Day 1: Novels. Tax forms. Marriages. Webcomics. What do they have in common? They take work. And I’m just foolish enough to meddle with the latter.

That’s right, I’m making a webcomic, forming it from clay, blood, sweat, and a failed one-act play from high school. I shall make ten full pages in ten days, all by a guy whose last completed series featured 'Mr. Pencil Guy' slicing evil pens in half with inexplicably razor-sharp elbows. I’m honestly not sure I can pull this off. Writing, sure, no problemo; I’m a creative writing student at university, but art from he who despises the scrikkity-scratch of pencils? This is an effort in determination. I want to know if the medium of comics is mine to master, because if I find The Right Story™, I want to make that happen. Kristofer Straub doesn’t know if there’s “necessarily a right or a wrong reason to do a webcomic.” He finds that whatever purpose your act of creation has “will dictate what kind of success you have, and what kind of effort you’ll be able to put into it.” If I succeed, then I’ve found a new playground. If I fail, well, then I’ll fail spectacularly, like digging to China through a sewage pipe, or that Halloween as the Pirate-Ninja-Robot-Monkey. Kids, don’t do duct-tape. Not on the skin.

Nothing left now but to start. I’m not starting. I’m delaying. I’m worried I won’t succeed, that the strains of Real Life and University are strong enough to deflate my ambitions. I hope they aren’t; that would be depressing. It’s now time to stand up, puff out my chest, stare nobly out the window, and announce to the world my entrance into the world of comicry! Tomorrow.

Day 1 (for real, this time): I’m not going to be pumping out one of these a day, so here’s the game-plan. Day one, get organized and start the scripts. Day two, finish them. Day three, sketch out the characters and background objects for an idea of the overall appearance. Day four, draw the first strip, make the layout (title, header, etc.), and decide on coloration. Days five through ten, I’ll draw the rest by hand, scan them in, then recreate with my copy of Paint Shop Pro 7. For the plot and characters I have a play I wrote back in grade twelve; I wasn’t able to get it performed due to real-life actors being too busy for rehearsals. Fortunately, barring any onslaught of poorly conceived meta-humour on my part, webcomic characters always remember their lines. Also, if this is a play, then I get to reuse the same scenery from strip to strip! I can’t draw well, but I can draw props! Probably. This unique style will also separate my work from the other Private Eye pieces out there like Peb Casey - Private Eye Butterfly and the recently kaput Basil Flint, P.I.

Richard Casey, maker of Butterfly, says his typical script is “more like a written screenplay with each character’s line of dialogue and little descriptive bits of the character’s environments, emotions, and actions.” This being the first panel, I’m including far more about the environment than I would under normal circumstances.

Strip One – Act One - Scene One – “Casting”

Panel One– Full Wide panel

Jack Norton, on the far right side of the panel, sits in a dark swivel chair with his black sneakers resting on an old wooden desk. He is wearing a grey jacket, a fedora, and a white t-shirt. A calendar is visible behind him, with almost an entire month crossed off. There is a door centre-left on the back panels, slightly ajar, with the words 'Janitor's Office' backwards on the glass. Various pieces of janitorial equipment litter the room. A string (for the later tumbleweed) lays across the stage. The panel (and indeed, the entire comic) is, for the most part, black and white, with quite subdued colouration in areas of interest. JN – The name's Norton, Jack Norton.

Not to be confused with James Bond, of course. Alan Moore once advised: “If you're happy writing pulp adventure stories, then for God's sake, write pulp adventure stories”. I’m enjoying this.

Day 2: I’m squinting at my screen as the streetlamp outside my dorm window glares at my scribblings. Jack’s words are cloaked in a dramatic sepia-tone. Fantastic. It’s also four in the morning; I get the feeling web-artists don't sleep much. Ten pages. 61 panels. Done. Time to get started on my psych 101 assignment.

Day 3: Athletes down sports drinks to revitalize their muscles and replenish their bodily fluids. Laptops are recharged. Most artists use caffeine. Unfortunately, I’m not a coffee drinker, so I’m behind. ‘Sketch Day’, wasn’t; I did try, though. I set aside a time in the evening to get some work done on the comic, sat in the mold of my generic campus chair, envisioned the shapes and faces of each character in my mind, picked up the pencil, drew a circle for a head… and then stopped. Last night’s meagre five hours of sleep sapped every creative urge from my body. This lack of motivation does not bode well for the project.

The header. It would look even better with a comic underneath.

Day 4: In grade one, my teacher would occasionally have us spend half-an-hour drawing. We tended to stick to the gender-stereotypical childhood interests; girls had their shaky unicorns neighing under Crayola rainbows while guys had their T-Rex/dog creatures standing fierce and tall, blood dripping from their teeth and frightened stick-people running below. You know, with just a pinch too much gore to be acceptable. One day I drew the devil owning a café. There the red-Pan-man stood: horns, evil grin and a pitchfork, right next to the cash register. The menu-board above read of inventive grisly delights like baby brains and fried fingers. Even today, that page fills me with pride. My parents almost sent me to a shrink.

Today, I kept busy. I’ve not enough time to go through a proper process of sketching out each character by pencil, scanning them in, and then using the paintbrush tool, but I did do the first page so I could get a feel for the rest. I followed David Hellman’s advice on using Google’s image search to find shots of locations and objects I’m not familiar with. Not only is this for details I might have otherwise missed, but also because “more importantly, observation gives you irregularities and surprises, which can bring life to the staid patterns of the mind.”

