DOING THE WORK
by Harris O'Malley

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
April 4, 2004

Well crap.

The other week, I suffered the biggest setback in my career as a comic artist and publisher, and I’m still struggling to repair the damage it’s caused. It’s something I should’ve foreseen and been able to avoid or at least minimize the fallout, but in my arrogance, I never saw it coming

All of the flowery language makes it sound much more dramatic than it was. It wasn’t a falling out with Jens, my collaborator and the mind behind Berserker: The Wild Hunt, nor was it my somehow alienating my distributors or other creators and personalities in the industry. It was much more banal than that.

My hard-drive failed. And it’s a freaking disaster.

Part of my computer’s set up is that I have two hard drives, one for general usage purposes where I install things like the media player programs, iTunes, Internet Explorer and whatever video games occupy my add-addled mayfly-like attention span. The second drive is partitioned in half, with half being art from artists who’s work I enjoy, my MP3 collection and various odds and ends that I found on bitTorrent. The second half is Studio Underhill in its entirety. Financial forms, Painter, Photoshop, Illustrator, my various plug-ins, my reference photo file and image bank and most critical of all, my artwork.

All of my artwork.

I do all of my work digitally. From the thumbnails to the finished lettering, all of my comics have been created, start-to-finish, in a combination of Photoshop and Painter. Pen never touches paper until I’ve printed out test-sheets to see how things track across the page. All the original pages are PSD files that I collapse to TIFFs when I send them off to the printer.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

It started with a series of odd program errors. Files necessary for Painter and Photoshop’s start-up would become corrupted and make the program crash. Then certain image files wouldn’t open in any of my image viewer programs. And then I couldn’t access the drive at all. It disappeared from My Computer as if it never existed.

To say that I was upset was like saying Vesuvius was a minor geological event.

I didn’t panic, at first. I would conquer my fear. Fear was the mind-killer. Fear was the… (ahem)…

As I said, I didn’t panic. I had every faith in the fact that nothing on a hard-drive was gone forever as long as you didn’t write over it. God knew that there was any number of ways of getting data back, if needed. I picked the brains of my tech friends and consulted a number of web-forae in the hopes of finding some fool-proof way of getting my art back, at the very least.

Nothing worked. Three successive system restores did absolutely nothing; files were back for a moment and then they were gone again. Norton file-recovery utilities were pulling back garbage instead of Between The Cracks pages. Every single file I recovered was corrupted beyond usability.

And then I started noticing that some of the image files on the remaining partition were no longer loading up in any of my image viewers.

Now is the time at Studio Underhill when we panic like bastards.

My first thought was that something, someone had gotten past my defenses. I checked the firewall logs. No unusual activity there. Ad-Aware and SpyBot Search And Destroy found the usual assortment of data miners and trackers, but nothing that would be as pernicious as whatever was happening to me. The latest data files on three separate anti-viral programs found absolutely nothing. My computer was clean. And the problem was still spreading unabated.

That’s when I called some friends in and had the computer checked out physically. It was the hard drive. The hard drive itself was failing and there was nothing that could be done, nothing that I could possibly afford, anyway. All that was left to me was to salvage what I could from the surviving sectors and replace it.

That’s when the other shoe dropped.

I’m not a fool. I back up anything irreplaceable and keep my backups handy in the event of just such an event. But I wasn’t as diligent as I should have been. I was lazy. I was sloppy. I was careless. I hadn’t archived any new data in four months. .

Four months of work, gone in an instant, and all of it is completely irreplaceable. I lost almost all of my older illustrations, which I never backed up in the first place, my old website, and four paintings, gone forever. And all of the pages to Berserker: The Wild Hunt.

There was some comfort, however minor, in sheer dumb luck. Through random chance, I had saved the PDF of the Bersker ashcan on a CD-ROM in case I needed to have more copies printed at APE. I also had prints of two of my most recent paintings for an art show, so I was able to scan them and have at least some version of them left. But that was it.

So here I am again, starting off at square zero. And it’s even harder the second time around.

Starting from scratch, without even the photos I shot for background reference has made this incredibly slow going. On average, I can produce somewhere between one and two completed pages per day, fully inked, lettered and camera ready. Lately, I’ve been lucky if I get the backgrounds 2/3rds finished before I throw the stylus down and pound the desk with my fists.

There is no feeling worse for an artist than any sort of blockage. It’s even worse when it’s an artistic block over work you have already done. “C’mon,” your brain insists, “you’ve done all this before. You know exactly how it should work. Pick the pen up and get drawing.” And you sit there, drawing and erasing the same face over and over and over and over again because every time it just. Won’t. Come. Out. Right. The eyes are too close. Or too beady. The perspective is off. The proportions are all wrong. The emotion is too underplayed. Or too cliché. The body language is all wrong. And no matter how many times you’ve drawn it, you’re making the same mistakes over and over again.

It’s a horrible moment when you realize that you’re actually intimidated by your own work. It makes you wonder if you’re the only artist who’s felt like this, whether other creators could get past this with far more grace and style than you are. Every single doubt you’ve ever had about being an artist and a creator comes flooding back to the forefront of your mind and remind you of all the flaws.

Ironically, there is some relief to be found in the work of others. The Sunday meetings of the Austin Sketch Group are always an incredible source of inspiration to me; it’s a time to relax and recharge the creative batteries and just learn from the people around me. I’ve picked up some new ideas that I want to try to implement in my artwork and there’s simply no way to do that except to just sit down and force myself past the block and back into my original rhythm and groove.

I’ve beat these demons before. I will do it again. I will get this project back under control and back on track. There are no other options.

Despite my setbacks, there is some good news. The Berserker: The Wild Hunt ashcans are still available for any and all who may want copies. Drop a line at berserker2004@web.de.de with your snail-mail address and Jens or I will hook you up. Also, if you’re in the Austin area, the Austin Sketch Group art show has been held over for another month. Stop by The Hideout, on Congress, between Sixth and Seventh streets, and have a look at what we’ve been working on. Be sure to let me know what you think at domalley@studiounderhill.com.

 

Harris O'Malley is a writer/artist/publisher of BETWEEN THE CRACKS and artist of the upcoming GN Berserker: The Wild Hunt. Find out more at http://www.studiounderhill.com


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