Matt Maxwell, former Broken Frontier columnist, blogger and soon-to-be comics superstar, is writing a column again over at Comics Waiting Room called Full Bleed. In the first installment, he talks about working on the follow-up to Strangeways, a casualty of the Speakeasy implosion that will be published next year:
Sitting down to work is the best way to sit down to work. The work is your best distraction. Devotion pays itself, dig? Like, for instance, I’m working on a script for the second STRANGEWAYS storyline, called “Thirsty” (yes, it’s cowboys and vampires, as the first one was cowboys and werewolves) and I’d been hammering myself trying to come up with an apt visual metaphor to show how addicted our protagonist had become, so hooked on blood after his first hit. It just wasn’t coming. I cursed and howled and railed against the fundamental unfairness of the universe, wailing O WOE IS ME, WRITER THWARTED. I did a lot of things.
But I wasn’t doing The Work.
So instead of bitching about it, I sat down and wrote, working on the script pages leading up to that momentous scene. I wrote some more. And when the time came to face the dreaded PAGE 7 PANEL 1, it just came to me. And it was pretty sweet, just a couple panels and WHAM, it’s set. You know how far he’s fallen, wordless, from humanity to something lower. Because I did The Work.
Check out the trailer for Strangeways below:
