So, lately, I was thinking about my comics.

I already have stories whizzing around my head. I don’t know if I totally gave up on filmmaking given the fact that comics is a more appropriate medium for my narratives. I mean, with comics, it is generally a lonely pursuit and I love working alone with ghosts trying to disturb me. With filmmaking, you have several egos to deal with plus play around with the purses of other people.

I don’t like to deal with such irritants just yet.

So, comics.

I grew up with them. they are my first love. Make fun and look down on comics all you want but even the stately New York Times wrote back in 2003 that comics will supplant the novel just like the way the novel supplanted poetry at the onset of the Industrial Age. Since we are in the Age of the Internet, it is all about the visuals and comics will just add to a more dialectic experience in the arts.

I was just thinking of my mortality and I have not even begun to write down the stories inside my head. I claim to be busy, which I am, but it is not sufficient reason to ignore my “babies,” right?

So, right now, I have all these sketches…and they’re not on paper but in my head, which is infuriating. Shall I wait for the hubbub of my life to settle down or just get on with it? I think I’ll just start.

If you ask my friends, I don’t use a pencil anymore, I draw directly on paper in ink. It’s not because I am confident but because I am always in such a hurry to finish things. And technology is making it worse.

I now draw directly to the computer using a stylus and some cool and nifty softwares. I am giving myself options to do “paperless art.”

I did this cartoon for a newspaper’s blind item about a socialite who claims she is 38; thing is she was twice-married in the 70s! Perhaps she is a “Promil kid” and was advanced for her age? A child bride?

Anyway, for rush illustration jobs like comic strips, I use the computer. The other night, I was doing my strips and was bored out of my wits. Trying to be humorous is such a hard job. So, I did not want to watch the TV, didn’t feel like reading. So, I took my stylus and drew Addie being scruffy and hard at work.

 

And this was just a quick sketch.

I think I have not learned to slow down still. Maybe because of rapid successions of finisihing illustrations, I am afraid to start my life projects because I might be in speed mode. So, compartmentalize and slow down are the stop-gap measures for this predicament.

I am tired of sketches, I want to see my work out there already.

“Already!?!”  *sigh* got to learn to have more patience…..

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