May 2024 update

I haven’t posted here for awhile.

Mostly, I’ve just been busy with my paying jobs. But, as I’ve said earlier, I’ve been having trouble completing comics projects. Case in point: I have given up on Slough and Stair.

Yet, that doesn’t mean that I’ve given up entirely. Basically, my new approach is to start a lot of projects at once. What that means is that I’m in the planning stages on multiple stories. I like the idea stage, so this is fun. But it also means that I am not getting much done on any one project because my spare time is split between multiple.

That said, here’s what I’m working on…

This first one is Cleft. This is one of those stories where the main character ends up in an alternate reality, like Flash Gordon or The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe (is there a term for this genre?). But I’m more inspired by the 1970s kind of Heavy Metal stuff. For instance, the first page is an homage to Richard Corben’s Den. I’m doing the pages in ink and painting gouache on the reverse, then marrying the two together digitally. I like gouache, but have no training and so it’s hit-and-miss. But this story is a chance to get away from any realism and my old ways of doing things and just play.

The next thing is a little personal project that I’m doing mostly to play with different staging ideas, uses of black, limited color, et cetera. It’s my platform to just get my confidence back. So it probably won’t be collected anywhere and that’s part of the point.

I have another story that I’ve been thinking about for a long while, Mutant Fist. I’m scripting and pencilling it now. It’s a fusion of all the apocalyptic stories that I enjoyed as a kid and teen, but filtered through my adult perspective. It’s kind of a pastiche, but also a reinvention. For example, most of those old stories have the same broken, emotionless, male main characters that I am sick to death with. So I’m not doing that. As always with me, things are going to go a different direction with gender. And there’s a baby.

I have come back to this YA story idea that I started and gave up before, Into the River. I have a stronger feel for it now, though the full plot is still getting worked out. It’s about a traumatized teen trying to make her way forward while also dealing with her new reality. And it involves friendship, which may morph into a Scooby Doo/Buffy set up, as well being about alternate dimensions and the interstitial space that binds them, the river.

I am also thumbnailing a work that was inspired by the three characters in the first chapter of Raymond Queneau’s The Skin of Dreams (or Loin de Reuil in French). The working title right now is The Third Floor. The main focus is the relationship between the characters, but also the genre of the story will continue to shift as it goes on.

I also have a version of Frankenstein that I keep toying with, Ffrankenschtein. On the literary theme, I also have always wanted to do Sophocles’s Philoctetes and have notes for that. I also have this very (VERY) old idea for a story, Video. You can see the main characters in the middle section of “The Planner” and that story is from 2007. I have tons of notes for Video from over the years (decades) and feel closer to a concept that I feel comfortable working with. Then there’s an old post-apocalyptic story that I’ve been mulling over for years, The Last Father. But it’s still too episodic and meandering. I need to figure out the central core to adhere the story to. And lastly, there is another Kit Kaleidoscope story that’s been floating in my head since the end of Carnivale. It has no name but it involves Kit teaching art to kids but then suddenly hitting it big in the gallery scene. All the while, Milo is getting older and not doing so well health-wise.

I have ideas for writings about comics, also. For instance, I have a paper analyzing Fun Home that I’ve been kicking around for almost ten years. I’d like to actually get it out there. Maybe I’ll do that this summer. I also am really interested in sequential art created before comics were invented. I have a list of different artworks and have been meaning to do something. Originally I thought a series of comics research papers or maybe videos. But I think I’ll just keep it simple and post here on my blog.

In addition, I want to revamp this website a bit and make it more functional. But that is going to involve talking with my web host.

So, as you can see, I have a lot of ideas. The thing now is to actually complete one of them.