Often I worry I draw too small and confined. Compare these recent panels with a brush, my hand, an autumn leaf.

Thank you continually for all the comments and support. I disagree with the sentiment from this recent HABIBI panel below.

Summers are always a bit chaotic, but I apologize for neglecting blog posting.
Here’s four steps towards a recent page of HABIBI. 1) rough pencils 2) refined pencils 3) half-inked 4) finished.

And below is recent documentation of my rural adventures visiting my sister in Nebraska — paired with an old doodle from my
sketchbooks, referenced from a National Geographic photograph perhaps? (let me know if you recognize it.)

Please note that I don’t wear a helmet while drawing or in everyday life.

I took a couple of days off when my buddy Alessandro visited from Italy. Here’s a doodle from a front porch conversation:

And here’s a little jumble of chapter five progress. It’s coming along!

Thanks, as usual, for the blog comments. And on that last round, lots of useful self-preservation tips.
For those in Portland, I’ll be at my friend Danny’s LACKTHEREOF cd release party at Holocene tonight.

All my favorite pages of HABIBI are too spoiler-ish to share,
so instead here’s a fairly innocuous/boring page that can be broken down into various stages of development.
It’s outright shameful the lapse of time from the first draft free-form journaled in my sketchbook in October 2004 and the final inks
laid down a couple of days ago. But here you go — 1) sketchbook rough in ballpoint pen… 2) composed into pages in the thumbnail draft…

… 3) the earliest stage of penciling … 4) note how I flipped the first two panels to flow better …

5) final inks. This is page 298. And today I finished page 302. Thank you for waiting!

PS — for those of you interested in production details, check my old tool talk posting.

Quick follow-up to that last entry. Peter asked how big the sketchbook pages are. They’re 9″ x 12″.
Here’s another sketch with today’s page of HABIBI laid behind it. The HABIBI pages are drawn within
an 8.75″ x 12.5″ live area, but you can see how detailed they are compared to the sketchbook.

Because the sketches are drawn from life with plenty of space on the page, it’s easy to dash them off with pocketbrush.
But the comics compositions are ridiculously worked over - generating heaps of eraser shavings. And they’re inked with
these sable watercolor brushes (I’ve graduated to the Winsor Newton series seven!)
(That’s my hand posing to give a sense of the page size.)

Anyways, this HABIBI page was drawn today. And the sketch above is of my friend Kathleen at Benoît Peeter’s apartment in Paris.

Finally, the fourth chapter is finished.
It took six and a half months, but it’s over a hundred pages long — begun on October 20th, after returning from tour with Menomena — and completed on May 8th, a couple of weeks after Stumptown Comics Fest. In between, there were a handful of out-of-town guests, a couple of trips (including the Grammys), 3 weeks of nagging cold, 1 week of completely paralyzing flu, and one martial arts-induced drawing hand injury (I dropped out of the class). Here’s some peeks at some panels (still hesitant to reveal full pages) and photo proof that I do work (Thaïs snapped the first one, and Lark the second).

I’ll try to attend to comment/questions soon. In the meantime, Tita and other Netherlanders should know I won’t be at Stripdagen Haarlem this year. It seems they’re showing a documentary or something that includes embarrassing footage of me. As always, thank you all for your kind words. They really keep me going!

Here’s page 250-something of HABIBI, along with photos of poppies from my backyard (lush Portland).

And here’s some of the sprawl of pages from chapter four. As alluded to in the last blog entry, working on a graphic novel can be tedious, isolating, and ridiculous. In terms of PROCESS, it’s probably not the brightest way to produce comics, because several years pass before a creator has new work on the shelves. It seems like all the “with-it youngsters” serialize their books online, sometimes in daily installments; but as a reader, I crave a self-contained reading experience, and intermissions of my own choosing. Half the pleasure of a book is reading it at your own pace. I’m resistant to serialization — and of disposable formats like the “pamphlet comic” and magazines and newspapers. There’s enough trees being sacrificed. Maybe the true issue is the length of a comic book. If only page 250 was the final page of HABIBI, instead of a little more than a third the way through. What do you think?

I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m ever grateful to all of you for your patience!