The End of Double Trouble and a Quest for Identity

 

 

 

  Good morning! 

  This is an attempt at logging my progress in the world of writing, drawing and producing comics. I hope it to be of interest to my small following of critics and potential future readers.

  As those of you who follow me on Twitter [1] may know, the next chapter of Double Trouble will be the last one. It is not to say I gave up on it, but rather that I figured now is not the time for a serial title. It came from learning on YouTube [2] about the way Japanese authors publish their manga. It made me realize why unpaid effort is a problem in terms of human nature. You see, the wages and other bits of reward along the way of a prosperous career are most definitely one of the crucial components of what makes people keep going! Although we can rationally infer about long-term gains, our bodies tend to have a more immediate approach to life, and that's a bummer if you're a beginner artist with no following, no contracts and years of development ahead of you. But that's the brilliance of the Japanese format! It converts the inevitable steps of an artist's development into bite-sized bets that individually have a large payoff potential. It's ingenious! It's not like manga wasn't the greatest influence on my art already, but still, it would be foolish to shrug off the findings of a billion-dollar industry.

  The second thing I would like to talk about is identity. My good friend Alexandre called my attention to the known reality of identity in art. It is known, and it doesn't require much thought, that the greatest in literature, music, painting etc. have very well-defined styles. To have identity is to be something that no one else can be but yourself. That should be one of the artists' main aspirations. I initially thought of it as something distant, a process of decades seeking mastery to only then deconstruct it towards originality. But I'm not so certain it would necessarily take so much. The way to identity as I see it is to strongly give in to whatever catches your heart! Much like a toddler laughing at their parents, the artist should do whatever is in their power to have more of the source object of their admiration. It may render them a copycat in the short term, but if done correctly and healthily, should eventually develop into a "teenager phase" that breaks from the parental influence and becomes its own thing, maturing from there. As babies don't wait, so won't I! And as in the first paragraph I appealed to the authority of a successful, century-old, billion-dollar industry, in this one I appeal to the undefeated, hundreds of millions of years old and incalculably valuable endeavor that is life itself. 

   To sum it up if you're not much into reading: you can expect to see the release of shorter, single-issue comics in the future of this blog, and a more homogeneous bunch of drawings in the coming last chapter of Double Trouble.

 

[1] Follow me on Twitter! @kevatecs
[2] That and many other lessons I learned from the channel "Learn to Draw Manga"! https://www.youtube.com/@aphlearntodrawmanga