It's not all rainclouds

Last week I posted that the next Steeple story would be the last, as Dark Horse didn't want any more. People were very nice, and posted the words I fear the most, "can't wait to see what you do next".  Yeah, me too. I have no idea what that will be.

But while I feel on the one hand that I didn't make as many pages of Steeple as I could have (about 500 in total, including the Author Unknown and Steeple Lite), 500 is still a lot. I started tinkering with the series in 2018 as a potential new webcomic series, a full-time replacement for the old Scary Go Round apparatus, parking it until Dark Horse asked me if I "had any ideas" (another phrase that I am very afraid of) and then making it into the five-issue print mini-series that kicked things off.

Covid hit soon after the miniseries concluded, putting paid to any chance of the monthly series returning. This was a blessing, because I couldn't script, rough, pencil and ink a 22-page monthly series. I wanted to make something that was visually at least somewhere near the Dark Horse books I had loved - a tall order. By issue five I was on my knees.

So the afterlife of the series, which lest we forget, created this Patreon and brought me back full-time to webcomics at a time when I wondered if I wanted to make comics at all, at a time when the world was going mad, has been a blessing. The woodshedding that lockdown allowed created, in Steeple volume 3, the single collection of my work that I am most proud of. The crossover story with  Charlotte and Shelley in Tredregyn is the best drawing I will probably ever do. I don't know when I will ever have that undistracted focus again.

I think there ARE more stories in this series, but at the rate of print publication that had proved possible, I was unable to lean hard enough into either the bagginess that I like in a webcomic, or the tough adherence to plot that print readers demand. This year I spent 14 weeks on a story where Reverend Penrose accidentally buys a car that is a Transformer and explores the delicacies of middle-aged male friend making. Even as I made it, enjoying myself tremendously, I asked myself: who is this for?

And the fact of the matter is, after five years, I have found myself inevitably ready to move on from whatever epoch of my little comics universe I've been exploring. Scary Go Round lasted seven years, and the last two were an increasingly desperate search for what would come next. Giant Days was about five years of comics including the self-published ones. Bad Machinery ran for nearly eight years but the last two stories were more to round things off for readers than for me. I couldn't top The Case Of The Modern Men, it did everything I wanted. And that was five years in, too.

The thing I find hard now, which was easier when I was younger, is jumping from one moving train to another on a parallel line. I'm not the same person who came up with Steeple in 2018, and he isn't the same one who came up with Giant Days in 2010, and he wasn't the same person who cooked up Scary Go Round in 2002, or Bobbins in 1998. A little more innocence is chipped away, a little more experience is lacquered on.  The experienced guy won't let the series degenerate into experimental pilots for things that might replace it. He says that's not good storytelling! He's a bad guy!

The long and short of it: I'm not 100% sure what I want to say with my stories once Steeple is done in February. I have an idea to tide me over, but it's nothing new. What kind of comics do I want to make in 2024? The world feels like an ever darker place and it's impossible not to reflect that. But I still feel there is an essential decency to people that goes unreflected by "the conversation". I think my trying to get to the heart of that is what keeps people coming back to read. I suppose I will just have to wait and see.

As ever I am grateful for your support.