Diary Comic Retrospective

Admittedly, ‘retrospective’ is a misleading term. I’m not done with diary comics or anything, but I haven’t made one in about a month and don’t plan on doing any over the summer, so I figured it was a good time to reflect on the ‘project’ (this feels dramatic) that was me making a diary comic every few days. 

Not to self aggrandize, but doing this has really changed how I view myself and my art. I’ve made 56 total diary comics, and the experience of making and sharing them (especially the 30 straight to this blog) has made me take my comics a lot more seriously. I’m certainly not some sort of comics god, but I feel like I can use the medium as a form of effective self-expression that people are really interested in in a way I did not before doing this.

I started making diary comics as part of an assignment for a class in early October 2024, and I kept going sporadically until about the end of the month for fun, but I’ll focus on the diary comics since I picked it back up in January 2025. My goals were roughly this:

1 - Make more complete comics.

I once heard the advice that you have to make 1,000 bad comics before you make one good comic, so you may as well make your first thousand quickly. I like this advice.

2 - Experiment and find styles that I like.

Further, I wanted to actually experiment with form and content in a lower stakes way—if I don’t like something, or it doesn’t work, it's in a pretty small comic that doesn’t take me too long, so not much is lost.

3 - Put more comics out into the world for people to see.

I find myself not wanting to share my art a lot, and I think this is a silly instinct, especially for something like comics, where the whole point is telling a story. I wanted to push myself to share what I made, even when I felt bad about it, both for this reason, and so I would learn to more highly value my work. 

Did I accomplish my goals?

– 1 - Make more complete comics. –

Yeah! Not even a lot to say here—just, like, yes. I made more complete comics, and that’s awesome. Like I said, I’ve made 56 diary comics overall, and 34 from February to April (there are a few I didn’t post).  I think that’s really cool!

I definitely did not make one every day, but this was never really the plan, since I don’t have that type of time. I definitely started to lose some steam as I got busier with other things in my life, as expected.  Still, each of these pieces (except one) tells a complete story about something that happened to me that day, and it’s hard not to be really happy with that.

– 2 - Experiment and find styles that I like. –

I accomplished this, too! Pretty quickly within picking this back up I realized that I didn’t have to stick with a four-panel grid—in late January, “Ice Fishing” and “Spuds” both merged panels to become 2 or 1 panel comics respectively. Still, the layout is still rooted within a four panel layout, I just combined panels. 

It wasn’t really until “I Think I Need A New Heart,” in mid-February that I really broke out of the grid. I still for sure stick to the grid as a default (which isn’t a bad thing), but semi-frequently break out of it to tell my story. I’m kind of a boomer when it comes to super wacky layouts, but I can certainly enjoy them from time to time, and they are very fun to make. I’m proud of how I used layout to  give unique and effective rhythms to my stories—”Everything Day” and “Vs. Fletcher" stand out to me as good examples of effective layout that isn’t the default four panels.. I also have three full-page diary comics,"Universal,” “Friend Crawl,” and “Alpha,” which I think is pretty neat! 

For a while, I also tried to get away from how word-heavy my comics were. I’d heard some greats of comics, I think, or maybe I’m making this up, talking about how they sometimes wish they didn’t have to have any words in their comics at all. I am also reading Chris Claremont’s run on X-Men which I love very much but also has, in my opinion, a whole lot of words. I especially wanted to move away from narration—I thought the drawings were often playing too secondary a role to it. Like, I could just write out the narration, and communicate the exact same things without the drawings. That felt silly.

I definitely developed a less narration heavy style for a while, and it was a necessary thing to do, but eventually I missed the narration. It can definitely be a crutch, but I also really, really like narration. I’d rather, generally, tell the story through image and dialogue, but I think I’ve gotten better at recognizing what the narration is good for. Partly exposition, for sure, especially in such short comics, but I also think I used it to good effect in harmony with image, and as an intention part of the rhythm of the comic in “Universal,” “Vs. Fletcher,” and “Behind You,” among others.

People compliment me on my style sometimes, which is very nice, but also confuses me—I see myself as a very, very inconsistent artist when it comes to characters (regardless of whether or not the art is appealing). I still don’t think I’m terribly consistent. While I’m certainly recognizable because of the sideburns,  even I look decently different from comic to comic or panel to panel. 

Thinking in terms of character designs certainly helped, though, and I think it’s fun that some of the characters (as in, real life people in my real life) are pretty recognizable from comic to comic. I think? It’s hard for me to judge that, because I fundamentally just know what I’m going for. You all can tell me. But even many of you are biased because my audience primarily all know each other. In any event, tentatively we’ll say I’m proud of this.

– 3 - Put more comics into the world for people to see. –

I also did this, as I assume you know since you’re reading this on my blog. Blogging has been a hell of a lot nicer for me, for whatever reason. Less numbers focused I guess? I really only ever care about numbers in that I find the statistics of it all interesting, anyway, though. Still, blogging has just been very kind to me. I like having all my stuff in one place, too.

I think the bigger part of this for me is just that it’s very interesting to me when people I don’t know super well compliment me on my comics. It's a surprised feeling at first that they’ve seen it, but it really is, like, the best feeling ever. It’s very validating that people like my art! And also very validating when my friends tell me this, also, to be clear.

It means a lot that people like my diary comics, and even though I’m not doing it for this reason, I hope people like The Earth Company too. Making comics has become a real passion, and I want to share that passion with people! I feel tempted to end this genuine sentiment with a bit, but I won’t! I like comics a lot and it’s very special for people to like the things you make.

– Conclusion –

I want to call attention again to James Kochalka, and American Elf, his diary comic project which inspired me. Maybe at some point I’ll make a more complete list of some comics that inspire me.

At some point later, I may also do two more kind-of retrospectives, maybe. One on specific diary comics, thinking about them in depth, what I would want to change or what I like about them. I think that’s a useful exercise for getting better! And if I’m writing it, I may as well post it. I also might do one about Intra-Dimensional Comix #2, my mini-comic which I ‘published’ (gave out for free), which was pretty special to me! 

In any event, I hope this was interesting for any diary comics-heads out there. If not, too bad. It was useful and interesting for me!