New/Old Art

This series of images was commissioned by author James Craft back in early 2015, using characters I had created for some of my earliest feminzation art.  Though I'd been paid for it long ago, I only finished inking it and added color about five months back.  Even then, I kept putting off posting it online because I'd intended to add dialogue, but I could never find the energy/inspiration.  

What kind of jerk takes half a decade to finish a simple art commission that shouldn't require more than a week, tops?  Well, you see, when I showed James the sketches, he liked them so much that he proposed we expand what was intended to be a one-off "comic" of sorts into a full-fledged illustrated story.  I was actually pretty excited about the idea.  The thought of doing a story involving these characters had crossed my mind before, though I had serious doubts that my ability to write would be as good as my ability to draw.

While I did once win an award for a story I wrote in fifth grade, I think the main reason for that was because the kids who voted for it had liked my illustrations.  To be honest, I struggled so much coming up with an idea for my story, I looked at a bunch of my old Cricket magazines for inspiration and basically ripped-off the premise from one story to use in my own.  In my defense, it was not an original idea to begin with, but rather something of a well-worn trope in fiction (characters panic over a spooky noise than they later discover is something innocuous).  Hey, at least I was more original than the kid who I realized years later had totally plagiarized a story by Richard Matheson.  

I'm afraid that any feminzation story I'd try to write would probably end up being a mish-mash of stolen ideas from other stories.  A collaboration with an established writer would take a lot of the pressure off.  Although the books I've illustrated for James Craft in the past have not been my cup of tea, I figured I could steer him away from any areas I was uncomfortable with.  Besides, I don't have the knack for writing that he has, plus we've always gotten along really well.

Unfortunately, after a few fits and starts, the project never really got off the ground.  I mostly blame myself.  For one thing, I felt ridiculously protective of these characters that I'd never fleshed out or even named, so I shot down all of James' ideas as not being suitable, though he had precious little to go off of when I had failed to establish who they were or what their relationship to each other was.  But even after I came up with an idea that we were both happy with, I felt like we just couldn't get on the same page.  While James and I often seem to have different preferences when it comes to femization fiction, I think a big problem was that I was too shy to articulate what I wanted to see in a story.  Maybe I just don't know what I want.  While I can concoct various feminization scenarios, I'm not sure how to keep it interesting once the guy is fully feminized. 

I stopped working on his commission once we started talking about a collaboration because I didn't know if I'd have to make changes to the art later to suit the story we were going to write.  Even so, once we amicably agreed to put that collaboration on the backburner indefinitely, I should have just finished the commission then and there.  It's been a source of guilt that I let it gather dust for so long afterward.  Just to give a sense of how long it's been, above one of the sketches, I wrote "Ready Player 1," presumably because I heard someone mention that title and I thought it might be something worth looking into later (though it probably wasn't and I never did).  In the time it took me to finish this one stupid commission, Steven Spielberg made a whole movie out of this book I hadn't even heard of when I started sketching.  

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More recently, I've been working on another comic for James Craft, and it's also taking longer than I'd like, but that's partly because it started out being six pages, then turned into twelve, and now it's closer to thirty forty, all because James kept coming up with ideas.  Still, I would have finished it long ago were it not for my laziness and all-too frequent periods of depression.  I would love to do more sequential art in the future, and even maybe get to the point where I could make a living off my art, but the achingly slow progress I've made with this project has made that dream feel less viable... which makes me depressed, which makes it harder to concentrate on my art, etc.   

The comic I'm working on now is something James plans on publishing (which is something he failed to communicate to me at first, to my frustration), so I'm unable to give people the opportunity to see much of what I've done so far, which sucks, as I truly feel that it's some of my best work to date.  However, I have been given permission to share a couple small excerpts at least.

 

The end of that statement is supposed to be, "...it was worth the wait."  Once it's complete, I really hope the same can be said about this comic.