The Terrible Anvil - Terrible Commitments!
Hi! Welcome back to The Terrible Anvil! Tom Hart and Jess Ruliffson love to talk about making comic-making EASIER, and in this episode, we’re talking about making terrible commitments.
It’s about time management some times, but other times it might be about character design, and story choices or structure.
Tom shows his examples from his comic in progress where the boys are wear buckets on their heads, the girls hide in hoodies, and the men are all rats. So everyone looks the same! How do you get out of it? Tom and Jess talk about it.
We talked briefly about Chester Brown’s Underwater. Tired of drawing hair, Brown drew everyone bald, which is fine. He also wanted to draw out the lengthy mental/sensory development of an infant into childhood and adulthood. He later abandoned the project! Terrible Commitment or brave experiment, or both?!
We talk momentarily about NAILED IT! -- there's great, great joy in Nailed It! People are experiencing great joy because the deadlines are so crazy. And the work is so off the mark, that it becomes a new thing, and the learning to figure out what the new thing you are developing, is part of the art of the Terrible Anvil.
Then as we slid into answering questions for people either interested or IN the 2026 Graphic Novel Intensive, we answered questions about navigating bad feelings in a project, about heavy choices early on, sometimes about tech questions.
Thanks for being here!
Here’s the video:
