Q&A 2: Remakes

Aram writes:

"I see artists remake their work quite frequently. I remember seeing some redrawn panels by you (maybe for the printed version of [Giant Days]?) Have you considered recreating some of the vector looking comics from the mid noughts? Why/why not?"

I wanted to write a little bit about the drive to remake old work. It's an instinct that, carefully managed, can service improvement, or it can be a very destructive process that signals creative problems that can't be fixed by doing variations on the same old thing.

When I first started making webcomics around mid-1998, one of the few people putting stuff online was a guy called Steve Troop, who had a comic strip called Melonpool. Steve's work was professional-looking (at a time when almost no one in the field was) and charming. But I can remember (I think) two separate occasions where Steve went back to the start, hundreds of comics into his run, and started redrawing the strips from scratch. Even the later iteration of the comic was a reboot that repurposed old situations. I believed then and am certain now that this was a bad way to go. You can't be so in love with your little world, yet so sure that it's wrong, that you endlessly reprocess it looking for some different result. I don't want to put Steve down - he's a great cartoonist. His evident technical skill made it stranger to me that he couldn't find what he was looking for, but went back for it anyway. But I took note. I'd rather put something out that's 95% finished than spend my life noodling over the last 5% and never putting it out. 

BUT I do redraw comics sometimes, but for a couple of different reasons:

1. I want to try out a new art technique.
Old comics are a good source of material to try out new things. I can try out inking techniques, pencilling techniques, bugged out layouts, weird colour ideas, format changes or anything else without having to write new material. If I manage to finish the page, I tend to share it (nowadays, usually here) because it's a bit of bonus fun. 

As an added extra, the original page provides a basic rough to work from.

2. I have a shortage of new material.
A few times, I've repurposed old stories in a slightly glossier format. One was the Heavy Metal Hearts and Flowers book I did for Keenspot around 2004, which built out a fairly slight Bobbins series from a few years earlier into a book-length story. I made those comics while simultaneously making Scary Go Round daily strips, and doing freelance design work, so I had to repurpose something old. There are a couple of other examples of this - the Girlspy minicomic (from 2003) and Oldbourne, a story I redrew while writing Giant Days and By Night for Boom in 2017.

So in answer to Aram's question, while I've redrawn one or two vector strips (referring to the old slick-looking Scary Go Rounds from 2002-2006) for my own amusement, I find them hard to work from as roughs (the compositions were limited), so I tend not to pick them out when I'm testing something new. 

It's fun to mark your progress by looking at then-and-now versions of things, but it's counterproductive to look down on past work and always assume that what you're doing now is 100% better. My remakes are often missing something. Innocence sometimes looks better than crusty old experience. 

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Next time, I'm going to write about writer's block, and the mixture of household chemicals that will cure it -- every time.

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