If I were to use some disgusting New Age language about creating things for stimulusresponse I might say that yesterday’s “ALL-CAPS COMIC #2” was, in fact, the 250th birthing from my fervent imagination – that is, I’ve made 250 things since it all began in December of 2006. I’m kind of impressed, really, and pleased that the experiment to “just make stuff and put it out there” actually works and can be sustained.

The site’s gone through a bunch of phases, but the weirdest one in some ways is that I was so immediately and irrevocably drawn to comics. I definitely read comics before I started the site, but I’d never, so far as I can recall, drawn one (barring a couple of rare cartoons like Being Blind). Yet the comic “I kissed the drummer boy” was the second thing I produced, and comics far outnumber every other kind of “response”.

Still, something about the medium (is it a medium?) sticks with me and, if anything, I worry that I don’t experiment enough with other forms anymore. My ideas, when I have them, are in comics form. I write poetry each day in order to come up with strips of a particular tone. I doodle in my notebook and transfer those doodles to the site. Comics comics comics.

Anyway, it’s a momentous day. Happy birthing day to me. Happy birthing day to me.

Sometimes I think about how I don’t really pay a terrific amount of attention to what has been said about the things I write about, nor to the art that relates to the things I draw and so on. It occasionally strikes me, then, that I may be quietly repeating things that other people have already said and done. Or, worse, producing incredibly facile versions of essays far better written or comic ideas far better produced.

Of course, that leads into a potentially vicious circle. The more I fear that out there – especially on the internet – are effectively the Platonic ideals of the things I’m doing, the less I want to look out there. Thus, my knowledge of things like comics history (and, frankly, comics present), or video game or tv criticism is quite impressively shabby. A shabbiness that protects my often fragile ability to write or produce anything at all.

On the other hand, another option is to throw myself into the “scenes” that exist around the stuff that I’m interested in. That would be another option, and it sounds kind of morally better in a way. But it also sounds like a lot of hard work. And my brain, meanwhile, whispers to me that in not engaging much with other related work, I am protecting the purity of my own thinking.

That whisper, I’m afraid, sounds like the last recourse of a lazy, lazy man – but I like what I’m hearing.

Carrying on with my process of drawing poems as comics I put together one based on a poem about an alien attack. The poem itself is pretty brief, and I think I even posted it here at one point: “When the aliens attacked / They came in ships shaped like raisins. / It’s embarrassing, but we thought we’d kick their asses / Because of that one, slim fact.” Lends itself to illustration, really.

Various fun things came up during the process. The first of which was how to do more than just literally draw the stanzas of the poem. Going with a need to do comics with less text, I wanted to draw the implied consequences of the poem (ass-kicking by the aliens) in a really extended way… to kind of overdo it, or get across how comprehensive it was. So in some ways the comic is mostly a drawing of all the white space after the poem.

Then there was epic drawing and redrawing as I tried to draw skylines and make them look like they were being zapped by alien rays. It’s almost depressing how hard that was, but I think the solution of having them kind of disintegrating along the edges of the beams and just gone further in worked out alright. Probably a bit of a cliche, but from my less-than-amazing-technical-drawing-skills perspective, I was happy.

Finally, the question of how much of the text of the poem to include. I originally thought I’d have it drawn in more numerous panels with the poem serving as captions as it went along. Then I had the whole poem just sitting like a lump at the top. And then an editor of mine suggested dropped the second stanza altogether and effectively let it be implied by the first panel. Which, really, is what comics should do in the first place, right? It also allowed me to run the first stanza on as a single line and to just make it a title for the comics, rather than part of a poem. Though then it introduced the problem of making sure the people pointing at the raisin spaceships looked like they thought they could kick their asses. Not so sure if I nailed that one, but it’s good enough.

So, just goes to show, even a rather simple comic which intensely basic composition and so on can involve plenty of agonizing behind the scenes. Is that a good thing?