I made the leonine comic around 2013 and then shelved it for 13 years.

Comics were my very first love. When I was a small child, my first creations were gag comics à la Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, but with a giraffe and ostrich as friends. One day the whole stack of paper was thrown out with the garbage. In middle school, I met a friend who gave me a paper with “draw me a sheep” written on it in blue. I drew it in black, he made a joke, and we had a laugh. The next day, he gave me another one. The result of our interactions followed the exact same format as a webcomic, with a lot of self-referential humour. We kept it going for a year, until I changed schools. Besides a few drawings here and there and short comics, Leonine was thus my next committed creative endeavour.

Then I made Leonine, almost finished a lot of it, and let it disappear. This was my optimistic view of life, but the world was just too dark for it.

Learning To Draw

I made these when I started to learn to draw “seriously” (or at least in a semi-structured manner). So these date back to 2013, plus or minus 1 year; in some sense they are very much a product of their time, and yet I hope they have some timeless quality. At the time, I was frustrated with some of the existing webcomics, even though I was still enjoying them. I wanted to make something that was at least consistently beautiful, although there are some problems I consistently cringe looking at. However, I won’t edit much of the old stuff besides updating the text rendering. I have many ‘almost finished’ drafts in a drawer (about a 3cm thick pile of pages) that I may complete and add to the ones that were already finished.

On the technical side, all of it was 100% done with FLOSS tools, and was an integral part of my liberation journey. The earlier ones were done with MyPaint, with only finishing touches done in Krita, and the later ones were directly started in Krita. There are some MyPaint brushes that did not replicate exactly in Krita, so there’s a slight difference in style; but this is very minimal compared to my improvement in drawing ability.

Restoration

It took me a long time to decide on a particular font. I never liked any enough to commit to it; however, trying to write everything by hand causes me RSI-type pain very fast. And for the reader, my handwriting is not the most readable. So, I went for a compromise: a handwritten font. I generated it with FontCrafter. The result was okay-ish, but the inconsistent letter sizes gave it a serial-killer-handwriting vibe. I solved that with a normalization step, which took much longer to get right than the font itself.

Someone Else’s Work

I won’t provide any comments on their content. They should speak for themselves; I don’t think I’ve ever had the impression that a comic was improved by an artist explaining it. I don’t mean comments about a general artistic project, which can put an interesting perspective on the context. But, “This interaction was inspired by my latest trip to the grocery store”, or worse, “this proves I am right and you should vote for who I tell you to”… If you missed it, it probably wasn’t important, or just badly expressed.

It’s reassuring to have the “word from God”, in the face of ambiguity. But even then, at one point the author might reject the obvious meaning they were going for at the time. Artistic integrity is not everything, especially compared to clout, fear, or regret. The “death of the author” is stupid when taken to some extremes, but the audience creates a dialogue which takes a life of its own. I don’t think I could have done much better at the age I was with the tools I had been given. Therefore, I see these as almost someone else’s work, for whom I have empathy, even if sometimes that makes me cringe.

The reasons I created these are closely linked to the reasons I shelved them for good (or at least for 13 years). But they don’t matter to anyone; this is just a window into my own narcissism. But isn’t that what we’re all striving for: to dwell freely in front of our narcissistic well, with everyone else as the public?