UNFINISHED MELODY

 

CLICK ON IMAGE TO VIEW GALLERY

In 2009 my friend Peter Rosenberg invited me to add artwork to a comic he'd been writing for years. It was about an adult woman who'd moved back in with her parents for financial reasons, and centered on her friendship with the neighbor she'd grown up with. We worked with the concept and characters for a bit, and I wrote a couple of episodes myself.

Shortly after we'd begun, and before any character designs had been finalized, we found out that Amazon.com was holding a contest, with the winner getting the chance to publish a daily newspaper comic strip and a book compilation. The only problem was that I only had two weeks to complete the requirement of twelve comic strips, including two color Sunday editions.

It was a huge amount of work, especially since it was all drawn digitally. Something that an artist might be able to complete in a few minutes can take hours digitally, but I'd long ago lost the ability to draw by hand (at least, to draw well...). But I also had to work out the layouts and do all the typesetting. Every single space between the letters in these twelve comics has been kerned.

Another problem was that, according to the rules of the contest, only one person could be listed as the creator, so if we had won, Peter would never have gotten credit for actually creating and writing the works, and I would have been stuck lying about it for infinity.



But I did get it finished on time. The contest was judged by some of the leading comic strip artists in the world, including Gary Trudeau (Doonesbury), and we actually managed to be included among the secondary winners, so I'm really proud of that.

I'm so glad we didn't win first prize though. The thought of being held to creating 365 strips a year is mind-numbing, and the money isn't really all that good unless you get in zillions of newspapers. And we all know what's happening with those.

But here they are for posterity. In retrospect, I can't believe I managed to do this in such a short time. I think they look great.