Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Failing Better

I sometimes coach a group of teenagers in comics-making, and I often use Samuel Beckett's idea of "failing better" to encourage them not to despair about their imperfect anatomy, or perspective, or composition, or whatever else. Instead of measuring success by perfection, Beckett said to treat everything as a failure, and to simply try to "fail better" every time.

In this case at least, I practice what I preach. Here's a little animation showing some of the revisions I've made to a page from my "Fantastic Life" comic starting with the original drawing from 2007 and culminating with yesterday's latest version. I swear to God(ot): this time it's finished!