Fail Faster Forever
Fail Faster Forever
Originally uploaded by preachertomThat's my proof copy in the picture. It'll look a little different when done, but not much. The book is called "Fail Faster Forever."
I jotted possible titles in my journal and brainstormed them with Sara and friends all along. While many of the individual phrases or lines from the book lend themselves well to book titles ("Men of Common Awesome," "The Academy Fails," and "Pussy Custard" being some of my personal favorites), in the end I settled on "Fail Faster Forever" not because any character says those words, but because I repeated them to myself like a mantra while working since the conception of the project.
I tried to accept all my failures and to leave each page a record of mistakes and accidents. I got rid of penciling so I could work faster and experiment with trusting my drawing hand. I was forced to accept gross errors of anatomy and perspective. The lettering moves from illegible to sloppy at best, depending on my mood that day and whether I was lettering on public transit. I tried to never consult old pages -- characters change hair and drawing styles, props disappear, backgrounds mutate. Five hundred pages of this is a marathon. Failing over and over every day. Looking down and being able to place the mistakes of today in a kind of cosmology with the hundreds of pages of ugliness I created the weeks before. The story exploring and evolving in new tangents constantly, losing its place in any mental outline I kept and frequently getting bogged down in dozens of pages of argument while I chewed on an idea.
The drawings are a record of the hand and the eye as they moved over the page and the book itself is a record of my mind as I moved through the summer. The question this project begs is, "Why not work on the book for a year or more, work really hard and make something actually good?" The answer is I would have quit around page 30 for another seductive notion of a project. The answer is that I did work really hard, but I worked really hard now -- harder in many new and different ways than I've ever worked on something before. The answer is that it'll never be the summer of 2008 again and I'll never be 27 again, so the book would lose those peculiarities of this mind at this age in this time in this place. The answer is that I draw a 500 page graphic novel this summer so that the next one I draw won't be just good, but better for me having learned by failing.
After a while, failure starts to become a lot like play. I keep warning people that the end of the book fizzles, both to insulate myself from that criticism in advance and to acknowledge that by the last 50 pages or so, I was much more conscious of this being The Ending for The Book and it needed to be Good to justify the money I was going to ask people to pay for it. The sense of play was overtaken by a sense that I needed to salvage what appeared to be creative suicide. So the last 50 pages took the longest to draw, are the least playful, look the most polished but provide the least for me to be excited about (with a few exceptions). It seems fitting, though, that a project rooted in failure has some record of my failing to produce interesting failures, while at the same time succeeding in meeting the book's arbitrary 500 page cap.