Why I'm Not Making Comics Anymore (Clickbait)

I came to a weird realisation over Christmas.

It started with my mum asking my sister Katie to go through a set of storage boxes and see if there’s anything she wanted to keep. Katie promptly found me, told me that we were sorting through storage boxes, and took me upstairs with her to the tiny spare room containing all our childhood leftovers. We sat on the floor and got to work.

The first three boxes we pulled out were all Katie’s, to my amusement, possibly explaining why Mum had been reminding her specifically to sort them (either that, or she knew that Katie’s chores-related sense of justice would end up embroiling me even if she didn’t ask me herself). There was one box of my stuff, though - mostly just paper. I started to leaf through it, expecting to find a bunch of drawings and sketchbooks.

True enough, there were a fair amount of drawings. But what really took me by surprise was the sheer volume of writing.

I’ve been drawing since I was able to hold a pen, thanks to Mum, herself an artist and very supportive of my creative endeavours. What I’d forgotten was that when I was in primary school, my granny had brought home some spare lined jotters from her teaching job, and I had immediately begun writing stories in them and never stopped. When I was old enough, I started buying jotters myself just to keep pace.

The box was full of it. Some stuff I recognised: ‘Dreamscape’, my first fantasy story from when I was barely in my tweens; ‘Action Calum’ stories I wrote about characters I’d made up for my little brother’s own imaginary worlds; an unexpected amount of Wheel of Time OC fanfiction. But there were also scenes featuring characters I couldn’t remember, disconnected fragments of impassioned dialogue for stories that clearly had not occupied any long-term place in my brain, that sparked absolutely no recollection upon rereading them.

I looked at these fragments and I thought: this is sketching.

And then I thought about my art.

I thought about my peers talking about how they struggle to draw for fun anymore. I’ve read many comics where younger versions of the artists remind them how much they loved just drawing for drawing’s sake once upon a time, and I’ve never really connected with them, even though I’ve been struggling with what I’ve been calling ‘art block’ for years.

It was only at that moment, looking at a box full of my late-childhood creations, that I began to guess at why that was.

What does ‘art for fun’ look like, to me? Hard to figure out. Art has always been a means to an end, even from an early age; a way of manifesting the character designs that I was carrying around in my head at an age where I was too impatient for extended description. I played about with comics from time to time, but they didn’t stick until I started going online, and making artist friends.

Back in the deviantART days, I followed original character tournaments with great enthusiasm, and wanted to involve myself in them as well, but when I did (and made it to the finals), it wasn’t with comics, but with illustrated writing. I started reading webcomics and tried my hand at making my own, which was rewarding for a time, but also quickly and permanently abandoned when my university exams hit. A Pokemon-based art tournament swung around and I shied away from joining as a competitor, engaging instead on the sidelines with roleplay blogs and character sketches, struggling to produce actual comics, and turning again and again to prose when I wanted to get anything significant done.

Whenever push came to shove, it was always been prose I turned to, writing thousands and thousands of words’ worth of stories, some of which I posted, a lot of which I didn’t. Even surrounded by artist friends working on their comics, even devouring their work and joining in on the community, I knew prose was what I was comfortable with.

It felt, to me, like laziness: everyone knows you can get more storytelling done in a shorter amount of time with words alone.

And I loved comics. I still love comics. I want everyone to love them as much as I do. Everyone knows the creative things you can do with prose, but comics as a medium has so much that only it can do, and not enough people fully appreciate that. I enjoy the theory, the time-bending nature of panelling, the tricks to guiding the audience’s eye, the ways in which you can play with emotion and visual metaphor.

But do I love making them?

I certainly get satisfaction from finishing them. But I need a framework and deadlines, I need a forward march of this is when you need to finish, to prevent me from grinding to a permanent halt. Returning to unfinished projects is a struggle requiring significant discipline and investment. For the longest time I thought this was all down to me doing everything traditionally, but it hasn’t gotten any better with access to an iPad.

Even simple practice is hard. I blame that on my self-discipline as well, on not doing drawing regularly enough, of not trying hard enough.

Meanwhile, I write, and write, and write.

Somehow, for the last few years, I’ve been telling people I’ve been in an art block. And yeah, I guess you could maybe call it an art block if you don’t count writing as art. I’m not even sure it’s an art block if you count art as art. My output has never been huge in the first place, and doesn’t feel particularly stifled right now.

What I really meant was: I haven’t been drawing comics.

But in that time I have written at least a novel’s worth of prose.

These are the conclusions I’ve come to, in the months since I first opened that box of writing:

1. I’ve been beating myself up too much.
• (Sticking with prose isn’t giving up or being lazy, come on now, Cara.)
2. I’d still like to finish Fault Lines, but that might be my last solo project for the forseeable future.
3. But I still want to help make comics.

In a way, this shift in focus has already begun. Part of the reason I started the Selkies was as a way to stay connected to comics and the comics community even through my ‘art block’. I’m excited to keep that going. I’d also like to start editing, though I’m not sure how that gets balanced with my responsibilities for the awards, and any impartiality concerns. I’m also not sure how people decide that I’d be a pair of safe hands for their work.

Maybe this calls for some blogs about comics?? (I barely need the excuse at this point…)

But for now, I’m excited to see where this new outlook takes me - and if you’re reading this, I hope you’ll stick around to see what comes next. ✌️