Flight 8 - The Clockmaker's Daughter pt.2

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The Clockmaker’s Daughter pt. 1

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The Clockmaker’s Daughter began a long time ago when I jotted down some ideas a couple years back. I had two characters, The Clockmaker and his daughter. The original goal for this little story (or whatever it was going to be) was an animated short. Something evocative, moody, and visually interesting. Smoky, dark, Victorian London.


Unfortunately for this little project I never made it much further than the characters and establishing that one of them was sick. I shelved it for several reasons the largest being I had only a sort of beginning, no middle, and the vaguest of endings.

That’s where this all began.


The time rolls around for Flight 8. I thought through the different stories I have on my list of short stories, comics I want to make and I kept coming back to this Clockmaker one. I knew I didn’t have much of story there, just a couple characters, and that one of them was sick and the other would go on a journey to try and find a way to heal them. Was the daughter sick? Was it the father? I didn’t know and I went back and forth for a long time in the back of my head while I was mentally preparing (juggling client work) and getting my thoughts together.

When I had the time I dove back into the world found it sprawled out, all around. It opened wide and all sorts of elements flowed in filled in the gaps in the story. What began as an idea with no middle or end to speak of developed into a non-linear mingling of

1. An original fairy tale 2. The curse of the Clockmaker's magic clock. 3. And the journey of the Clockmaker's Daughter's to break the curse.

(How she effects the fairy tale itself will be told in the story, I don’t want to spoil it for you.)

I don’t mean to make it sound that easy, it certainly wasn’t. In fact to even get everything boiled down to those three elements was a huge struggle for me. I went back and forth for weeks and weeks, refining and refining, spending most all of my free time over Christmas and the first week of January pouring over my notes and drawings trying to get at the heart of the story and make sense of all these elements.


When it clicked at 3 in the morning one night it was magic. I had the complete story and I just got up and went to work.

For this story I did a lot of writing-writing, it’s my most text heavy short graphic story to date. I say writing-writing to differentiate it from drawing-writing. Mostly I do drawing-writing where I’m sort of writing words but it blends into drawing-writing with pictures and back again.

Here’s a look at some of the writing-writing and drawing-writing for The Clockmaker’s Daughter.