As I am working on expanding my short comic into a bigger (140-odd page!) graphic novel, I thought it would be helpful to do a bit of a recap on how I self-published the first iteration. I’ve been to several talks over the years, gleaning insight into how other people have done it for their own work, and want to contribute to the wealth of information out there. As anyone sensible (without a grift or agenda) will likely tell you: there is no one way to make art. Each person is different, and I personally still haven’t found a smooth step-by-step that I can trust to guide me through a project. I am still very much figuring out what helps me work.
The very first iteration of this comic came out of an online class with Sarah Lightman, Drawing Graphic Narratives with the Royal Drawing School in 2021. Below you can see the first page, I think I did just this and a couple of other pages at the time. The pencil lines are barely perceptible – I’ve edited the scan so you can see on here. Looking back, I find it a bit funny to see just how delicate and fearful my lines are.
That comic was actually towards the end of the course I think. Looking through my sketchbook from the time (a VERY lovely thing in itself pictured here – from the amazing Holodeck, Birmingham) is a little bit painful, but it helps to see how far I’ve come in terms of self-confidence. I’ll include some of the work that I like from that class.
So I made these couple of pages of a sketched comic, and didn’t do anything with them for a while. During this time I was working at Footprint with Clare and Hils. It was just the three of us for a while (in 2023 I think), and in one of our review meetings (a day-long in-depth business meeting) we talked about how to make our jobs more inspiring, so that the difficulty of co-running the business could be better offset with positive and fulfilling experiences. As each of us is some kind of visual artist, we came up with the idea of running a regular ‘Crit Club’, where we’d bring along a work-in-progress and offer each other constructive criticism to help move the project along. We had only one or two Crit Clubs ever, but my lovely colleague-friends were so enthusiastic and so encouraging about these comics, that I was moved to come back and try to make them a bit more solid than my first ghostly sketches.
This next part is a haze of boring half-hearted attempts at re-drawing the first bloody page a couple of times and basically giving up in a huff, because my drawings weren’t immediately good / I couldn’t make myself carry even one panel to something ‘finished’. I didn’t know how to do any of this, and I hated myself for being so pathetic.
But, gradually, gradually, I made some small bits of progress, talked a lot with my friend Clare about the project. She wouldn’t let me get away with giving up. Every time I had an excuse for why I hadn’t progressed, she had a question to undermine the bullshit obstructions I built for myself. I owe so much of my confidence to her kind and intelligent support.
Around this time is also when Leeds Comics Collective was born <3 my friend Jack Fallows invited me along and I couldn’t believe they wanted little aul me to come to this ultra cool comics makers meet up. So another friend helped give my self-esteem a much needed boost, and I kept on at this thing I was making.