I did a little pencilling at the Keep today. Janice was helping Jason stuff the holds, Bradley was keeping the couch rooted to the floor, Ari was chowing down on Cheap Chinese, and I was taking a break.

This nice gal, new to the place, began talking to us, mostly because Bradley and I were discussing the differences between monkeys and apes, and, you know… MONKEYS. It’s a conversation you have to get in on.

Naturally it led from there to ninjas, swords, and baboons. And the new girl identified herself as “the one whose fiance kidnapped her.”

Ah, yes. Those were YOUR friends who came in here, changed into black coats and ski-masks, and then went next door. “We thought they were LARPers. At least, that’s the story we would have given the police.”

She explained that she was a little concerned at how she might be weird. After all, she and her fiance have swords adorning their walls.

We all had a nice chat, and then she headed back out into the world.

I told Janice (and the rest of the store, but I directed my comments at Janice):

“The good news is, she’ll fit right in around here. The bad news is, THIS is where she fits right in.”

Maybe that’s why I love the Keep so much. Weirdos, to the last.

Tuesday went okay. I got six rows colored, and managed to get The Voices In My Head talking with each other about which story element should advance next.

They surprised me, and came up with something pretty fresh. So this morning I whipped out nine rows of scripts (seven days), and got five of them (four days) pencilled. And there’s still time this evening for family stuff, like the cub-scout rubber-band rocket race.

Thursday and Friday may be completely devoted to convention prep, though…

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