Back in January of 2016, I did a three part story called “Light.” I had always intended to do a follow up story shortly thereafter, but it wasn’t until September of 2017 that I started work on the sequel “Darkness” which ran for seven parts and an epilogue (although the epilogue was mostly used to explain another costume change for Life.)

One of the things I’ve done several times with my comic so far is to revisit an idea. Usually just one panel or even just a position, nothing major. It might come off as repetitive if it’s pointed out, but the real reason I do it is just to see if I can draw it better the next time.

Normally I try not to be too obvious when I’m revisiting an idea, but for one of the first panels of Darkness, I flat out just redrew one of the panels of Light (I had also hoped that this would jog people’s memories that this was in fact a sequel.) Here’s the result:

I don’t particularly go back and look at my older work from a critical point of view, but because this is essentially the same panel, the differences are pretty glaring. I think there is a pretty marked improvement in my drawing, and I feel really proud of that.

I often remark that when I started work on Life The Necropolis, I had given up drawing for 15 years, and even then I never bothered to learn the fundamentals of comic art when I was still drawing. I really had my work cut out for me, but I figured that if I just kept practicing making comics, logically (and hopefully) I would seemingly have to get better at it by default.

Here’s a couple of other examples from the two stories that I feel show my improvement:

Oh, and also I’m not sure how many people noticed, but I drew all of Darkness (except for the epilogue) in four widescreen panels per page. It was kind of interesting forcing myself into this format and certainly proved challenging. It also kind of made drawing backgrounds a real pain in the ass, so I usually just didn’t.

Love Nick.