic weather-control powers, so you have to find some other way to accomplish the same thing.
It's a lot like life, really. One of the things I've realized lately is that moving back to Fairbanks is going to take me back into the lives of all the people I used to know when I was an adolescent. Starting over again in Champaign had one huge benefit: it was a clean slate. All the stupid decisions that I made back then ... all the people I hurt and who hurt me, all the embarrassing and just plain stupid things I did, that everybody does when they're growing up and learning to be an adult -- all that may as well never have happened. Most of the people I'm friends with now are people who met me in my mid-20s, after the growing pains were mostly over. They're not people who've seen me in a drunken screaming rage or who know about some of the dumb illegal things I did when I was in college.
I would love to just wipe the slate of my life clean, but I can't. I didn't realize until I'd spent a good long time away from Fairbanks how hard it's going to be to face some of the people that I used to know when I was depressed, hostile and possibly borderline alcoholic ... conveniently ignoring the fact that if these people were friends with me THEN, and still want to be friends with me NOW, they obviously don't care about those things that still loom so painful and embarrassing in my memory.
Everybody's life is like that. You change the things you can change, laugh about the things you can't, and move on -- or else you end up in an endless quagmire of recriminations and guilt. It doesn't matter what you did then, nearly as much as it matters what you do now. The same is true of comics. Neither Hunter's Moon nor Raven's Children is turning out to be what I wanted it to be. But I have a lot of loyal readers of both series who seem to like them very much just the way they is. I wanted to write something that was beautiful and moving and classic and perfect. It's not, and I can't go back and MAKE it be, and now I'm all depressed about it -- but the trick is picking up from here, figuring out a way to make the stumbles look like part of the play, and going on.
One thing that helped me a lot in this is realizing that a lot of the books/comics/movies that I really like have some of the same problems that are making me hate my own work. Stephen King's Dark Tower series, for example, is riddled with errors, dangling plot threads and internal inconstencies -- none of which I noticed on the first reading, when I was far too caught up in the story to notice silly little things like that. I've caught some huge errors in long series of books -- like a character previously stated to be dead showing up alive, or a character's name changing from one book to another -- but it generally wasn't something I'd ever have noticed if I wasn't so in love with the books that I was re-reading them and paying attention to every little detail. Some things start off one way and completely change horses in midstream, like Colleen Doran's "A Distant Soil", which goes from being a fairly juvenile fantasy of teenage rebels to a mature, sophisticated, and complex story of interplanetary politics as the author grew up. Look at "Cerebus". Or "Sandman." The first few issues are a far cry from the later body of the work.
This isn't something that I've never thought about, but today is the first time that it really all came together for me and made me realize, once and for all -- this is why I've been having so much trouble with my art lately. And this is what I can do about it.
The key to being happy in life ... well, one of them anyway ... is realizing that you can't make yourself perfect and you can't make your past perfect, and loving yourself anyway.
The same is true of comics. Or books. Or raising kids. Or building a house. Or any long-term project that is worth doing. Accepting the flaws and mistakes, accepting that you can't go back in time and change them, and doing the best you can from here with what you have, and liking it -- that's what you gotta do.
I'd come to hate Raven's Children because I believed that you couldn't build a nice house on a flawed foundation. And sure, it's got its flaws. Huge ones. But that doesn't mean I can't do something really nice with the rest of it.
Gads, that was a long entry. Maybe another reason why I'm not getting any work done lately is because I'm spending more time talking about it than actually doing it! But this helped a lot ... I feel more positive about my comics than I have in a very long time.
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