Last Monday I got a full week’s strips inked, and I was hoping the rest of the week would be similarly productive. It wasn’t. I managed, over the following five days, to color the inked week, script another week, and pencil five rows of that week.

Breaking it down by staged rows per day:
Monday: 12 (9 rows inked, 3 rows pencilled)
Tuesday: 0 (prepped rows for coloring, but finished no stages)
Wednesday: 6 (5 rows scripted, 1 row colored)
Thursday: 6 (6 rows colored)
Friday: 5 (3 rows colored, 2 rows scripted)
Saturday: 4 (2 rows scripted, 2 rows pencilled)

That’s 33 staged rows for the week. Since there are 36 staged rows in a week of strips (9 rows each of scripting, pencilling, inking, and coloring) that means a net loss of 3 rows.

My goal for a productive week is to average 10 staged rows per weekday, for a total of 50 rows per week. During a productive week, I’ll put a little less than a week and a half of strips away, adding maybe three days to the buffer.

THIS week also began auspiciously. I pencilled four rows and inked nine. So…. 13. Since I’ve got a convention at the end of the week I really need to get my game on and NOT slip tomorrow. Having a 0-row day kills me extra-dead when I lose Friday and Saturday as work-days. (Not that I got much done on those days last week, mind you.)

Tuesday’s goal, then, is to color everything I inked. At the very least I should be able to knock down 6 rows. But I’d LIKE to be able to color 9 rows (finishing next week’s strips… yes, the uploaded buffer ends on Saturday as of this writing) and script three.

And now you can see inside the head of the anal-about-his-productivity cartoonist.

–Howard

“Good lord, man, retain that anus! Someday its fruit may be all that stands between us and oblivion!” — The Tick, “The Terror,” 2001

One of the best parts of putting together the first Schlock Mercenary book was deciding which artwork to stick in the margins. Consider: each page has room for four “rows” of Schlock on it — four daily comics, or one Sunday plus one daily.

Unfortunately, Sundays MUST be kept together. And often there are footnotes. But not often enough. The result is that the best page layout for the book is 3 rows per page: Sunday, M/T/W, Th/F/S… three pages for a week. And that leaves three rows worth of blank space. We filled that space with existing footnotes, a few new ones, and piles of artwork, some brand new. There are concept sketches, marker pieces, and a few pieces that point up punchlines in weird ways. Some of the “margin” art takes up half a page or more.

So… picking the margin art was fun.

One of the worst parts of any job is cleaning your office. My office is FULL of stacks of stuff that might make good margin art. Some of it might make good auction pieces. Some of it would be perfect bird-cage liner. And it’s all in three or four unsorted stacks, a couple of boxes and one wall-mounted “in box” thingy. No, I don’t have a “sketchbook.” Every sketch I whip out is loose-leaf. What a disaster.

After tearing through those piles to find good stuff for this book, Sandra and I have decided that we need to tear through them for ALL upcoming books, in one big triage party. It’s pretty easy to tell which pieces would go with which book — especially when I’m designing aliens for a particular story (the first book has half a page of sketches showing the evolving design for the bug-eyed cave-men I called “cruxapes”). It’ll take a little mental energy, but when we’re done they’ll all be sorted by book in nice folders I can then put away in a single box.

This evening I began tidying my office, and ran up against these piles. I have a sneaky plan. I’ll go upstairs now and do the dishes. Then Sandra will be sooo excited about the clean kitchen she’ll rush downstairs and help me file margin art for the next three years’ worth of books.

–Howard

I’ve got a few items taking up space in my house. If you have some interest in taking these off my hands, make an offer.

1) NEC Accusync 90 18″ monitor (trinitron tube, I think). At 1280×1054 the lower third of the monitor is a teency bit blurry. Probably worth about $50, and likely luxuriously large at 1024×768, where the blurriness isn’t noticable.

2) gigging musician’s “carpeted” rack-box . The rack-box has 10 rack-spaces and is 12 inches deep, with panels closing the front and back of the box for safe transport (not rated for air-cargo though). One of the two front-closure snaps needs repair (re-attach female snap to nylon closure), but all pieces are present. Probably worth around $50.

3) Sabine FBX 2020 stereo feedback eliminator (occupies one rack-space in item #2 above). eBay says it’s worth around $500. I paid $900 a decade ago. I guess these things hold their value pretty well. If you run sound, especially in a theater setting with floor mics or “choir” mics it’s a godsend.

Naturally, Sandra and I would both love to get lots of money out of these, but we harbor no illusions about their actual value. We’d also rather not have to go to UPS to ship them (especially not the monitor).

–Howard

I’ve been “distracted” from working on the comic for the last two weeks, what with all the work involved in getting the book ready. I burned through a week of buffer, and woke up this morning with only 5 strips in the can.

After my morning routine (kids to school, me to the gym, come home and eat, then nap) I hauled my gear to Dragon’s Keep to get some work done. At a minimum I needed to get this coming Sunday’s strip pencilled and inked.

I managed to pencil and ink Sunday, and then pencil and ink the rest of the week. It took a solid seven hours (with breaks for eating, shooting the bull, etc), but I pulled it off. They’re good strips, too. (Well… next Friday’s strip is questionable. It’s an experimental sight gag, and while *I* like it, I’m sure there are those who won’t).

How do I feel? Awesome. Tomorrow I’m hoping to be similarly productive, coloring everything I’ve inked. And then Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday can be spent putting yet ANOTHER week in the can. Only then will I feel good about the fact that I’m travelling to a convention a week from Thursday.

–Howard