Yesterday morning I finally scanned and screentoned the 208th and last page of Linnavainio 2 book.
Here’s some history of the project:
- 2013/01/28: Completed inking the first book, Linnavainio 1
- 2013/09/10: Linnavainio 1 released at Helsinki Comic Festival 2013
- 2013/09/18: Rough plans for Linnavainio 2, i.e. story points that should be accomplished before the end of the book
- 2013/10/07: Writing the first draft of Linnavainio 2.
- 2014/04/04: Completed the fourth and final draft of the script, with full dialogue.
- 2014/05/15: Intro sequence inked and ready. Quite nicely in a decent time.
- 2014/10/06: First chapter done. A huge loss of time here, due to working elsewhere. Around this time a got back into my studio full time thanks to a grant from Pirkanmaan taidetoimikunta.
- 2014/12/02: Second chapter done.
- 2015/07/14: Third AND fourth chapters done between this and the previous entry. Took seven months.
- 2016/01/22: Another seven months to ink chapters five and six. It’s this moment right now.
So… it took almost TWO AND A HALF frikken YEARS to make a comic book. To me, it’s AMAZING to think it’s ready now. It’s such a slow process that for two years there were no end to be seen, only hope that if I just blindly head into this direction, making these tiny bits of work everytime I possibly can, someday and somewhere in the future it will be done. Sometimes towards the end I looked at some of the created/modified/accessed dates of the completed pages and I see something like “created 2014/09/17” and I have no idea what else was going on in my life at that time.
I can only imagine what goes on in some video game developer’s mind when the development times range from 3 to 5 to 7(?) years! It’s a good junk of your life.
The original plan to release this book was at Tampere Kuplii 2015 festival in March. Couldn’t make it. I was so depressed I couldn’t go to the festival at all. The next one up was at Helsinki Comic Festival in September 2015. I really crunched towards the end, but had almost fifty pages left to draw at the time of the festival. Couldn’t attend that party either.
I had planned to draw the comic in nine months, based on the experience with the first book which took exactly that (writing took almost a year, though). What I didn’t take into consideration was the family I had been growing in the meantime. There just wasn’t time - other than night-time (and then you want to sleep or just lie around). On a couple of occasions there were months while I couldn’t make even a single page from start to finish.
The bad part is that even if no work can be done in weeks or months, it’s still in the back of the head, causing stress. One time I seriously considered to stop working on it altogether. “Why should I do this if it’s that hard?” and “Almost no one is interested, many will walk past it, and the REST WILL READ IT IN TWO HOURS MAX!”. What gives?! 2yrs-2hrs ratio doesn’t feel that good.
Still, I had plans to make a third book since I got this far. But first I’m going to play some games, watch some movies, play some music… Just got into Terra Mystica this week and it’s AMAZING, btw.