Writing small press comics involves a lot of waiting and a lot of patience- it takes you a few minutes to write down some words describing an epic battle scene, but it’s often several months before you see how that scene looks on a page, after the artist has reached the right bit of their to-do list and spent hours/days/weeks drawing it. It makes it important to keep busy- rather than finishing a script, sending it off and then sitting by your inbox twiddling your thumbs until you see some pages, it’s good practice to start working on something else, keeping yourself busy.
Sometimes, though, everything comes back at once and you have several things to shout about- which I found out was the case this morning, when I realised that not only was the final part of Hadopelagic (my story in Aces Weekly with Neil McClements and Nigel Dobbyn) now available, but that a short story I wrote for Futurequake #27 (drawn by artist Joe Palmer) is also out and available now from the Futurequake webshop.
And as well as seeing finished work come to life, this morning also saw the next step in the journey for Brigantia, my project with the wonderful Melissa Trender- we’ve been hard at work putting a pitch document together, complete with 5 (gorgeous) sequential art pages, and have this morning sent that off to Image Comics to see whether it’s something they’re interested in. Now to cross absolutely every digit that I possess and hope that they like it! #TeamBrigantia
So, that’s the life of a small press comics writer (at least in my experience)- long periods of calm and relative quiet, interspersed with manic bursts of activity. The trick is to try and shorten the quiet periods by getting as many stories out as you possibly can!
All the best,
Chris