Making comics is hard pt1

It's weird about my music vs. my comics. I really hate most of the comics I've ever made. I think they're terrible. But I love most of the music I've ever made. I also enjoy making music more than I enjoy making comics.

I think that might be because I don't have a good intuitive sense of how to make comics. or perhaps I'm not making the kind of comics I want to.

When I'm making music, I'm the final arbiter of what gets made and what doesn't. I make music I want to hear. I do the best I can and incorporate influences and have a basic understanding of song structure, arrangement, sound design, mixing, etc.

With comics, I never know what I'm doing and end up making stuff I think is cheesy.

Making music puts me in a flow state. It's almost effortless, until the mixing and mastering phase which is a little bit more tedious.

Making comics seems like a pain in the ass. There's not much flow to it. It's work. But maybe that's ok. Maybe the suffering is worth it to realize the final created work. But on second thought, nah, I don't want to be spending my time doing something that sucks.

I need to find a way to make making comics more fun and enjoyable. Find a way to make comics I want to make...

I'm not alone though:

Gerard Way 

Comics are really fucking hard. To put it in perspective: When I get to make music, that's like a vacation compared to comics. Maybe that's the nature of who I am. Music seems to come pretty naturally. I make myself nuts, and I push myself super hard, and I went crazy a couple times making albums, but it's not even close to how hard comics are.
...
Alex Abad-Santos 

What is it specifically? Art? Writing for the art? 

Gerard Way 

It's a grind, man. You have to get yourself in the right headspace, then you have to keep it, and there's times that you're sitting there and you're like, "I don't know what fucking happens." You have to just figure it out. You're also on a crazy schedule. He’s [artist Nick Derington] drawing his ass off [on Doom Patrol], so I’ve got to make sure he has pages when he's done so we stay on time. It's just chaos. It's fucking chaos.

Gerard Way 

I'm having to switch gears a lot because I have the mind space for Doom Patrol, but then I have to have one for Shade, when I'm reviewing Shade, and Mother Panic. I'm also co-writing on Cave Carson, so it's constantly switching gears. That's a drag. I'm getting better at it, though.

Gerard Way 

It is just so rewarding to make a comic. I cannot think of anything that's even close to that. To put it in perspective, in my band I was never even nominated for a Grammy. I was nominated as an art director. But not as a musician. When I was nominated for an Eisner [the Oscars of comic books], that was the biggest fucking deal in the world to me.

...

The best thing I can hope for is that it impacts young creators to make their own stuff, and realize that they don't have to do super commercial stuff.
I was watching a documentary, Jodorowsky’s Dune. The best part, I thought, in that documentary is when he talks about how he found everybody. He's talking about them like, "I need warriors." Those are the only kind of people I wanted to work with. I didn't care if they were the best artists in the world. If they weren't a warrior, I didn't want them. I've been that way even in my band. I don't think anybody in my band were trained musicians.

...

Alex Abad-Santos 

Renegades. 

Gerard Way 

We are. I only wanted people that wanted to make really fucked-up comics. 

Alex Abad-Santos 

“Young Animal: I wanted people to make fucked-up comics.” That’s a tagline. 

Gerard Way 

Pretty much.

vox