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Part 4: False Start
It took me several months to shake off the sketching bug and finally do some sequential artwork. In August of 1999 (a year after the original brainstorming of the title), I penciled out 5 pages of the story. That would be as far as I would get on it...
Those first few days of drawing were really invigorating, but I couldn't keep my mind set to it. I was penciling the first few pages of the story without having nailed down a schedule for myself. Some days I would get inspired and work hard on it, but there were far too many days when I couldn't get myself motivated.
To make things worse, my Photoshop skills were sorely lacking. All of the text was created by typing it out piece by piece, printing it and then gluing those letters right to the artwork. It made for awkward blocks of text, uneven spacing of the lines and overall frustration. With the web comic, I can lay out the word balloons and narration panels any way I want and have the flexibility to change it at any point.
Each page after the first got more and more sketchy as I lost my momentum. When I scheduled myself to finish a page, I'd end up with just rough pencils or a swath of mishmash ideas. Annoyed with myself and my inability to stick with it, I put the pages aside and gave up on it. Looking back at them now, it's annoying to see the strength of those first two pages give way to the quick and scratchy look of the later ones.
I think my problem was not knowing where Makeshift Miracle was going in terms of release. I had thought about pitching the series to get it published, using it as a portfolio piece to get other freelance work or putting it on the web. I didn't have a clear goal in mind, so it was hard to get myself pumped up for working on it.
Click on any of the thumbnail images to the right to see the original pages of The Makeshift Miracle comic book. All the material covered in those 5 pages end up becoming Pages 1-9 of the web comic version. If you look at the web version, you'll see a lot of similarities in the text and layout of some of the pages. However, the web comic definitely has a slower build towards the explosion on the hill and a greater variety of storytelling involved.
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