Weekly Thoughts 5/14/23

This week, I started a new file on Dragon Ball Fusions, and that’s never a good or healthy idea for me. It’s very addicting, and for reasons I can’t explain well, it kinda just takes a long time to play without feeling like a lot’s happened. It is nice sometimes to ignore the clock and let time blindness take me, but I also can’t have that be every night, you know? I’ve gotten to the point where I just need to recruit a bunch of people, so there are a lot less “pressing concerns” to deal with, and hopefully I can do another thing. Like dishes.

I will say, it has been helpful in some ways. While I think about my art style between projects, I am also thinking about what kind of stories I want to make. I am often torn between two desires when I am developing a story: The desire to lay out a grand vision for life, culture, and meaning, and the desire to do whatever has caught my attention that second. I very often struggle with dichotomies of “all or nothing” that don’t really exist. Having this game fill up my time, I’ve had to wind myself down, remind myself that I don’t owe anyone the use of my personal time for anything ““““important”””” or specific. I owe it to myself to at least try for my dreams, and my dream is to make comics. I love comics. I think they’re a lot of fun, I have a lot of fun with the creation process, and I want to put out books people will enjoy. Work will always be work, but not all work is cut from the same cloth; I want a profession I’ll enjoy and have fun with. So while I want to say something with the books I make, I also don’t want to be beholden to a notion of how ““““important”””” a topic or story has to be for me to make it. If I’m going to fully disarm that voice in my head, I need to know what I think is fun; or rather, I need to figure out how to write and draw what I think is fun. And that’s not something I’m ever going to do on my own, since I have no accountability for difficult, scary thinking. That’s where you come in, my readers.

The first mini comic I ever made was part of a comics and graphic novel class I took in college, where we were allowed to submit our own comics as a final paper type assignment. It was a random chapter from the middle of a story I hadn’t written yet. Because it was a story and a set of characters I had been working with for a long time, I really liked giving them form. The actual content of the big conversation is…not great, looking back, but I did like the flow of it, and how I was trying to address something. I also had this moment where an alien character drops their holographic cloak, and that was fun to draw. Still think that turned out well. The story involved a hodgepodge of different types of heroes, with this fun superhero team, and at the time I was learning how to dive deep into the character work. Having a story that let me do that while retaining all the cool window-dressing was a lot of fun.

The second one I made was for a comics class with Nashville Community Education, and it’s the one I usually think of as my first real comic. Shoutout to my teacher in that class, Becca Hillburn, she’s great; check out her stuff @Nattosoup, she’s got a comic called 7’’ Kara; buy her books and hire her for stuff. My mini for that class was a ten-page short that told a story of a romance between two teenagers that I had been trying unsuccessfully to write a novel about for a while. Yes, it was the first Rosemary and Alex story, and I’d remake it later as a mini I have on this site. Once again, being able to give form to ideas and characters I had been working with for a long time was very satisfying, especially since I was able to condense their story into its purest essence and cut out the things that were tripping me up. I had a lot of fun planning out how to use the space as part of the storytelling and working on their faces. Little dialogue choices, like how Rosemary says “ergo” while trying to comfort Alex, which feels like a very Rosemary thing to do. The cover was based on a moment from Bloom Into You that I really like.

So I definitely enjoy working with characters I’ve known for a long time. I don’t want all my comics to be based on novels or other massive projects I’ve thought about for years beforehand. Seems like that would limit my output; I only have one other novel I couldn’t make work, and I haven’t thought about it seriously in a long time. My third mini comic was much more recent in my mind at the time. This was also for the NCE-sponsored comics class. I had been developing a slice of life comedy series about college students who were all secretly supernatural. I designed a lot of characters for it, so I did a mini about Frankie the Frankenstein’s monster going on a date with Keaton (who was, like, half-demon or something, it’s not relevant to the plot). Frankie was a lot of fun to work with. Her situation makes for a lot of great bits, as an amalgamation created to be the “perfect daughter” and all the existential dread of knowing you were made from different people’s bodies. She’s a year old, in literal terms, so it’s fun figuring out how she’ll navigate the world and experience different things with such a knowledge gap and a mind developed to a similar level as any other eighteen-year-old’s. I was able to work in how she’s torn between three love interests because she literally has three hearts, but it’s a center heart day. This was the first one I did with cool visual elements, like Frankie being imposed over the rest of the page. Overall, I’m not too satisfied with how it turned out, because the plot is based on a pretty weak joke. I took a walk and wracked my brain, like, “what’s a joke?” It didn’t really come together like I wanted. I haven’t looked at it again in a while, so unless my memory is bullying me, I assume the joke doesn’t land.

