I just made a new comic I call "Bigger Bear." Not really sure what it's about, just that it sort of got stuck in my head and I just had to draw it out. And then it ended up turning into a finished thing. It all started with these meandering, diaristic sketches.

After doing a couple of these I did some sketches with a similar kind of page flow. I really just wanted to draw myself in a coat and hat, but I also had this idea about bears in the back of my head.

I liked the sketches a lot, and I got a really good response on Facebook, so I decided to make it a finished comic. A lot of sketching and page layout drawing then happened, but before too long I had completed the piece.

Finally, I decided to color it. This was done on the iPad as I still suck pretty hard at water colors.

So there you have it, "Bigger Bear" in full color.

I recently purchased Echo: Cut-Up Drawings from Black Hole from Pigeon Press.

It's a book that sheds some light on how Charles Burns composed pages for his book Black Hole. From the product page:

"What is this? I took a bunch of pencil drawings from my comic Black Hole and taped them together and xeroxed them to make this book. When I "pencil" my comics I work in layers on sheets of tracing paper and build the drawings up by slowly refining and fixing them. Sometimes I get what I want in one or two tries, but that's rare..."

I love Burns' work, and I'd always been curious about his process. Just how does he make those insanely precise drawings?

Echo doesn't entirely answer that question. But it does offer a glimpse at the working process of the artist. I'd never seen anything other than his pristine, almost inhumanly precise finished work. Seeing his pencils alone has been quite illuminating. But seeing them in the context of the fractured, cut-and-paste environment in which Burns works is especially revealing.

Most fascinating to me is how much process there is in creating these drawings. They don't simply appear on the page, fully formed and perfect. There is a search for that perfection, and that search is long, complicated and messy.

And often beautiful.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of the deluxe version. It includes an original sketch from Black Hole, cut and taped into the book.

So it's official, I guess: I'm a Charles Burns fanboy. There are worse things to be.

Malcontent Comics Incorporated Presents:

the various and sundry projects of mike barron