This year marked my ninth year participating in Hourly Comic Day - and my first year not “finishing” it.
The not finishing? This was a surprise for me. Hourly Comic Day (HCD) is an annual exercise I really look forward to and have truly enjoyed participating in these past several years. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, HCD is an annual comic-making exercise taking place on February first each year where the goal is to draw a panel/tier/strip of autobiographical comics for every hour that the artist is awake and I look forward to participating every year. I love rereading my previous years, watching how I’ve improved and what I’ve learned. I love seeing what stays the same from year to year and what changes. I also love reading HCD comics made by other people that allow me a glimpse into their daily lives. Several people in the comics community who don’t participate tend to view it as either a pointless chore or some kind of self-torture but it never felt like either to me. I found it valuable because it meant I gave over an entire day to inviting art to live alongside the rest of my life and, often, it was the one day a year I prioritized drawing over my other responsibilities. It was freeing and playful and challenging all at once. It made me keenly aware of what kind of February first I was having each year and I tended to stay in the moment and savor my time better. These are the feelings I was looking forward to this year when I arranged to take the day off from work so I could comic all day…and then that wasn’t what happened.
Everything started as it does for me each year: got Bee off to school, got my things ready, and went to the cafe to draw. Rather than my typical pen and watercolors, I decided to take some markers I bought a while ago but then have not used as an excuse to play with them. Perhaps, this was my misstep (if misstep there was). Using the markers felt uncomfortable and that discomfort was immediately visible on my page. While drawing normally calms me, watching the marker pile up on the page left me feeling increasingly anxious. This was where my HCD derailed - though I don’t regret it.
Instead, I spent some time with my discomfort, trying to figure out what wasn’t clicking. I pulled out my watercolors and started a back-and-forth about my unease with what was happening on the page and I started thinking about what, exactly, was beneath it. My current difficulty with the concept of creative “play,” my perfectionist tendencies, the frustration of the demise of much of social media and my inability to share and connect the way I used to. The way posting art feels like dropping a rock in a hole: not even a distant thud returning so much of the time.
And I gave myself permission to run run run back to my comfort zone.
Then that didn’t work either. And so, after thinking through it for two more pages that I won’t be sharing, I decided to just stop. I will not let drawing become one more chore on my to-do list. Instead, I went to help Bee make cookies (I ate the dough, she did the rest). My evening wasn’t magically better but I was happy I hadn’t forced myself to continue flogging my proverbial cheval mort.
This wasn’t a one-off. Right now, it feels like a trend and I’m still not sure quite what’s going on. In May of last year, I experienced something similar - TWICE. Live-drawing Eurovision has been an annual habit for me for nearly as long as HCD, and last year I just couldn’t find the joy in it… though I did follow-through with the whole task. Around the same time, something similar happened with was my self-inaugurated tradition of sharing a drawing tutorial and asking people to draw with me on my birthday. I made my tutorial this year (and was actually very pleased with it) but then, like a five-winged chicken, it never really made it off the ground.
I think some of this is probably related to work and life feeling a bit overwhelming the past several months. My relationship with creativity is also changing and these are likely to-be-expected growing pains that always come with that kind of thing. Part of it may be the increasing difficulty of feeling connected in these digital places that are crumbling around us.
I don’t have a wise or pithy comment with which to close this. The question of what works, what doesn’t, and why is one I will keep coming back to. For now, though, I’m reminding myself that it’s okay to just accept that something is no longer working and to move along. And so off I go.
P.S. After all this, if you’re interested in knowing more about Hourly Comic Day, (which was really not the point of this post as it turns out) you can read my previous years’ comics here.
Thank you for this really lovely and considered response. I think you are definitely on to something and I am probably looking for a similar answer in my own work. I do love the sharing and connecting though!
In the 2010s I was doing a lot of internet-facing work, and I gradually withdrew from that as I became a stronger, better artist. I don’t need the same validation that lovely comments and such gave me in the early part of that decade; I’m in a different place.
I also considered doing HCD this year but I didn’t feel the urge to show my daily routine. Part of this is that I have some private things that I keep from the internet - as a direct response to my 2010s outward creativity, I now have private practices I don’t mention online. I’ve found these really helpful for my painting, because I can see a parallel creative development without waiting for external validation.