The stories I grew up on are enormous, and most of them reach people in one of two shapes: dense text you have to work at, or the same small handful of famous tales told over and over. The rest — hundreds of them — sit just out of reach.
I wanted to give them a form people, especially children, would pick up on their own: pictures first, a clear thread, a page that pulls you to the next one. A comic. That part felt obvious.
The non-obvious choice was scope. It would have been easy — and satisfying — to make one beautiful comic. Pick a favorite story, illustrate it lovingly, ship it.
But one comic isn’t the point. The point is the whole tapestry: the big stories and the forgotten ones, the way characters recur and cross over, the sense that you could keep pulling threads for years. So the goal became a series — many, many stories, told with a consistent look and voice.
That one word — series — quietly rewrote the entire problem.
Making one comic is a craft project. You can hold the whole thing in your head. Every choice is bespoke: this character looks like this, this scene is lit like that, and you personally guarantee it all hangs together.
Making a series is a systems problem. You can’t hand-tune hundreds of stories one panel at a time and still finish this decade. The moment you commit to volume, a pile of questions you never had to ask about one comic become the whole job:
None of those matter for a single comic. All of them are existential for a series. Choosing “series” is what turned a nice illustration project into everything this logbook is about.
The first real step was small and concrete: take one tradition to begin with, pick a canonical story, and turn it into an illustrated comic — a script broken into scenes and panels, with art to match. Nothing fancy. Just proof that a single story could go from “text somewhere” to “a comic you can read.”
It worked. And the instant it worked, the series ambition sent the bill: every problem I’d waved away — consistency, quality, faithfulness, and later narration and video — lined up and started knocking.
That’s what the next posts are about. This one is just the starting line: an illustrated comic, and the decision to make it a series that made everything after it hard in the best way.