Finally, I assembled the overall layout. Now if I could draw someone with their legs up on a desk, I’d be set. I’ve tried using my own, but without a full-length mirror, I’m staring at the wrong side of my shoes. Hmm… where’s my roommate?

Day 5: Why am I making this? I know I said it was some sort of chest-thumping ‘look what I can do’ event, but that’s not right. Validation, perhaps? That would make sense; I do have enduring fears of incompetence, of saying the wrong thing and not living up to my potential. Hellman didn’t help allay my fears any when he told me “the more skilled you are, the clearer the channel between your experience, your thoughts, and the thing you produce. Proficiency creates the possibility for a more nuanced interplay between the artist and his world.” Eloquent. He then quickly added, “On the other end of the spectrum, you have a random mess.” So then garbage-out reflects poorly on the skill of the creator? I want to be proficient, I do, but more importantly, I just want to create.

If I found a link between these brilliant web-artists and I, then I could prove my own status as a creator by proxy! Am I truly akin to these guys and gals who use their ambitions to create such works of humour, drama, characterization, and art? Really, what could I have in common with Adrian Ramos, living in Mexico to make ends meet, or with Scott Kurtz making his livelihood pumping out quality artwork day in, day out? I couldn’t make the connections.

But then I found Sam Logan. He graduated from my University the year I was accepted, and lives a short bike-ride away! But he started drawing his main characters in a travel journal as a kid, “so much younger than today”, while Jack Norton didn’t exist until grade 10. Plus, he got an artsy degree. Well, despite working hard for a good four hours or so (albeit a far cry from the ten Richard Stevens says a “good page would take”), I’ve only finished half of what page one needs. Maybe I will hit that ten-hour mark. I really can’t afford to do that ten times in five days; a three-strip goal might be more realistic. I do like the look of the desk, though. Yay for depth perception! It almost looks like John Allison's work. When he was eight. I bet he still got all the ladies then, too.

Day 6: Tarzan no want deadline. Tarzan want be free. Instead, I’m chained to my schedule, surrounded on all sides with sketches, scripts, interviews, continuity notes, and peanut butter covering my bed, lap, other chair, desk, screen, keyboard, and printer. Peanut butter jar, meet plastic fork. Yummy. I’m still a panel away from finishing the first page, I can't make Jack a face that doesn't look like one of three things: (1) a lunatic drawn in Paint, (2) a ghost/robot, with the colouration of a ghost but the crude features of a robot, or (3) a cave-wall drawing of Marilyn Manson. I've gone with option number two for now. I name him Cyberspook (Name shamelessly stolen from Beaver and Steve.)

I also officially ask God to consider replacing man's agile, tool-grasping hands with flippers; moving my mouse might be trickier, but drawing Mr. Norton would be a breeze.

Well, set your sights for the sun and hope you don’t fall into the volcanic minefield, that’s what I always say. My eyes, they burn. The goggles do nothing.

Stunningly, this is actually the Improved, less ghostly version.

Day 7: First page is done, but all attempts failed at saving Jack from an ethereal existence. I've darkened the skin a bit. He now looks as bandaged as Bill Cosby's Ghost Dad.

In other news, late-night instant oatmeal is about as close to imitation gruel as one gets without re-enacting the musical Oliver.

Day 8: Seven days to finish the first, one to finish the second. Huzzah. Progress like this makes me feel like I could draw comics forever, or at least every other day for the next month or so.

I realize I'm first and foremost a writer. I know I’d be better suited to collaborating on such works with someone who has picked up a paintbrush in the past six years, but seeing the second page on the screen like this makes me think I could do it. My panels aren’t repulsive! Boo-yeah! And how could anything with a title like 'Bogarting the Humphrey’ be anything less than awesome?

Day 9: I didn’t get to comicking until half past two in the morning. University work takes priority and all that jazz. As such, I only worked for a few hours, but the third page is looking nifty.

Day 10: You thought I was going to be done by now? Well I dub this… April Fools day Mark II! Ha! Ha ha! Yes, that is right, you are fooled because I am… creative, like that. Look, a distraction!

Actual Day 10: Boy, what a rigorous and stressful twelve ten days! Due to some socializing, I didn't get to work on this page until half past two, again, but I said I'd get three pages done, and I have. It may be 6:45am, but I’m awake as ever because I’ve finished the third page, and it looks good. No, it looks smashing.

Today, I found Kean Soo. This guy hangs out at short film festivals. He makes comics. He's self-taught. He uses an autobiographical webcomic to express stuff he wouldn’t be able to, otherwise. This is the guy I want to be in six years (he's 24). Not identical, mind you. He was an engineer; I’m a writer. He stays up drinking until dawn, while I don't drink because I'm afraid I'd abuse it, in sadder times. He often sees life slipping away. I fear life may be- I'm supposed to be looking for differences. The point is, if there’s a place in the world of webcomics for him, there might be one for me too.

For now, I’ll doodle. I’ll sketch. I’ll learn. And who knows, maybe in six years I’ll send Mr. Soo an email and get him to read something of my own. Or maybe my characters will instead weave novels, plays, poetry, performance, and other mediums. But I can proudly say that I created these works, these three pages. They are mine. And who knows, maybe in the future, Mr. Pencil Guy will get another chance to be drawn.

Andrew Wade is a student of the Creative Writing program at the University of Victoria, and currently is up-to-date with and engaged by at least 35 different webcomics. He accepts that he may have a problem, but refuses all treatment.

Pages from the webcomic described above may be seen here, here, and here.