Closing Remarks/Commentary

Oh, man. This one was a doozy. This manga, at a mere 25 pages, stands as the result of three months of hard work. Now, I don’t want to sound too dramatic, but this manga made me want to abstain from drawing for many months to come. To be fair, the first 10 panels weren’t that bad. The next 275, however, were killer. By panel 250 I felt as if I had eaten 71 ounces of a 72-ounce steak in a Texas roadhouse. I was ready to throw in the towel- heck, the whole closet! But let me tell you, when I was done drawing and coloring that last panel, a long shot of the village where Taka lives, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of accomplishment.

I definitely learned a lot since my last manga. If I may be so bold, my drawing skills have improved somewhat. As promised, I acquired a watercolor pad and another set of watercolor pencils. The additional colors really show, I think. One major obstacle I faced while drawing this issue is the difficulty of drawing humans. This time around, drawing a page worth’s of panels (about 12) took between one and two hours. Coloring those panels usually took another hour. For the longest time I was wondering to myself why I was having such a hard time, and then it hit me. Cats are easy to draw; humans are not. Humans have hands and ultra-specific proportions. Even with an occasionally semi-chibi style, bodily proportions were still awfully tough to get decently correct. Chirei was tricky to draw in previous issues as well, but I had an advantage that I no longer had this time around: thin paper. You see, ordinary printer paper is thin enough that the light from a computer monitor can shine through it, allowing one to trace an image displayed on said monitor. I didn’t take advantage of this very often–maybe once or twice an issue– but it was helpful to know I could if I needed to. For issue 3, however, I had no such crutch. My reference images had to be “traced” freehand. Despite this, or maybe because of this, my drawings as a whole turned out better. Yay! ^_^

What I can take with me to the next issue is this: Plan better! I didn’t realize how much time would go into this manga. Each page took about a half-hour to write, an hour or two to draw, an hour to color, an hour to edit in the computer, and another hour of miscellaneous bits and bobs that needed to be done. Multiply that by 25 pages and you have about 150 hours of work. When I realized in late December just how much lay ahead of me still, I quickly wrote up a schedule to make sure I could have the manga completed by the time the missionaries returned to Japan. Observe:

Adhering to such a schedule required me to spend at least three hours per day slaving away. Sorry, do I sound as if I’m trying to elicit your sympathy? Well I am. Feel sorry for me, please. Ahem. Anyway, I’m really glad that I drew the first 70-or-so panels in December. Drawing 12 panels per day was draining enough, but 16 or 20 would have been downright exhausting. It’s funny that I have a visual imagination, and enjoy writing in huge chunks, but become terribly drained from drawing twelve little pictures. I think it’s because the stakes are higher. You’ll notice that the pictures in my first manga were drawn by someone who, appropriately enough, has nothing to lose and doesn’t really care. The drawings in the second one were more detailed, though, and the drawings in this one are through the roof in terms of close attention to detail. I don’t mean to brag, of course. All of the drawings could have been much better; and, come to think of it, the story could have been better too. Usually when I write something, I keep editing it right up to (and in some cases, past) the deadline. But when I need to lock myself from editing the story a month or two before it’s published, then the quality ends up suffering a little bit.

I also noticed while reading through issue three that there are problems with story flow. Some scenes ought to have more panels, some ought to have fewer. Some conversations need to be truncated, and additional narrative in some places would be helpful. And if I had translated the script myself, then I would have included these changes. But to ask Taylor-san to keep translating my revisions over and over would have been obnoxious. As it is, I’ll just have to let my manga stand with all its triumphs and failures. Warts and all. And if my readers don’t notice or mind these faults, and enjoy my manga sono mama (as it is), then I should be quite content.

And if you’re wondering why I didn’t just write the story several months sooner so I could have extra time to edit it, the answer is simple: I didn’t have the ideas for the story yet. The main plots for issues two and three were inspired by the Japanese missionaries, and when there’s no inspiration, there’s no story. I think I wrote the first scraps of the outline in September, but it was just a few sentences or so until sometime in October. When I got the idea for Milo, Jr., then the writing process really took off. Most of the time I spend on a story is in my head. I mull over a story throughout the day, spending perhaps weeks at a time thinking about it while going about my business, then at the end of a few weeks or months, I sit down and hammer out what I have. At that point, the story is 70%-90% done (if you exclude editing). If I could draw 1,000 times faster, then I would have continued editing the script throughout December and January. By January the edits would have been minute, perhaps changing a single word or punctuation mark. So my lesson for issue 4 is… become inspired sooner? Put it off until after the missionaries return home? Win the lottery and hire an artist or two?

Well, anyway, that’s about all I have to say for this. See you in a few months (to a year) for issue 4. Take care, everyone.