Today I got a lot of work done on my proposal for Large Nameless Publisher. They wanted the script for the 90-page comic book, and six sample pages.

I’ve got fifty-odd pages scripted, and I did four sample pages today. I’ve got a style I’m pretty happy with so far, and I’m growing increasingly excited about the script, so that’s something. (Of course, if the proposal doesn’t get taken up, now I’ll be disappointed unless my agent can find another publisher to take it. Oh, well, them’s the breaks…)

At least, at four pages a day, it’s something I’d be able to hammer out in short order.

The funny thing is that this is Yet More Proof that nothing is ever wasted. The character designs are variations on the Horrified Lizards, and I realize now, bear a suspicious resemblance to a painting I did about a thousand years ago, called “Young Dragons” which featured some little punk dragon characters. The two-color scheme is based on stuff I learned doing “Little Creature” and even the panel borders are done with a trick I picked up back in the Caliban days–and of course, I couldn’t draw it at all if I hadn’t spent three years to date on Digger.

It’s crass sentimentality, and I almost disgust myself with the Pollyannaishness of this attitude, but I’m slowly coming around to the opinion that there is no art so crappy that one can’t use it for mulch. Good projects strip the bad ones for nutrients. Old projects break down gently into useful bits that you dump on the roots of new projects.

Even the bad art has its uses. Maybe especially the bad art. After all, it’s the nastiest gunk that makes the best fertilizer.

I prefer this way of looking at it to thinking that we all just endless rehash the same things over and over.

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