Tailslide

Last page in this chapter!

For the next few (4) weeks, I’m gonna be posting pages of a short comic as a breather between chapters 3 and 4, then hopefully will jump right into the new chapter. I have no sense of what feels appropriate or not to hint, but I think there’s a whole lot to be excited about in it.

And for some aimless philosophizing, since I feel weird saying the same “holy shit” thing every time I upload more pictures than I expect to this website:

One of my favorite books as a kid was Holes by Louis Sachar – probably everyone knows it, but it’s about a kid sent to what’s essentially a juvenile detention center that “rehabilitates” kids by making them dig massive holes in the desert every day. There’s a line in the book about it – how digging the first hole is the hardest, because it’s new. Then digging the second hole is the hardest, because you’re tired and blistered from the first. Then digging the third is the hardest, then the fourth, then the fifth… Until at some point, you know each new hole isn’t actually the hardest anymore, even if it still feels hard.

It’s absolutely bonkers to me that there’s 114(?) pages of this comic that exist. I dunno, I was a kid who made frequent, bold, dubiously actionable claims about my ambitions (“I’m gonna build a treehouse with a laser-powered security system! AND a bunk bed!”), and got a lot of skeptical peers and adults on my case about it. I kept the fact I was working on a longform comic a secret for weeks for several reasons, one of which was the worry that I was only ever gonna get a few pages done before falling off. And there’s a lot of reasons I might’ve. I’m not really afraid of time or labor commitments, but I’m very afraid of not making something ‘good’. Three years ago, I think I would’ve guessed the hard part of committing to a long-term creative project was signing off on the time I was going to put in. The actual hard part, at least for me, is accepting what comes out, and continuing to make things anyway. For weeks and weeks and weeks and months and years.

That’s 114+ times now I’ve decided I want to make something more than I want to preserve my theoretical capacity for achievement. I struggle a lot with that. The amateur comic I put my name on is, quite literally, a brightly-colored target for exactly those sorts of insecurities. And for anyone counting, that’s at least 114 points on my side of the board. So thanks for sticking around.