If you're a regular visitor here to ye olde site, you may have noticed a dearth of comics or art, or any kind of posts for that matter, of late. That's because I'm in a creative fever and I don't really have the time or the space in my head for anything else at the moment. I feel like I've been in a bubble; I don't know what's going on in the outside world, I'm just living in my head.Anyway, the above pics are snapshots of the progress on my next book for First Second, TUNE (Book 1): Praxis and Allies. I've finished the writing (took me almost a year) and now I'm knee-deep in the thumbnail stage. I've completed about 120 pages of thumbnails, and I've got 4 more chapters worth to do (10 chapters thumbnailed so far). Then I'll be ready to jump into the final art stage. I can't wait!As much fun and rewarding as it was to work on Good As Lily and The Eternal Smile, there's an intimacy to doing everything yourself that defies description. And lately, I've been thinking back, and it's been 6 whopping years since I last released a book that I wrote and drew. (That would be Same Difference and Other Stories.) By the time TUNE hits the shelves, it will have been almost a decade! As much as I love comics, it's so frustrating how much time it takes to give birth to one, especially one where everything is done by one person. But mostly, I've been sidetracked by so much freelance work since Same Difference was released. Regrets, regrets, moan, whine.But anyway, back to TUNE! I'm super excited about it. I think it's some of the best writing I've ever done. I crack myself up on a regular basis while I'm working on it. (Okay, so it could just be that I'm going crazy and has nothing to do with the writing.) Do any of you remember Half Empty? It was the other story that was being serialized simultaneously with Same Difference here on the website almost 10 years ago. Well, eventually, I had to drop Half Empty to focus on Same Difference. It was too distracting and taxing to work on both stories at once. Well, Half Empty is finally going to be completed in TUNE. TUNE is a reworking of Half Empty. It ended up being vastly different than the way it started, so I thought a new title and all new artwork was appropriate. If you remember the pages of Half Empty that were put up years ago, you'll recognize some of the sequences in TUNE. The path of the story has been changed drastically, but I retained the best sequences from the original pages.Another thing that makes TUNE exciting for me is that it's my first series! Book 1 will be the start of the continuing adventures (misadventures?) of Andy Go and his (reluctant) friends.It feels so good to be finally wrapping up an unfinished story. Somewhere down the line, I hope to finally wrap up Healing Hands too. It needs some seriously rewriting, but I think it can be salvaged with a restart. I think the rest of my career is going be just going back and pinching off all the crap I've left dangling.It's all weird and unpredictable and wondrous how this whole "creative process" thing works...
