Final Furlough inking is done. A version of lettering is done – hand-written, straight on the drawn pages. It remains to see how I like it (and how my Legibility Panel feels about it). I completed a bullshit strip* to make the story an even 24 pages. Three printing quotes requested, and now I’m on page six of scanning so that I can go in, tidy everything up, lay that shit out, and send it to the printing shop of my dreams.

And so much is left to be done! For instance:

• The cover: penciling, inking, painting.
• Try to finish this cat zine of mine so I can have it at the convention
• See if I have a good night to devote to doing the drunk zine
• Decide what on earth I want my booth to look like
• See about getting paintings printed

And so on. I could make this list 40 items long, if I felt so inclined, but these are the things I’m actually thinking about. There’s also a larger item, entitled “Do not make yourself insane,” which includes things like exercise, reading, and not shorting myself of sleep. However, I know me, and adding such an item would only make me unhappy that I managed to do no such thing.

I’m at a good place; T-minus 13 days, and the bulk of everything is done. It’s just hard to see that right here, and it will be until I’m sitting happily in my living room atop boxes of printed books.

I didn’t help myself tonight; I spent a weird amount of time (like an hour!) reading old Questionable Content strips. I’ve gotten a vague impression, from the small amount of webcomics-related criticism/bitchery I read, that it’s kind of popular or trendy to slag QC, but I really like it.

I like that if you read the whole of the archives, which I did in three nights when I first found it, you get a very specific picture of one person’s artistic education. I like the banter and the swearing and that the characters are just far enough away from regular life to be fun to watch, but not so far that you’re drawn out of the story. I like that it’s about half a universe away from ours, so you can get some really wonderfully strange “And now for something completely different” moments now and then. It’s also nice to read a graphic story about (mostly) regular people doing regular things. As those are the kinds of comic stories I tend to write, it’s reassuring to see that kind of story being told and to see that it’s not made boring by its generally domestic setting. I even enjoy its glacial pace. I think there’s an honesty to it about the pace of graphic storytelling.

*I got this term from Dan Clowes, who used it in a derogatory way about the stories in Twentieth-Century Eightball. However, I usually use it in a complimentary way. The stories in that book are my favorites of his, and I like pretty much all of his work anyway.