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about |
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| Since
I was little, ever since I can remember, I’ve been telling myself
stories. This whole thing- which would eventually become thistle
salad-
started when I was in middle school. I started with seven or eight
characters – some who remain mostly unchanged, some who have
since vanished, some who are still here, but drastically different.
And it grew over the next dozen years into something of startling
proportions. |
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| I
didn’t do that much with it. I wrote down bits and pieces, accumulated
stacks of notes and sketches, threw together a couple ten page comics
every now and then, but the real drive behind thistle
salad is simply
that I am an insomniac and telling myself stories helps me sleep.
If I could not drown my thoughts in fiction, I would be trapped awake
all
night,
worrying
about my real life. I needed the outlet and the escape. |
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| I
came to comics late – later than most people, I think. And it
took me a long time to equate my ability to draw reasonably well,
my compulsive, if erratic, need to tell stories and my enjoyment of
webcomics and jump to the afterward obvious conclusion that I should
do my own comic. |
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| It
first occurred to me to do my comic on the web when I had an idea
for sewing together a story taking years of random notes and trying
to make something sensible out of it – something
I had been working on (and off) for years, something I’m still
working on… the
story that I think of as the center of thistle
salad and that I haven’t
written yet*. I was wandering around San Francisco
with a notebook full of ideas, trying to punch them into coherency
for the first comic
I had worked on since I left college… and I was wondering why.
Why would I do all this work, only to file it away with the rest of
these things in my filing cabinet and forget about it? |
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| It
was fall of 2002; I hated my job, I was chronically ill from stress,
I was an undiagnosed depressive. I wrote two thirds of a novel that
would become the core of armageddon girl and then stumbled onto NaNoWriMo where I wrote a novel about how, after some unspecified fate befalls
Anna Bloom, Ivan Churney drags her sister into the future with him
and… they get married and somehow between them destroy an entire
civilization? |
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| Then
I got really sick, quit my job, took some classes on web design and
started my site. I had attempted to whip the timeline into coherence
during my college years, and now I went over it again before I started
the comic; culling people, combining them or separating them and trying
to figure out how one person could be in two places at the same time
or to be in two times without having aged in between (This is a little
easier than you’d think, given that I enjoy messing around with
comic book conventions). |
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| I
will say this, if I was starting all over again, I would have a firmer
plan for what I was doing that first year. I still like what I did
then, but there was an awful lot of flail there, too. I didn’t
know where to start – the scope of my ‘world’ still
baffles me. So I fluttered around and hacked out little bits where
I could. But if I started over today, I don’t think the end
result would have been that different, either. I might have a firmer
grasp of the storylines, I might have started out with armageddon
girl immediately and moved up the introduction of the
green door,
but there would still be multiple lines and I would still switch between
them as my fancy took me. I guess I must think elliptically, because,
well, when I am working on my terrible novels, I work the same way.
I pick something up, add a few pages, move onto the next unfinished
novella (and they’re all unfinished). |
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| I
know my comic is difficult to follow. What I wanted most when I started
was the structure of working on a weekly comic. Like NaNoWriMo,
I wanted to set myself a goal that was manageable. I already had accumulated
years of content – which was also a problem as I didn’t
want to start off with pages and pages of exposition. That’s
why there’s so many storylines: the various storylines are supposed
to (eventually) illuminate one another (although, I didn’t chose
my storylines as wisely as I could have). So yeah, my comic errs to
the side of deliberately obscure. Yet I don't want the fact that I
consider
thistle salad to be more of a personal
art project than a conventional webcomic to become an excuse for me
to dismiss fair criticism or to
sink to lazy storytelling. But it seems I have thrown away the conventions
that would make my comic friendly to a broad audience – everything
from exposition and thought balloons all the way down to linear, coherent
storytelling. I wanted to see what I could do, and if I could do it
with art. I didn't always succeed. I won't always succeed. That's
life. |
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| I
just want to draw some pretty pictures. Pretty pictures of a world
that’s filled with sympathetic villains, compromised heroes
and disingenuous gods, that runs on dream logic and comic book science. |
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| *thistle
salad is the story of two girls
and a sword. Funny how that
hasn't quite made it into the comic yet (...although). I tell people
that armageddon
girl is the main story of the comic, but that's not entirely
true. Armageddon girl is
simply the story with the largest scope, the one where everyone-
heroes, villains, gods, monsters,
men, even the dead- has a part. It’s an ideal way to survey
the maddeningly complex closed system camping out in my head. But
it occurred to me, working on this particular comic, this story,
the real story, that I would have to start earlier, much earlier
in the narrative, that I would need to fill in a lot of blanks before
I could establish all that I needed to before I could really begin...
I’m always getting closer, but I’m not there yet. |
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