Long John

I was never a perfectionist, but I do have a tendency to get overwhelmed by the enormity of a project or task, stopping before I even start. That being said, the same aphorism that is meant to help perfectionists I also found very helpful to getting started:

“Perfect is the enemy of good.”

For me, I could easily stay in the thumbnail stage of the comic-creating process––just work and rework the composition of the panels on the page. That’s where any sort of perfectionism would creep up on me. Especially working digitally on the iPad, I can erase as many times as I want––or copy and paste––so I can keep tweaking a composition into oblivion.

To avoid that, I somehow acquired the ability to stop when messing with a panel and ask myself, “does it convey what it needs to say?” If I think it does, then that gives me the permission to stop and move on. Such was the case with the first panel of this page. It’s not the best panel in the world, but it conveys the chaos and confusion of having a horse trample through your camp at full speed, and that’s what matters. It’s good enough.

I love the rest of the page, though.

Thumbnail for this page. Click for larger version.