It’s another comic short story! Give it a read, and I’ll write some thoughts after the comic. You can read the comic at your own pace, or watch the video and have it scroll through the comic (at what I assume is a somewhat normal reading pace). Thanks so much!
I always love writing these comic short stories. I think that, as a creative person, I should aim to make what I want to see existing in the world; these short comic stories are about as close as I get. I love the idea of a short stand alone comic story that hints at a larger universe but that leaves fleshing out that universe to the reader’s imagination. My favourite graphic novels tend towards being anthology collections of short stories- from Junji Ito and Yoshihiro Tatsumi to any of cloudscape’s indie comic anthologies, heck even Archie comics, I just love sitting down and reading a whole story in five minutes and being left with more questions than answers. Twilight zone. Outer limits. Love Death and Robots. LOVES ME SOME SHORT STORY ANTHOLOGY!
That being said, it does take quite a lot of time to make these. Creating these short story comics is intrinsically linked to the luxury of time I have in the summer. When school starts back up again, and eventually when I’m back to being fully employed, I’m not gonna have the luxury of hours every day to be able to make these stories. Some people are able to compartmentalize their mind and shift gears between spouse and parent and writer and artist and work and home life with ease- but that is not me. I can only really write when I’m truly bored, and I have time alone with my thoughts, and am totally uninterrupted. Having a portable digital drawing set up (iPad) helps me squeeze art in whenever, and many years of drawing comic strips has helped me to be quick at drawing the pages, but even then it probably takes an hour or two per page. All of that to say: If you enjoy these short stories, I’m glad! I do too. If you don’t, well, just wait for September because I’ll probably have to shift back into a less time intensive form of creative expression (aka, comic strips!).
Also, in my understanding, KAIZEN (the title for this comic) is a Korean philosophy having to do with incremental improvement- the idea is that if everyone in a company gets a little bit better at the little things over time, it eventually adds up to large improvement. Combine that with “it’s hard to get worse at something you do every day” and I’d say that’s my creative philosophy in a nutshell. I’m not looking to redefine what comics can be, I just want to get better at giving people a few minutes of enjoyment when they read my comics.
