Firstly, what was intimidating was the feeling of having to build a world. So, you're not just drawing a character with a particular background, but situating someone in a virtual environment. In short: You do panel 1 - yay! - and then realise that you now have to draw the same figure again, perhaps from a different angle, with different gestures or facial expressions, etc. The same goes for the background - the figure gets up and goes to the window - what does the room look like from that position? And so on, all of which is a big headache - at least if you're concerned with being consistent (which, I'm guessing, most comic book artists will want to be).
There is a side issue here regarding how faithful to be to reference material. Since Freud was an actual person who lived in an actual time and place (in this case, Hampstead in London, 1939), then it's possible to track down photos of the house (which is now the Freud museum), the surrounding area (Google Earth is handy here), and basically drive yourself crazy with the search for authentic pictures of what Freud's actual chair was like, or what brand of cigar he smoked. I did a bit of this, but quickly realised that (a) I'd go mad, and (b) for the amount of effort involved, it wasn't worth it - the vast majority of readers wouldn't even notice. So, for the sake of saving time, I've decided to take shortcuts - or what is sometimes termed 'artistic licence'. For instance...
Freud's desk is a clutter of objet d'art - little statues, figurines, etc - which would drive me insane to draw faithfully. So, I've made do with suggesting their presence, without too much concern for whether I copy the desk exactly, or even whether the objects are identical from panel to panel. I'm a perfectionist about lots of things, but really who has time for this amount of detail? More importantly, why would you want to? It's art. You want realism, take a picture. (And with that get out clause, I move on...).
I've got a number of other things to say about the technical aspects of comics production, but they can keep until another time. However, I'd just like to finish with what is perhaps the biggest thing that struck me: just how long everything takes. The first page took me about a week - planning, sketching, fine tuning, inking (not to mention lettering, word balloons, etc). I've done another page since then (more next time), but - even if it only took me two days per page - we're looking at almost 300 days of solid work just to do the line art (based on the script, the book currently comes in at 142 pages). If I want weekends free, then we're looking at 20 months to 2 years! How do people do it? I'm talking I suppose about independent creators, here - how do they fund something like this? There's Kickstarter, of course, and publisher's advances, but even so that's a long time for people to wait for something they've invested in. Anyone have any thoughts?
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