Incidental comics

It’s now school holidays, so all my comics will be incidental and impulsive and half-formed things. Another conversation I had, over drinks, was whether or not your drawing style drove the content of your comic. Today I deliberately went for the pencil and watercolour approach, which may or may not have added to the impressionistic effect of it.

I have always been troubled by the idea – was it Rainer Maria Rilke’s notion? – that one should only write if one has something to say. How do you define “something to say”? Don’t we all have something to say? It’s hard to tell how trivial or significant it is in the moment. That’s the kind of thing you figure out in retrospect. Knowing that you have something to say also suggests self-importance. Also, given that I work out what I want to say in the process of drawing and writing, I would never write anything if I took Rilke’s advice.