I’ve been keeping a separate comp file of my published work since my first comic Elflord Vol. 1 #6 came out 34 years ago this month.

I apparently haven’t been very diligent about filing comps as there are a fair number of issues missing, and I forgot about the file after I “got out” of comics in 2000 (when I went in to animation) and the publications slowed down. It took a few minutes to cobble together this stack from various shelves, and I’m too lazy to go digging in the actual comic book collection longboxes for the missing singles, so this is what I’ve got!

There are probably close to a dozen single issues missing and most noticeably I don’t have copies of any of the collected editions of my Elfquest work, from the WaRP Graphics reader collections, the DC collections, or the most recent Dark Horse collections that have compiled about half my output for them at this time.

What is also missing are the two daily webcomics I did for a cumulative 14 months, and all of the unpublished pitches and complete projects that will never see print, or won’t see print for a long while.

But I digress…

For a long time I’ve been feeling sorry for myself that I haven’t been able to work in comics full time (and make a real living) in 20 years (until this past year) and I’ve been lamenting how little work I’ve produced in that time.

But I did a little bit of quick math, and I’ve produced a fair amount of pages since the summer of ’86 accounting for a conservative estimate of a cumulative 10 years of full time work.

I have inked a conservative 1154 pages of published work and pencilled and inked (and sometimes written & coloured) 994 pages since “going pro”. Not all of those full art pages have seen print, and some will never see print, but that is the nature of creative work.

I’ll never be able to get an accurate page count as so much of my work at Aircel was as an assistant, and I haven’t even considered the amount of time I’ve put in as a production designer and publisher. And I’m not going to go digging to pull up all of the abandoned tryouts and sampe pages I worked on in down times.

If you average it out, that’s 63 pages of comic art a year for the last 34 years. If I’d produced 120 pages a year, I’d consider that a decent career.

I can’t account for every moment of the rest of that time. I’ve spent a cumulative 15 years in animation. I spent 1 year as a “full time” musician at 22 (ie didn’t have another job even though I should have had) two and a half years cumulatively working service jobs and I’m sure another cumulative year staring at the ceiling thinking “what’s next?”. I could probably count writing out this post in that category. Oh, and I was still in High School for the first year of my “pro” career.

I’m not sure what the point of this is, but the goal is to draw comics full time from now until I retire/croak. If I could do 120 pages of full art a year for the rest of that time I would be a happy cartoonist.

I’ve currently got 20 pages of Wip stuff going and a script for a 28 pager I’m going to start soon enough, so only time will tell…