Annotated Raven's Children - Issue #1: Page 25

[layla]

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This is the end of the first issue, which makes a good stopping point. I'm going to be traveling for most of October, so I'll resume updating with issue #2 when I get back.

But there it is, Raven's Children issue #1. I began drawing it sometime in November or December of 2000 (but had been worldbuilding obsessively for at least a few months beforehand, and working on the world since the late '80s). I finished sometime before Wizard World Chicago, which was in July 2001. Six to eight months, then, was what that 25 pages took me.

(Given how stalled out I've been on Kismet lately, I probably shouldn't look back at myself and go, "Oh, but I can do so much better now!" Because obviously, I'm still a trifle unreliable in that area.)

Anyway, flawed as it was, this issue was a big step for me. It wasn't the first creative project I worked on ... not by a long shot. It wasn't even the first one I completed. But it was the first one I shared with people. Of all my various comics, novels and so on, this was the first one that didn't languish eternally in a notebook or on a private corner of my hard drive. Other people read it, gave me feedback on it, and even paid me money for it. That was a really amazing feeling. There are about a million things that I'd do differently if I did it over now, but that's only with the benefit of hindsight born of experience, which of course I'd never have managed to acquire if I hadn't taken the plunge, from hiding things in my desk drawer to sharing them with the world. There always has to be a first step -- a flawed, brave, thrilling first step. I still remember realizing that there was no reason to wait -- that, in fact, if I kept waiting for some vague future condition to be true (waiting to be better, waiting for a different idea, waiting waiting waiting), I would be waiting all my life, doing nothing more than fantasizing about having books out there. So I did it.