While I’d love to draw and perhaps even co-create a comic for all ages, one that’s cute and poignant and funny — sort of like Calvin and Hobbes except a bit more weird as I like weird — it is more and more clear that the Mars comic is not that. It will be about love, friendship, boredom, sacrifice, breakdowns, and the human spirit. It will not be for everyone, I’ve always suspected that but there are little doubt now as it’s changed tone a bit. It’s kind of bleak but filled with hope, I think.

What I thought would be a sequence towards the end is now in the middle, it has not be really in order to use the spread. (I did briefly entertain the idea of a big fold-out spread in the middle. That would probably not be the least cost effective though.)

Reading Becky Cloonan’s excellent Wolves I also know that if I manage to get it printed — this has always been plan A as paper always beats rock — proper shading is the way to go. Originally I planned on strictly black and white bit no, fine half-tone patterns will be needed. I really want to make it in Swedish though, but that on the other hand will affect the price and number of copies.

I cannot lie and say that the people who’ve worked with Brian Wood isn’t a damn big source of inspiration for a lot of my own things. It’s too damn obvious. While we’re roughly the same age, they do make me feel like a kid who don’t really know what I’m doing. I don’t want to copy or something like that, it’s the way the tell a story with their images that I admire a lot. The humanity in the lines, if I’m allowed to be silly and poetic.

More and more it’s starting to feel as if I can do this without letting people I admire down — this is what the headspace tells me, I don’t really think they’d care one way or another except that my brain think so. Me and my brain, we need to clarify how we work together better I think. Either way, I wouldn’t be the crappiest “comic artist” in the world, the script might be another matter entirely. (Fingers crossed though.)

Progress report: the Mars Project now has 7 thumbnails (even though I need to insert a page between five and six. Not doing more with that sequence would be a crime.) No dialogue is written but I know the gist of what it’ll be. Coming this far is for me rather huge. The big bits are left to thumb out or even realise how to tell it without forsaking reality. I will not begin to draw it properly until everything is in the thumbnails — I know I’ll forget or get bored otherwise.