Friday, June 29, 2007

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Touched

Lint got April zine of the month in Broken Pencil Magazine which was nice. Lint is actually a sort of repackaging of the now out of print Matter #2 achieved by swapping out 3 of the stories and adding a new cover. It is probably the best seller of the comics I've done largely because of 'The Record' story which featured in Matter #2. Of the stories that were removed, 'The Divils' is better left by the wayside while 'Girl on chair' is a fine collaboration to appear here at a future point. The other story 'Touched' is one I remain attached to despite its flaws. It was a continuation of characters I'd drawn back in the 'Crack in the Shell' days. It had no real story, just a sort of slice of life back and forth through time. The few constructive comments I'd gotten about the strip remarked how it was hard to follow and understand what was going on and what the point was. The earlier version had these obvious frame shapes and age number badges to cue the reader to the shifting time periods for the character and I had unwisely discarded this convention in the later Matter #2 version. Most problematic though was the big missing chunk of story between the first 3 and the last pages. I knew in my head that something went on in this interval and I hoped the reader would too - big mistake.

Several weeks ago I discovered 2 partly inked pages that continued the story and I began to rummage around in my hard-drive to see what other fragments I had bothered to scan noticing that, barring a couple of additional pages, I actually did have almost the complete story.

I'll probably never collect it together in print partly because the page dimensions, lettering and drawing ability differ too greatly from end to end and partly because its not that interesting anyway - it's certainly not worth re-drawing. I'll attempt to present it again here in segments over the next few weeks or so with some rougher sketched pages for the missing bits if for no other reason than that is what the blog is for.