The Beginning of The End

May05
by on 5 May 2025
All 59 pages of Long John, chapter 6 stacked on my desk.

In the middle of April, I inked the last line of Long John ever.

That’s not completely true; I have a cover to draw (though I might do that digitally) and I haven’t decide what I’m doing for extra content for the book (or if I want to try and fund a collected edition through Kickstarter), but as far as telling the story of this series, all the pages are done.

Strangely, the last pages I drew were not the last pages of the book. I remember drawing and inking the final page of the book and feeling…nothing. I told myself that the emotions would hit once the book was in-hand, but I knew deep down that there was something wrong with the flow of the back third of the book. It went a little fast, but I was already at 57 pages and knew that if I wanted to flesh out scenes it would have to be in two-page increments, which can be a lot. I had already added two more pages to the final scene because it was so rushed in my thumbnails that it didn’t hit as hard as I wanted it to. To add at least two more seemed to be asking for trouble.

I tried to put start and end dates on each page as I drew them. While I wasn’t always consistent, the very first Long John page and the very last one have their start and completion dates on there (drawing and inking them in a single day).

I was also worrying that I might be adding pages because my brain wasn’t ready to be done with Long John, a story and process that has been at the front of my life for 11 years, more if you count when I started to really develop the character and story.

But when I put down the pages for a few days and came to those final scenes with fresh eyes, a two-page spread came to me and it was obvious it needed to be in the book, and felt like it had been there since the beginning. Honestly, it comes across as one of those images that I normally have early on, and part of the process of writing is to get to that image. But coming after it was all done showed that this book still had some surprises for me.

All 223-ish pages of Long John stacked on my drawing table.

With the drawing all done, it’s on to the next stages of the process. I’m in the flatting phase right now—putting flat colors on the pages to separate characters from backgrounds, etc. It’s probably the most numbing and tedious phase of the whole process, but it needs to be done. I’m also doing another pass on the script as I do this, because looking at the pages in a different light brings the whole thing into focus a bit more.

So, there’s a fair amount of work to go, but it’s all coming together really nicely. On a good day you might even get me to believe that I’ve stuck the landing.