My fourth mini was called Full Circle, and I would later redraw it and tweak some dialogue to make it into Do You Really Care? I really liked the whole development process for this story, because I didn’t have to worry about missing out on the “fun” aspect of the premise. I based it off of the relationship I imagined while listening to You’re a Cad by the Bird and the Bee, which was on rotation on the store radio at work. The fun of the story is the seriousness of this messy relationship and how important it is for both of them, despite how they treat it. The interplay between Gabriel and Dom was a lot of fun to draw, and I think I did well with capturing the mood I was going for. The sex scene was a rewarding challenge. I still think Dom is the prettiest woman in the world in the panel where she’s looking into Gabriel’s eyes next to her in bed, head on hand; I’m very proud of that image. For the Full Circle version of the story, I found out why I needed to learn about digital art, because I was cutting out word balloons with an X-Acto knife. I do want to try finding other songs or points of inspiration that I can turn into stories like this; it’s a different kind of thinking and development, compared to my normal process of trying to assign meaning to the coolest white noise in my head.

My fifth was You’re a Snack! That came from thinking about a premise to a manga I was recommended on Amazon that I never got; what I boiled it down to, ultimately, was a story about someone who enters into a relationship with some secret element entirely out of lust. What kind of person would do that, and why would they make such a huge commitment on the fly? Both good questions, and the fun answer I came up with was that it was all surface-level. Sometimes people aren’t complicated, and that gives you license to have fun with a complicated situation that arises from superficial needs. I also had fun with injecting personality into the two or three lines Friends A, B, and C have. I think I learned a lot about how to structure a comedic story, and what sort of humor I want to revisit and work into other stories. Doing the splash page with Britt was great. So was the photo montage. It was great to do a vampire romance especially, because, in fictional settings, blood is very sexy to me.

Then I did the newer version of Rosemary and Alex posted here. Going into it this time, I was much more conscious of the personal elements of the story and was able to dive a bit deeper into the darkness while still coming out with a fun romance. The first page is based on something that I actually saw while working the register. Same basic concept, a mother berating a daughter about what she was talking to and laughing with a friend about in a way that sounded to me like she was afraid her daughter wasn’t straight. Hope that poor teenager is doing well. Anyway, it made a good framing device to flesh out the dynamic between Alex and her mother, and I’m really happy with how that turned out; I didn’t have time for it in the original version. The whole montage in the middle was really fun to plan and execute. I also had a lot of fun reframing Alex’s whole “running away” routine, since it gave me the chance to show her making eyes at Rosemary’s parents. In general, it was a lot of fun getting to revisit the characters and find new aides of them for me to show off while still telling the same basic story I had in mind all along. They’re a sweet couple, and I’m happy they’re happy.

Then is my most recent work, Bet Your Sweet Bottom! As now looks like a recurring theme, this is a story I’ve thought about for a while, but in this case not so deeply or with such well-developed characters. It just seemed like a fun premise for a romcom that’s only possible with bi leads. Looking back now, I can say that there are various deeper elements to it, but I really liked getting to do a fun bit for its own sake. As I was making it, there were moments where Carmen and Nina surprised me, because I hadn’t planned out dossiers on them like I have for other characters. As someone who hasn’t been seduced or seduced anyone, it was a lot of fun thinking about what ham-fisted nonsense they’d pull out on Kyousuke, and what normal habits of theirs would trigger each other, because I actually had to slow down and think about what is sexy. Like, Carmen’s collarbone stroke. Never thought about that as a particular move, but that can look really sexy under the right circumstances.

The thing that I enjoyed most of all in every project was being able to connect a personal experience or feeling to the characters and world. It’s not something I’ve been very good at doing consciously over the years, and I want to change that. The most fun part of YAS was writing about a shallow person who chose all their relationships based on sexual attraction, and is always fighting fears that it makes them shallow and shitty. BYSB has two people so afraid of “ruining things” with a friend that they couldn’t even acknowledge their attraction. Rosemary and Alex represent two different expressions of my own experience with sexuality and romance. DYRC is a great exploration of the need for connection, and what sorts of mental gymnastics a person like me could jump through to justify doing something “bad” without giving up on that moral stance, and without having to consider what the relationship actually is. At the end of the day, the thing I found most fun was being able to express some part of myself. That sounds obvious, but I often struggle with this. In day to day life, I don’t have a script for talking about any of this in a lighthearted way, and I don’t want to have a pity party. So I like getting to put these ideas out into the world in a way that’s still fun and allows me to focus on the cool window-dressing.

I have an idea for a new story, also in theme as a premise I’ve had for a while, and I want to continue more consciously down this road. I want the story to be fun, with wit and humor, while playing directly with my experience. When I think about the kinds of stories I want to draw, I think back to As Miss Beelzebub Likes, where Matoba said her goal was, to paraphrase, to make a “light afternoon snack.” A snack doesn’t have to live up to the expectations of a “real meal,” yet at the same time, the best snacks are more than potato chips. I want my work to be in that vein, and I want the process of engaging with my experiences to make art to feel that way. Binging on the darkness and then doing everything I can to ignore it isn’t a great cycle; it would be nice to have a quick bite every now and then.