Tag: graphic novel

Concerning Happiness and Focus

Posted on April 16, 2023 by Byrd

I have a new friend. They do poster art professionally. They’re work shows a great deal of enthuesiasm. I visited them last week and they showed a bunch of their work to me. You really feel like they enjoy the process when you look at their stuff. It made me reflect on my own work, and how much I don’t enjoy it sometimes.

My own work makes me think of the quote “I hate writing, I love having written” by Dorothy Parker. I think of this phrase often, as a lot of my process is driven by the need to produce anything. It’s driven by hitting a quota, because the fear of becoming unfocused and moving on before the project is finished is paramount.

This led me to reflect on how much I miss animation, and I spent a whole day considering the idea of adding a 30 second animated teaser for each comic project. I’m not an animator, so these projects would be limited, probably involving a lot of “squigglevision” style (which I’m a big fan of). But still, it would require a lot. I’ve probably spent a good 6 months on this particular project, and it’s not done.

But I spent most of the day considering whether or not to purchase After Effects and a few plugins, as I have other animated teaser ideas for my other projects. I think a few years ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice, and would have impulse purchased After Effects. But this time, I wrote out my projects, and my wants, and came to the conclusion that with the labor and skill available, adding animation would be untenable.

But it really sucks to walk away from the ambition of that. Which brings me back to enthusiasm, but enthusiasm within the scope of what can be done. I would love to get to the point where my work reflects how much I think and adore the characters, places and ideas in my scripts and comics.

Like, “Enter Cedar”, I knew that these characters had names, but I never took the time to discover them until this week. I was drawing them uniquely, they’ve had personalities, but I was rushing through the illustration of pages and not taking the time to discover what those names were. Perhaps it’s these areas I should make more time for.

Concerning the In-between Comics

Posted on April 3, 2023 by Byrd

So, in the same vein that “Groph’s Green Wizardry” brought us from “Deep Circuitry” to “Enter Cedar”, what if we do that between “Enter Cedar” and the next project? Maybe some sort of story about the Knowledge Retention Bot (KRB)?

We first saw the Knowledge Retention Bot in my short film “The Antique Dealer”, played by my good friend Hazel Blue.

Like, I’ve got this idea of a short scene where Ian meets KRB when he’s an adult, while out on a jog. The KRB has just found information about Ian’s interactions with Squash and Gray, which is what “The Antique Dealer” was about. So then it’s a matter of going from “Enter Cedar” to “The Antique Dealer”, and then to the “Algorithm Interviews”, where the KRB is still trying to solve where the aliens are.

And then all of this leads into the next big project “Where the Highway Meets the Corridor”, which is a tangential story that involves the KRB helping a group of humans help the aliens escape from the United States government. Yeah, I think that works.

Concerning Worth and Big Pictures

Posted on February 27, 2023 by Byrd

I’m feeling very undeserving as of late. It began when I started creating a “timeline” of the projects I’ve finished and the projects I’ve yet to finish.

It’s a lot of work. I’ve done the math, it will likely take my lifetime (at my current pace). When I map it out like this, I start to feel like I’m not good enough to tell this story, or that it shouldn’t be as big as it is. That I’m not good enough for this, or that the idea itself isn’t worth illustrating; that “The Imbibe Universe” is only worth devoting a little space to it.

I don’t really have an argument against all that, other than I want this and that I’ve spent a good deal of my life thinking about it. It’s part of who I am as a person. It’s not a part I share very often. And I’d like to change that. Because it seems to be an awful shame for it to rot away in my skull after death. Regardless of whether or not it deserves telling.

Concerning the Log Children

Posted on February 12, 2023 by Byrd

This is an early piece depicting the Log Children. It was done digitally, because I thought I didn’t have an option to not do digital. You’ll note the lack of loincloth in the actual comic.

Original designs also incorporated a lot of lazy appropriation of Coast Salish elements. I had a lot of conversations with friends over this. The native elements are not super important to the story, as the gods behind the masks are not the actual gods, just beings who feed of the follower’s faith. Therefor, would that being use native elements to appear to people? They would to those they would be tricking, like someone who believed in the raven spirit. But would Ian see this? He’s just a white boy, with no affiliation with local tribes and customs, and since the appropriating beings use the thoughts and images they’re living in, they would appear with what’s available in Ian’s head. Thus, logs and blue tarps.

The added benefit is that this imagery is lot more personal to me. Making my stories personal to me is challenging.