Alec Longstreth

Whoa-oh! I'm half way there...

Sun 7/18/2010

As many of you know, I'm very fond of Dave Sim's 2,000-Page Theory, which basically says that you have to draw 2,000 pages of comics before you can draw your first REALLY GOOD page of comics.

Earlier this summer I read Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcom Gladwell, which puts forth an amazingly similar theory which says that it takes about 10,000 hours of concentrated effort and practice to master a discipline. And well, if it takes you somewhere around 5 hours to write, pencil and ink a page of comics, then that math works out quite nicely, doesn't it?

Back in March, when Nate helped me update this site, I put a Bibilography page up in the new "Miscellaneous" section. At first I just dumped in all the issues of Phase 7, but I had much bigger plans for this page, which I didn't get around to until this morning!

I finally loaded in every single page of finished comics I have ever drawn into the table, whether it was a 24-hour comic, an anthology submission, a zine, a webcomic, or whatever. The only stuff it doesn't include are covers, and all my sketchbook stuff (unless those sketchbook pages ended up in a zine!).

As of today, the grand total is 1,085 pages.

The list starts in 2000, after I read Understanding Comics for the first time (none of my comics drawn before then were worth counting, and none have - or ever will be - published). So it's 1,000 pages in 10 years. An average of 100 pages a year? And another 10 years ahead ahead of me before I start drawing some really amazing comics? I can live with that! :)

Anyway, people might want to go check out the Bibliography, as it has many links to stories that I did for various zines and anthologies that you may never have known about. I will continue to update the table with all of my new comics projects, so you can keep an eye on that total at the bottom of the page.

Onwards, into the next 1,000 pages!