I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the direction my ‘creative career’ has taken over the past few decades, and have been coming to some conclusions. First of all, the mass of unfinished projects has been weighing on me more heavily than I thought, and second, the way I was going about creating artwork was, sadly, unsustainably counter-productive.

The biggest problem I can see, was that I was trying far too hard to draw like other people for the sake of making the project resemble the works that inspired them. It was as if I had something to prove to myself, that I could create work that was just as good, or that deserved to be elevated by someone as I had elevated those works. Because I was trying to draw with “someone else’s hands”, as it were, these pieces and pages always ended up taking several times longer than if I had simply drawn them the way I drew things, and to make matters worse, I was never really satisfied with them, always seeing them for what they were – pale imitations at best.

In the last year or so I’ve been making more of an effort to get back to drawing the way I draw, as you can see in pretty much all of the art on this site. The style is the one I first used when I started drawing Chutney Point some twenty years ago (which, again, was a pale imitation of Richard Sala, but I’m still okay with that. I can see that it’s become something more mine). Working this muscle has brought me back around to looking at all of the comics and games that I’ve started over the years but left unfinished, and longing to see them completed. In no particular order, here’s the list I’m looking at:

• Chutney Point: There were supposed to be two companion stories in this series, exploring the historically weird goings-on around this town.
• The Circle Weave: The story that started it all. I started this one in high school, and have worked on four different versions of it in the decades since. This one will be my biggest regret if I let it go unfinished.
• Ellie Connelly: My most recent aborted effort. I had high hopes for this series of stories, and I think has the most potential as a storytelling vehicle. There’s just such possibility here, as demonstrated in the fifteen story ideas I have already mapped out. It also contains my best love story in the form of Ellie and Henry, and I’ll be disappointed if I don’t get to share how it plays out.
• Starhustlers: A sci-fi adventure story I never even started, but have a bunch of notes for.
• My Most Important Year: Almost autobiographical, easily the most grounded work I’ve started, centered around a group of contemporaries dealing with the frustrations and changes of middle-aged regret.
• Blue Nova: A reworking of a super-hero deconstruction I started as a kid. The characters were just so fun, and I loved the idea of taking something so simple as making it mythologically epic.
• StarSpeed 17: A fun space-racing game I designed a couple years back, but never finished the artwork for. I’d love to get this done and published in the next year, though I think the rules need a bit more tweaking.
• Labyrinth: A genre-crossing open source RPG system I designed primarily for solo adventures, inspired by all the times I wanted to play D&D as a kid but never had a group to play with. Each module would use the same movement and combat rules, but could use a myriad of settings. They’d all be playable solo, using the combat tables in the module booklet, or could be played in groups for additional strategies.

So, this is where I’m at right now. My energy is up a bit more than it has been, and the initial sample pages I’ve been working on this week have me really inspired to see some of these projects through. Seriously, where it used to take me a week or two to complete a single Ellie Connelly page, this week I was able to do three pages in my ‘comfortable’ style, and I couldn’t be happier with the way they look. I’m looking forward to having something to share with you all very soon!