n i j o m u

As I was finishing “Kit Kaleidoscope and the Mermaid in the Jar,” I was becoming very dissatisfied with my art. There were many elements that contributed to this, but one of them was my growing unhappiness with my line work. I found it inconsistent, indecisive, and inharmonious. The lines were hastily put on the page without much forethought. They didn’t speak to each other, either in terms of direction or tone. I was trying to be expressive, but what I got was a mess. I actually had trouble completing the story because I was so disgusted with my art.

So one of my goals for Carnivale was to be much more careful with my line work. Figure drawing was a part of this, trying to be more deliberate and consistent with how I drew the characters, but I also wanted to focus on how I laid the ink down on the page. This meant much more deliberate strokes and more space between the lines. This also meant trying to give the lines a uniform tone–through density and size– and a uniform direction. I wanted the lines to sit next to each other and look like they belonged, not seem as they had nothing to do with each other, which was the case before.

And as much relief as this approach has given me, I’ve begun to see its limitations. Of course choosing any approach means denying others and dissatisfaction seems to be one of my main motivations as an artist, but I believe in progress and constantly trying to learn from the things I’ve done. So my new dissatisfaction is that the line work in Carnivale is a little empty. In lacks a subtlety of tone that the more haphazard style managed to have now and again. This was due to the layering of lines and the variability in line length. It gave tonal depth and liveliness. I’m feeling that the training to be more deliberate has maybe served its purpose and I can now let loose a little bit. I don’t want to alter style mid-story, but certain scenes in Carnivale will have this looser approach to the line work.

I write about this because this is stuff that I obsess about and it interests me, but also because I think it’s important to discuss all the little decisions that go into a comic. This can be overwhelming of course, and I think that’s why James Kochalka once wrote that craft is the enemy. Good craft doesn’t necessarily make good art and worries about craft can kill the creative process. Still, without craft all that anyone creates is haphazard. If your mantra is “first thought, best thought” then there’s nothing to learn. I just can’t live that way. One of the attractions of comics to me is that there is so much to learn and the deeper I go, the more I find. The journey is its own reward. Despite the frustration.

As an analogy, this is also what attracts me to Aikido. I’ve been doing it for about five years and I keep learning new things. I don’t simply mean that I am introduced to new techniques, which happens all the time, but that I find more to notice in the techniques I’ve always done. One example is tai no henko. This is something every beginner is introduced to. It’s sometimes referred to as “the Aikido handshake.” Basically, one person grabs another’s wrist, and the grabbed person moves. That’s it. At first, what the beginner focuses on is where to step. Then how to turn without pulling the partner. Then the student discovers that a turn of the wrist affects the partner’s balance. Yet these are all just mechanical physical movements and they are deceptive, because the beginner thinks that once these steps are mastered, then tai no henko is mastered. But if that’s all one understands of Aikido, then one hasn’t ever felt Aikido. It may seem obvious, but every partner is different and every grab, even if done by the same person, is different. If one applies this to one’s practice, it means that there can never be one set way to do tai no henko. The technique must come out of the specific situation. How one moves is not robotic; it is a response to one’s partner. Which means that the technique (if one even wants to call it that) is much less about doing and much more about listening. But one has to get all the worries about where to step and how to move one’s wrist out of the way, so one’s brain can be uncluttered and one can begin to listen.

But part of what makes one listen is the fact that one can’t do the damn technique! There is that one partner that can’t be moved. Or that realization that one has been muscling the thing the whole time. Dissatisfaction either takes a student off the mat or makes the student listen. And if one chooses to listen, one chooses to walk on the path of the ever broadening horizon: one keeps walking forward, but since the horizon continually gets bigger, it looks as if one is standing still.

At those times, it’s good to look back and see how far one has come. Which is exactly what I’m doing here. It’s another way to keep me walking.

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