Q&A 39 - Revisions

Jack Christmas wants to know:
"I've noticed that for a fair number of your older comics - particularly Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery - you sometimes revised the art when re-releasing or collecting them. What motivated you to update certain comics after the fact - was it due to how people reacted to them or more-so your own evolving standards?"

Working on the Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery collections, revisions were an important part of pre-publication. I'd redraw figures, fix faces, sometimes redraw whole pages where I could tell that I'd been seriously off my game. This wasn't true of every page, though I could often spot bits of colouring that I'd missed and minor fixes of that sort. The reason that I did this was simple - the work wasn't finished. I worked at a fierce pace, five pages a week, and would publish when I felt done that day. Believe me when I say that when you grind it out like that over months and years, you can feel "done" pretty early in the process.

I was always quite good at ignoring glaring mistakes - I think now that this was a survival mechanism, critical to my ability to move forward. But when I'd come to collect the work in a book, I could see, very clearly, where I'd cut corners or been struggling to draw that day, and the remedy was often pretty easy to apply.

So in essence, publication called for editing, editing that hadn't taken place earlier. I think it's more noticeable on Bad Machinery, where the page count Oni Press called for per volume was greater than the number of pages I'd drawn on the web for the early stories. So I had to add in, in some cases, dozens of new pages. But it was nice to break up the dense rows of panels with new splash pages and more expansive things - especially in the original large-format editions.

After years of performing these revisions and adding in pages, I started thinking in terms of a eventual print edition of anything as the finished product, and began to organise myself so the webcomic wasn't a malleable first draft. First I organised the writing process so that I wasn't leaving holes in stories (or, at least, gaping holes). That was the easy part. My art brain improves at a glacial pace, but slowly I learned to pick up visual mis-steps earlier.

These days I can usually pick it up on the day, but there are frustrations associated with this. Frequently I will ink a panel and realise it's weak, then have to cut it out and start again. There are days where large parts of the page are re-done while I work, and I still may not be 100% happy. The bottom left panel is often the one that causes problems, and I'm still not sure why. Perhaps it's an important pivot point before the climax of the page, and carries a lot of weight. I've learned not to stress about it - there's always an answer. I also have the benefit of a much longer lead time on publishing, so I can stare at my mistakes as I go with the luxury of correcting them a day or two later.

That said, readers who got the PDF of the current story, Little Days, will see that the bottom left panel of the final page has been replaced when that page appears on the website. The work of revision continues... forever.

There are dangers in revision. When you have the digital files, it's very easy to go back in and tinker. I know that a few of my early contemporaries in webcomics have got stuck in a loop of redrawing and revising old work. The readers aren't applauding the infinitesimally different new versions. No one is asking for them. It's solipsistic effort. And fixing things at such a remove is hubristic - "I'm so much better now!" I'm not so much better than that guy. In some ways, being more self-critical, I'm worse.

The older a piece of work gets, the harder it is for me to patch a panel or redraw a figure as I would have drawn it back in the day. Some of the early Bad Machinery books were pretty hairy in this regard, with a three-year remove in applying fixes. In the last few weeks I've been preparing a new print edition of Murder She Writes, a comic from late 2011. I did make some tiny revisions, but only in instances of egregious carelessness back in the day. Ideally, no one will be able to spot them but me. All my work is a document of who I was the day I drew that page, and expecting it to ever be perfect is missing the point. But it can often be a little bit better.