Doodle Penance: "12 reasons for penance"

This week's Doodle Penance is brought to you by an anonymous Google-searcher who found our site when looking for "12 reasons for penance." That strikes me as an unusually specific and limited request, in terms of the numbers. Having been trained in guilt for many years in graduate school, I can think of many more than a dozen reasons to be penitent. Still, we're happy to oblige...

Since we're both pretty busy this week and the blog hasn't been hurting for content, Mike and I decided to divide up the dozen reasons. Here are my half-dozen:



(You may click if you want a better view of my looming guilt.)

These are all reasons specific to my guilt as a cartoonist or a comics critic, and they are all guilts that derive from inaction (or from the opportunity costs of my other actions), rather than the many bad things I have done.

Let's see... First, there's poor Matteu, whose last "weekly" strip got drawn early in May of last year.

Then there's the Mapjam, which is a project with some real potential. Why has it taken me two years to draw a three-page story? What would it take for me to get that thing underway again?

Oh, and the essay on Alan Moore's collaborative practice, which I've been meaning to edit a little bit and deliver to the good folks at Secret Acres—two days' worth of work, tops, which I've been postponing for more than a year and a half. Let's let the Moore essay stand in for all of the many essays I haven't written, including that nearly-finished thing that Mike and I were working on about comics and set text.

Then there are the blog posts I have planned but not written. That's a different category of guilt, since not writing them doesn't really hurt anyone but the blog. Still, I am wondering why I still haven't written the third of my three "Swansea Find" posts, which is supposed to be about Dudley Watkins's Desperate Dan. I was in Swansea back in July. How long could it really take me to write that post? And when am I going to post my other finds from the Joe Stinson Collection, for that matter?

And then there's the general woeful matter of squandered time. Could I have back all the time I wasted on, say, Civilization? (And that's not even to mention the egregious, awful time-squandering of summer 2007.)

And, finally, the most painful failure: I've got a book to write, and it's not exactly writing itself these days.

Writing this post was a little more painful than I meant for it to be. Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm going to spend the rest of the day grading papers as fast as I can and staying as far from the internet as I can.

...With that in mind, Isaac—this is Mike writing, now—I will refrain from sending the usual e-mail alert when I have completed my half of the proceedings and posted it to the blog; far be it from me to enable more guilty feelings in your day!

I don't think I care to get quite as specific as you did with the rehearsal of one's own personal failings. Not because mine aren't legion, but because I don't trust myself to stop before it gets too maudlin or icky (see, there's a perfect example of what I mean right there!). Indeed, I have depersonalized my doodle, as well, relying on abstract iconography for the most part, so I'll have to decode it in prose after this image:
What we have here is almost a mini-narrative of regrettable deeds, misdeeds, or failures to act, though in several cases the ill could just as well be a good were it reconsidered or redirected. From top left to bottom right in usual reading order:

1) Correspondence. I don't stay on top of it as I should.
2) Finances. I should really keep my eye on the ball more carefully and more often.
3) Inattention. The images here are meant to suggest "out of sight, out of mind," though that's one of the worst attempts at a drawing of a brain I have ever committed.
4) Skewed values. The item on the left of the scales is the earth, complete with its moon. The item on the right is a single person and his comfort. (I wonder who it could be?)
5) Reliability. There's an old saw about the dependability of oaths written on water. Note how the ink immediately leaches away into an indistinct blur.
6) The insufficiently-examined life. Hence the question mark for a head.

In the case of the original doodle, the medium is indeed the message, for I sketched it out on one side of a still-unopened envelope that instructs the recipient, "Please respond within 4 weeks." I can't remember when it arrived, but the other side of it furnished the drawing surface for a doodle penance post from January 4. (In defense of the recipient, the instruction might have been more persuasive if the senders had seen fit to identify themselves.)

And now, having indulged in this self-flagellating exercise, I repent of our having chosen this topic for Doodle Penance. Henceforth, let the good times roll!

Matteu (13-15)

For the next Matteu strips, Mike took advantage of the page break to move the story forward by a few minutes without showing them to us. (This is obviously something we're going to have to do from time to time, so we won't have to be drawing this story for twenty years.) I think the transition has done a lot to increase the tension of the story, even if the central conflict still hasn't really emerged.

Here's this week's installment of Matteu's story:



(As usual, I hope you'll click to enlarge and read.)

