Doing Revisions

[JR]

I was looking at my archive, and I was thinking that my early comics need to be cleaned up.  I don't like the coloring, the lettering is crap and the panels are crooked and jagged.

How do you feel about doing revisions to your old work?  Is a little okay, or is it better to leave it as it is?  Thoughts?

[JGray]

Writers revise all the time. Even classic books will occasionally have notes in ther front mentioning that they've been revised by the author since their original edition.

I'm making some revisions to MotA with an eye towards bringing the comic a little better together for a print edition, where a reader goes through in chunks rather than one at a time.. Mostly text, though.

Just don't get so caught up in fixing up the past that you forget to update the future.

[Gibson]

When I started doing the coloured versions (which is a revision too, I suppose) of Pictures of You, I ended up making a lot of little changes, especially to the first book. I don't think anyone ever noticed the changes, so it didn't have much negative impact and it made it better for new readers. I think it's one of the great things about our medium that we're able to revise and touch things up whenever we feel the need. The biggest horror in print was that a mistake was forever.

I agree that you don't want to focus on the fixes so much that you become absorbed by them. Sometimes, you just have to let the old mistakes stand. The changes you're talking about sound mostly technical, though, so tweaking them a bit is probably not a terrible idea.

[wendyw]

I'm actually starting doing a revamp of most of my archive to replace the hand lettered speech bubbles with my curent font. I've been on hiatus for a while and I'm thinking that as well as building up a buffer before coming back I should also do that at the same time. It's something I've been thinking about doing for a while and it seems like the right kind of time to do it. I just need to find my back up disc of the early comics at full resolution, which seems to have been misplaced in our house move.

I will probably tweak the art here and there as well, but nothing major, just fixing little things that have annoyed me since.

[TTallan]

Here's my solution to the persistent temptation to fix the old stuff: I won't change anything on the website, but I'll make note of minor problems (like continuity errors) that really bug me. I try not to get worked up about the art not being as good as my current pages. When it's time to collect it all into a book, I'll do all those little fixes for the print version.

The biggest horror in print was that a mistake was forever.

Not so! One of the great things about Print on Demand is that you can do a small run, catch all your errors (for us, it was stupid mistakes in converting some files), and fix them for the second edition. Yay!

[Gibson]

While that's true, your first print run does have those mistakes forever, there's no way to change them...and that's true for any kind of print medium, print-on-demand or not, you can change future editions, but the ones you've produced already, you're stuck with the blunder.

[LegendWoodsman]

Sometimes it's just nice to have a "time capsule" of your older work. Hopefully you are always progressing so in five years everything that you're fixing now may need extra fixing then???

[Funderbunk]

It's your art - do what you want with it. That's my two cents on the matter. For better or for worse, it's yours to do with whatever you want.

Some people probably will take offense, but I am of the opinion that the artist is the first and foremost authority. Even George Lucas.

[jaygee]

Agree with Funderbunk - it's your comic. Means it's you who calls the shots. For what it is worth - I tweak and revise all the time (well, at least when I've got the time). I know that doing revs isn't popular with everbody (I understand that there are people who like to see how a particular creator evolves over time - nothing wrong with that) but in the end it's the creator who needs to be able to look at his or her early pages and feel comfy with them. If you don't, fix them.  

[Knara]

I don't endorse revising old strips, mostly because I greatly enjoy seeing how an artist develops over time.  I think many viewers enjoy that sort of thing, too.

YMMV