Well, it's been a while, hasn't it?
Only three months, actually, now that I take off my shoes and do the math, but in the life of the internet, that might as well be decades.
But wait, I can almost hear the assembled multitudes declare. Why another essay? Hadn't I succeeded in my self-appointed task of reading all the comics being done by my fellow contestants in the Daily Grind Challenge? I'm not trying to expand my mandate and balloon up into yet another windy bloviator on the steppes of the world wide web, am I?
Not really, I hope. But I had kinda thought after writing my Fourteenth Essay back in September that I ought to write another report whenever anyone dropped from the contest, just to make note of the event and keep my Essays current. Maybe I'd fill the rest of the Essay with reports on non-Grind comics that I like to read, comics that I hadn't seen written up anyone else, for instance. That might be fun...
So I waited. And waited. And waited.
Two months went by. It was pretty astonishing: I posted my Fourteenth Essay on September 19, the Monday after Phil McAndrew was disqualified from the contest, and after that, everyone still in the Grind put up a comic, Monday through Friday, for the next nine weeks. Lurking around the Daily Grind Message Board, I saw comments from folks about a few close calls, a few people admitting to making the deadline each midnight by the skin of their teeth, as we used to say. But everyone did make that deadline.
Until November 28 when a snowstorm-induced power outage and a post-Thanksgiving pizza party caused two of the contest's mainstays, Chris Crosby of Superosity and Yu-Jay Huoh of Abrandoned Kids to miss their daily posting.
Now, these weren't either of them comics that I was reading--for reasons I go into in my Fourth Essay and Eighth Essay respectively--but, I mean, Crosby is one of the pioneers of webcomics! He co-founded Keenspot, still to my eyes the home of the best comics produced on the internet, and had been updating his comic every day since March of 1999, a streak among the competitors second only to R. Smith of Funny Farm! And Huoh had developed a strip that, in style and content, embraced the barest minimum of what was allowed under the contest rules! He could've conceivably skated by devoting what seemed to be a half-hour's worth of effort each evening to his comic for decades to come!
And in one night, both of them, poof!
It seemed to break the metaphorical logjam, too, as the following week saw three more Grinders drop: John Hill's Fatty at Amazing Amoeba, Natasha Allegri's Normal Life--she's apparently just gotten engaged to her boyfriend Sean, whom she would always draw as a bewhiskered cat-person in her comic--and then Remi Treuer pulled himself out of the contest when he got hired to do the artwork for a role-playing game rulebook.
I'd been following these three comics on a weekly basis and was enjoying them all, so I'm sad to see them go. But there's always the hope that they'll keep doing stuff, and in Treuer's case at least, it's almost a certainty.
Five folks in two weeks, though: I'm almost ready to give some credence to the thought floating around the Message Board that some people just wanted to say that they'd outlasted Crosby. But also, December 2nd was the 40th week of the Grind, and that meant we'd all done 200 comics as of that day. So a couple milestones folks can bask in the warmth of passing.
For me, though, something else interesting happened because of all this. Former contestant Robin Bougie put up a thread on the Message Board asking what would make us folks still in the contest drop out.
Various people answered amusingly, but the question poked at me, so I posted an actual truthful answer: I might consider dropping out of the contest if I could find someone to draw my comic for me.
Because Bougie's question had made me think, and that's always dangerous. If you think, don't drive, Superchicken tells us, and I've tried to live my life heeding those words. And yet, there I was, thinking about comics in general and my comics in particular, specifically about what exactly I want from a comic I read and from a comic I produce.
And I came to the conclusion that the ultimate comic in my eyes is one that's 100% a comic, one that couldn't exist in any other artistic form without a whole lot of rejigging. I discovered that I divided comics into two categories: pictures with words on them, and real comics, the difference being that pictures with words on them can be quickly and easily translated into, say, animated cartoons, while real comics would be as difficult to adapt as most novels are. Maybe even more difficult...
I only came up with a couple examples of "real comics" after a day or so of thinking: George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Dan O'Neill's Odd Bodkins were the main two--and, strangely enough, are my two favorite comics, the two comics that gave me the unstoppable urge to try drawing my own stuff in the first place--and then to a lesser extent Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes and Sarah Ellerton's Inverloch. It all has to do with the way in which the words and pictures are combined to create something more than just words and pictures. It's a function of layout, certainly, but also a function of storytelling in a planar visual medium.
