Late!

Hi Everyone,

Posting a little late today because life has been intervening and I️ feel like my head is about to explode. Do you feel like that, too, when you’re trying to do your nice, quiet work but have to take a lot of phone and meetings, many of them spontaneous, and your kid has been acting so overwrought and exhausted that you try to pick him up early from camp (daycare) every day, sacrificing important work hours? I️ wonder if any careers are truly flexible - mine just wears thin as it stretches, rather than snapping. I’m so lucky to have it. I️ hate trying to find the loopholes in it. I️ hate phoning it in.

I’m going to take next week off (will be on vacation doing a good impression of someone who likes to take time off work), but will post a Substack Reads feature I’m in the process of writing, recommending some other newsletters. It’ll be this newsletter’s second birthday next week, too, I️ think.

Happy Fourth of July, since happiness is, to some extent, a miraculous choice we can make.

Here are some drawings.

For paid subscribers, another page of She Devil, a comic I’m writing about being bad at being a person - and marriage, and community, and the past. I️ know it’s weird to serialize something bit by bit on the internet, it just is, so I’m trying to make these pieces of story able to stand on their own emotionally, at least - which fits with how I️ tend to see larger works, anyway - as collections of fragments.

I️ just reread today’s fragment and wanted to sneak in a disclaimer/teaching moment. The most important thing about comics, for me, is the pacing. Some of these panels should be expanded into many panels. Others should be collapsed into fewer panels. Some of the line breaks are off. It really bothers me to read something where the pacing isn’t perfect. (The other thing that bothers me is to read a comic where the facial expressions are off - but that’s something a comics artist either has, or not). But pacing is always off, I️ find, in early drafts. You have to wait till you really know what you’re saying to iron out those wrinkles. And I️ think the less confidence you have, the longer it takes to figure out the story you’re trying to tell. I️ don’t have much confidence - at least in this area.