Just so we’re clear:

“Thing is, drawing comics isn’t that easy. From the first moment you sit down to draw – after finding any excuse you can not to face the increasingly stupid-sounding idea you’d been nursing for the previous day or so – a host of unforeseen decisions and hurdles start to multiply and crop up. Let’s take an example: your “idea” demands a scene which starts at night… someone sitting at a table, tired, drawing. Now unless you’re dealing with a character you’ve already developed, you realise, once you start to think about it, you don’t really know how to draw the person you thought you were imagining more or less clearly all this time. How old is he? What colour is his hair? (What does hair colour mean, anyway?) Also, should you show all of him sitting at that table, or should you just show his face? From the front, or side? If he’s tired, is he resting his head on his hand, or should he be yawning?

Eventually, really having no other reason not to start, you just start sketching, maybe drawing the figure from the side, hoping for the best. Shortly, however, he looks sort of bent over, like maybe he’s in pain, or bloated, or sick. But he was just supposed to look tired, you think. A normal guy just sitting there. Erase. You decide to turn him around, maybe show him from above, since that’s easier to draw, the shoulders and the hips sort of moving away from the viewer at an angle… then you draw what’s on his table, or what’s out the window, too, maybe, like the moon, that’s easy -

But now he looks like an animal, squatting. And why from above anyway? That seems weird, like something from a detective film. Erase. Better to keep it simple – draw it from the side again. Something sort of normal-seeming about that, anyway.Before long, you arrive at your first panel, and it doesn’t look quite as bad as you thought it would, though you wasted a lot of time getting up from your table to check your email and get a couple of snacks – and maybe you added too much detail to the drawing, too, though the detail is good, sort of, since it gives you some feeling of confidence. Possibly false, you wonder. Anyway, in that next panel, he’s got to sort of look like he’s considering what he’s drawing, sort of concerned a bit, for this to work. Maybe like he’s squinting at it, or something.

But. God – do I have to draw that whole stupid room completely all over again?

…And so on”

- Chris Ware (Introduction to McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13)