And here's the way my thinking went: prose fiction is pretty much a linear medium: you start at the beginning of a book, read through to the end, then stop. Films are likewise linear, and even more literally: they are a strip of celluloid, a reel of magnetic tape, an ordered stream of electrons, an object possessing a definite and physical beginning, middle, and end. The stories being told within these two media can be juggled around--in film, Tarantino and Avary's Pulp Fiction is one of the better known examples of this, and let's not forget the ever-popular "Choose Your Own Adventure" books--but you can't go too far with that before the whole exercise becomes pretty pointless.
I mean, I can't imagine that there'd be much call for a DVD player with a "randomizer" function like you find on CD players: who'd wanna watch a movie where the machine is tossing scenes up on the screen in random order? Or conversely, who'd wanna read a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book straight through from cover to cover?
And, yes, I can see there might be some artistic statement a person could make designing a film to be viewed like that or a book where the chapters don't necessarily follow one after the other, but, well, there's a reason these sorts of things are called "avant-garde." They're not the usual way stories are told, and if the viewer isn't ready for the experience, nothing connects, the story doesn't get told, communication breaks down, and everyone ends up with a lap full of hot soup.
Comics, though, don't need to be linear this way. And I'm not talking about the whole "infinite canvas" thing because, well, infinity makes me nervous. I prefer dealing with something the size of a piece of paper or a computer screen. But even within the confines of that limited space, time can be squashed and stretched in ways that tell stories no other medium can.
Look at a full-page Krazy Kat comic, for instance, and try to imagine in what other form it could exist. Try tracking down one of the Krazy Kat animated shorts somebody or other made back in the late 30s: they didn't make many, and judging from the one I've seen, they were essentially "Tom & Jerry" cartoons done with characters that looked vaguely like Herriman's. Nothing of the real Krazy Kat comes through. But when you look at Elzie Segar's Thimble Theater, another wonderful comic strip from about the same time as Krazy Kat, that easily made the transition to film in the form of the Fleischer Brothers' Popeye cartoons.
A story being told in a real comic, I found myself thinking, can only be told in comics, and those are the sorts of comics that I like the best.
Which is why I've been trying to do that sort of comic over at Terebinth since 1997 or so. I want to make pages where the narrative flows more or less from upper left to lower right--the idea's not to make things confusing--but where things above and below add to and influence the general drift of the story: patterns form and are broken up, shapes repeat and reinforce each other, words become panel boundaries, stuff like that.
All of that meant, however, that I pretty much had to draw the thing myself. The pictures would be determining the words as much as the words determined the pictures, after all, so I'd either hafta be in the same room as the artist while the page was being done, or I'd hafta be in the same skull as the artist. And I choose to do the latter.
The more I thought about this, though, the more I realized that Daily Grind didn't work the same way as Terebinth at all.
Daily Grind, as I started thinking about it, isn't one of these real comics I've been talking about. It's a serialized adventure story, but it's got a lot more in common with the "pictures with words" comics, is more of a Popeye than a Krazy Kat. And that meant that I didn't need to be the guy drawing Daily Grind for it to work: in fact, it'd probably work a lot better if someone else was drawing it...someone who could actually draw, for instance.
This opinion was reinforced when I submitted Daily Grind to the Savage Disassembly group over on Livejournal the first Monday of December. I'd prepared them for my stuff by quoting Jeff Bent's line about my comics being "sandpaper for the eyes," and those who've given me critiques so far have all agreed on that point: the stories were fine, more or less, but the artwork essentially needed someone else's hand at the tiller.
Of course, I've never had any luck getting artists to work on my stuff: if you're interested you can click through to the Archive & History page of my Terebinth comic and page down to the History section to read how the inability to get an artist for a project led directly to my doing these webcomics in the first place.
But as near as I can figure it, that's indeed what it'd take to get me out of the Grind: someone willing to take over drawing the comic Monday through Friday so the comic itself wouldn't skip a beat when I stepped aside.
This, however, is extremely unlikely ever to happen.
Most artists, as I can tell you from experience, have too many of their own projects going on to work on something like this, and to keep up a daily schedule, well, if it wasn't difficult, there'd be no reason to make the doing of it into the basis for a contest, seems to me.
So it looks like I'm here for the duration. Unless somebody wants to audition...
The Fourteenth Essay comes before this one, I'll have you know, while the Sixteenth Essay comes after it. Links to all the Essays live on the Book Reports main page, and I also do this Daily Grind comic around here somewhere, seems to me...