Things continue to progress with the production of my comic Blotting Paper:The Recollected Graphical Impressions Of Doctor Comics, although somewhat erratically due to digressions and interruptions. But I’m still managing to keep it creeping along with the intention of having the first chapter finished in November 2011. In my transition from comics studies to comics production the staggering discovery has been the amount of time required to create the art. Whereas I can sit down and write a thousand words about someone else’s comic in a reasonably short space of time, to create a page of art seems to take hours and hours and days. From all of the comics creators that I have interviewed in Australia the common denominator in terms of time for page creation was “a day per page”. I wish! On the other hand I suppose I can only get faster.

A mock up for page 2 of the first chapter. (Pen and ink drawing by Michael Hill-© 2011 Michael Hill)

In addition to the use of printmaking as a means of image-making for my comic I am doing quite a bit of drawing. I love this process and the mental spaces it takes me into. I find that I enjoy getting lost in those spaces that sometimes only seem like twenty minutes but are actually closer to two hours.

Early stage. (Pen and ink drawing by Michael Hill-© 2011 Michael Hill)

Later stage with added tone. (Pen and ink drawing by Michael Hill-© 2011 Michael Hill)

“The Story Starts In Sydney…” when ‘my’ character is quite a bit older than I am now but contains flashes backward to earlier times before returning to the future. It’s been quite fun trying to imagine what I shall look like when I’m eighty and trying to recall via photos how I appeared when I was twenty. And of course, because it is both partly autobiographical and partly fictitious, the character doesn’t have to look exactly like me, and from what I have seen of what I have done, he doesn’t. It goes on.

See previous production reports: No.2,  No.1.