As you might be able to guess by looking at the last date (which seems to be Mike's date of composition, since he emailed the final copy to me just a few days ago), this brings us to the end of the three-strip pages. Now it's my challenge, I guess, to get another strip of this story done before this time next week, to keep up the regular updates.

Now's a great time for you lurking readers to pitch in and kibbitz a bit. Ask something about where the story is going: we may not know the answer until you pose the question.

Matteu (10-12)

I'm done coloring the images for the postcard version of our Elfworld submission. Once I get them back from the printer, I'll set up a post to sell them through the website; they'll also debut at MoCCA next month.

And, in what I hope will be my final wrangle with Photoshop for the week, I've put together the next page of the Matteu story. Things are starting to get tense, now, with a real conflict emerging, sort of...



(Please do click the image so you can read it.)

You may notice the cameo Mike and I are making in that first panel. Two free sets of the Stepan postcards for the first person who can identify our clan costumes! (Use the comments section and your knowledge of the comics Mike and I grew up reading.)

This is around the time when the chronological gaps between tiers started to get kind of long. I think more than a year passed between my two strips on this page. This is what you get when you mix comics with academia, I'm afraid.

Matteu (7-9)

So far, these Matteu pages haven't garnered much comment, but I'm going to keep posting installments at least once a week, hoping that Mike will lob the ball back into my court some time soon so we can get a nice volley going.

Without further introduction, here are the next three Matteu strips:

(Click-to-enlarge.)

... Apparently we got pretty interested in that business about horses. But now we're getting into the city itself, and I'm sure the plot is going to start moving forward. I can just feel it in my bones.

Notice the weird timing on this batch. I drew the middle tier as a response to a pencil version of the first tier; Mike inked both the first and the third tiers of this page on the same day.

Matteu (4-6)

Our pal Carl Pyrdum anticipated, in the comments on last week's installment, the next turn in the Matteu story: the peculiar fellow in the black robe, whose name turns out to be Karel (spooky!), explains his headgear:


(Click, of course, to make larger.)

As you can see, we moved away from the idea of developing a language for the Mihkra (Mike must have been having a Tolkien moment or something when he started that). You can probably see some jostling between me (even-numbered tiers) and Mike (odd-numbered tiers) on other matters, as well: what's to become of that horse, for example, when neither of us really likes to draw horses?

You'll also notice the first significant gaps between drawing times for the tiers: apparently, we waited almost a month between strips on this page. Those were not the first delays, nor the longest, by any means.

We welcome speculation on what might happen next, though I believe that was all decided back in 2005 ... or 2006? What's this story going to be about? It's still hard to say, isn't it? (We sure didn't know.)

Matteu (1-3)

Back in the summer of 2005, Mike and I started drawing two stories that both involve a scholar named Matteu. In both stories, set ten years apart, he travels to a walled city somewhere in the hinterlands. That's as much as we knew about the stories when we started, and I don't want to spoil any future revelations (or revisions) by trying to describe what he discovers there.

This project has been really slow in the making. Although we were originally planning to draw one strip of each story each week, swapping stories every week, a lot of other things have come higher on our list of priorities, and Matteu keeps getting postponed. (If we had kept up with the original plan, we'd have about a hundred pages of story now. As it is, we have almost ten.)

Because we're both a little embarrassed about the glacial pace at which this piece has been moving, we've decided to create a spur for ourselves with the blog here. We'll be posting one of the stories (the first visit to the town) here in weekly installments. The other story will continue to grow at the same pace, but will remain invisible to the internet for now. Until we catch up with new work, I'll post the story in pages instead of in individual strips. (The weekly unit of progress is a strip or a tier, not a page.)

Here are the first three strips:

(I recommend clicking to enhance legibility.)

The inspiration for this form of collaboration, by the way, was the Josh Neufeld / Dean Haspiel concoction Lionel's Lament, for which the pair of collaborators alternated two-panel tiers in a six-panel grid, working on the story in two halves simultaneously. It's a pretty fun jam, and Matteu's story has been a lot of fun for Mike and me, as well, though I don't think you'd ever guess that Matteu and Lionel shared much in their origins.

I hope you'll enjoy getting up to speed on Matteu's travels, and that you'll stick with us long enough to see the new material, which is just a few pages away.