Time Lag

One of the things about making a living from comics is that you have to be fairly conservative about working methods - your continued survival depends on being able to turn out X pages a week reliably and consistently.
The upshot is that I tend to do most of my experimenting in my sketchbooks, and even when I find something new that I like, it can take years for it to percolate into my commercial work.
The sketch shown here, done in the autumn of 2003, turned out to be the seed of something that I hope will come to fruition in Stickleback, my next big project after The Great Game. I've already given it a try-out in a short strip I've done for the Semana Negra book festival in Gijon (northern Spain). At the same time, I can't let myself get too enthusiastic about new ideas, since I still have sixteen pages of The Great Game to knock on the head, and that's six weeks'-odd worth of work...