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Part 3: Development
After writing up the story ideas and brainstorming, I hit a snag in the process. Even with a good idea of where I wanted the story to go, I didn't feel ready to start. I would sketch and sketch, but never go beyond character designs or random doodles.
Without even knowing it, I'd run into one of the key problems that Dave Sim talks about in his Guide To Self Publishing:
"While I was producing pages, they were noodling laborious drawings in their sketchbooks that would put Bernie Wrightson to shame, doing preliminary studies of interiors for a comic book they intended to draw sometime off in the future - model sheets with dozens of variations of incidental characters, airbrushed presentation pieces and cover designs, 20 different logos for 20 different formats. They would draw everything in the world except for page one, panel one."
I was getting so absorbed in the process of creating that I was paralyzing myself from actually starting the damn thing! The ideas were there, the drawings were there, I should have started on Page 1, Panel 1 and gotten it going. Not rushed it or done crappy drawings mind you, but actually started telling the story.
I was fooling myself that I was being productive as I banged out doodle after doodle of character designs. None of this would get seen by people (until now that I post them here) and it wasn't getting me closer to the goal of telling a story.
Click on any of the thumbnail images to the right to see a sampling of the old development work from 1998/1999. There were tons of other sketches like these, but this will at least give you an idea of how it happened.
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