Psychocartography

Mandatory check after the jump this time, friends.



Some creative zooming might be required to achieve both a holistic view of this page and its individual parts.

Unlike the spread posted below, this more recent pile of secrets still hurts. Revisiting this in detail to re-letter it reminded me of the acute psychological condition I was in when it was made. There is a honor in remembering it seems but there also is a sadness. Perhaps a couple of years from now the emotions that fed this will be crystallized more into a picture and less into a mirror.

With this page, my backlog has all but been depleted (there's like 3-4 pages I didn't deem good enough to post and a 18-page 24hr comic which I'm not terribly fond of either). This means I have achieved what I set out to do with this blog initially, which is to give a permanent digital home to work that I felt had been perhaps misrepresented in initial publication (this is a fancy way of saying that nobody that would want to see most of these would be able to where they were published).

This blog as an experiment has been very successful. The communication with you readers reinstilled a degree of self-confidence in me and I even put out the Asides Bsides book on that strength. I thank you sincerely for this. Even if we were to be done now, I would still rank this whole endeavour as probably the most important thing I've attempted in the past couple of years.

As I do not want this to be done though, I think it's time for to consider further options. Naturally it is impossible to keep the rate of posting I have on this blog now the well has run dry. I am currently - albeit slowly - making some more short comics. I have at least 3 4-5 page stories I need to tell in this period and I am assembling material for them at a discrete pace (you may detect from how I write here that there is a chance that I might abandon making comics after that. This isn't because I seriously think there will ever come a time when I throw the towel, more that I find it psychologically supportive to think of a future without any hardcoded certainties). The initial plan B was that when I would be done with my past work I would continue to post my new pages as they appear, here. I intend to do so, but I urge readers to not expect updates in the usual rate of once every 3-4 days anymore, as comics take a long time to be made. (Actually, comics can be made quite faster if I were employed to make them, but seeing how I am not, my own conscience sets the pace). I say this because it seems there's about 50 people visiting every day... take the bookmark from your daily folder and put it in your bi-monthly folder, please :)

I put the question to you, kind readers and humans, on the material of future posts. Should I post only when a page is completely and utterly done, or would you also be interested in work-in-progress (along with a hefty amount of comic-theory-ramblings) posts that might make less sense/spoil the end result ? Naturally if I can post WIP-stage work it means I will post more often (while still not at the past pace) but at the expense of the novelty of a finished page.

Also, on the strength of positive reception both here on the blog and for the book I recently put out, I am thinking I want to work making comics as a professional again. I think the Greek market cannot provide for me even barely reasonable compensation for the sort of work I do (at least not through the current channels) so it might be the time that I should start looking for opportunities to be published abroad. How exactly to do this, I am not certain. Any ideas are welcome. I suspect the first thing to do would be to make a bio / portfolio section on this blog with some standout pieces from the archives here and a few words on who I am and what I am willing to do to survive. This only makes sense because I don't expect an editor stumbling on this page to have the time to read the whole blog to tell what I can do, and seeing how I don't post my most recent work on the top of the blog they might be confused further. I'll do this soon.

If it were up to you, which pieces (let's say up to 4 stories) from those on this blog would you select for such a purpose?

Ah, well. I'm feeling a bit sad now. Was it really just 6 months with this blog? It felt longer, it felt busier. Felt like I had more purpose than usual. I'll try to go with this feeling.

- Helm