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Post by Nixie on Mar 17, 2010 16:35:39 GMT -5
Even if it doesn't get published, having a comic to work on at all times keeps me motivated to work on my art. But right now, after realizing what a dumb idea Humans and Mirror/Mirror were, I'm at a crossroads. There are so many comics I want to draw but I can't possibly do them all. I need to choose just one to focus on. All of these comics would be in series format, with never-ending plots. Option #1: A funny furry comic about paranormal research, primarily monsters. In this comic, the main character will never encounter anything paranormal, but her sidekick would see it all. This would be a throwback to my old Kyuu days, and furry comics do usually generate a pretty big online fan-base. I've already sketched the first eight pages. Option #2: A fantasy adventure comic based on magical cards. This one holds to potential to be turned into game systems or create spin-offs using the same concept but with different characters and different goals. I've already sketched the first 14 pages, but they would require a lot of revision. Option #3: A series of short funny comics, almost like Archie comics, featuring the random adventures of a few basic characters. Possibly including side characters such as fat superheroes, crazy old cat ladies, country hicks, and cartoon animals (not furries). This kind of comic could change theme and plot at the drop of a hat, and would likely be of lower art quality, but it also has the potential to keep me interested longer. Option #4: Continue making those black and white comics about my random adventures. THESE comics. www.kiwichanstudios.com/randomkay/index.htmlIf you have any better ideas, I'd like to hear them.
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Post by Kristal Rose on Mar 17, 2010 20:10:06 GMT -5
I never got to find what the story to Humans or Mrirror/Mirror even were, so I can't comment on if they were a dumb idea. So far it wasn't worse than Alice in Wonderland, and the characters had potential, especially the earlier villains you dropped.
#1 Concept is funny.
#2 Ugh. As torturous as 90's cartoons.
#3 Sounds like 80's Santa Cruz / Berkeley stuff. Better than nothing, but not the best you can do.
#4 I didn't care for those any more that Bazooka Joe comics. Very dry no matter what went on in them.
Even if it's an aimless serial with punchlines, you should still have those cliff-hangers which make one want to read a few pages ahead.
It should have super heroes, furries, bizarre humans, or maybe a combo of them and some straight humans. I say this not to highlight their differences as story, but because it allows for greater variety of surreal experience and more expressive reactions.
Some ideas:
#A Ice-cream monsters and blue-electric glows living on earth forced to contend with exasperating things like taxes, internet shopping, and anti-gay politics.
#B A series of four page dreams, or even alternating between that and life. Sure it's been done in sci-fi movies (Walter Mitty, Matrix, Alice, etc etc.), but not in any truly parallel interwoven interdependent way in which the primary reality, isn't even clear, thus mundane earth experiences might actually be the wise surreal experiences which influence the real comic reality. Advantage is that you only have to compose one pair of segments at a time. Having them build upon each other in subsequent chapters is optional.
#C One page complete fantasies, like day hikes and bike rides to living nature scenes and fantasy shopping malls.
You need some sort of continuity. That one in which the main character never sees anything paranormal is a great example.
#D Characters living in a video game, like following the yellow electron road, (like Tron) thus justifying constant new characters and a new story for each level. (I don't really care for this one either). Goal is to find the ultimate truth or something.
You should have an indefinite goal, or even a few cycling in and out as completed.
#E Choose your own story by jumping to optional frames. (Not recommended because you couldn't line up any good stories or even build circumstances for punchlines.)
I don't think random pages of talking stuffed animals would keep your attention any better than long stories. Something written in segments would be better for you, whethar those segments invisibly bleed into each other or not. The stories you like to write are mostly scenes and reactions. Sometimes they allude to a larger context, sometimes they don't. You need to compose around the longest scenes you want to write, and fit in the smaller ones as contributing filler as inspiring details come to you.
Something close to MDS seems about perfect, perhaps, with your concern of not getting to far ahead of yourself and ending up with a burden, with not so much long integrating story. It would allow you to throw in something like a character learning accordian without having any story to throw off. That squirrel (dang, forgot his name) had flash cartoons which would have translated to about a page each. You want to set up more than circumstances or philosphical opinions, but also paradigm circumstances, so you'll need at least three page stories to create and wrap up a segment. By building on past content, you can reduce that to a page or two per segment wrapped up momentarily. Tempo was a problem for you, 14 pages in one circumstance, then two in another. To save yoursely drawing work building up all those circumstances, I suggest that you start writing with more of a play structure, where your story is anchored to a few sets/scenes/paradigmscontexts which you can alternate between and build up. Towards that end, you need stories written in parallel with unlimited potential for being built up. A dream/reality model gives you at least two such interleaved scene/timelines to work with. Multiple dreams, some introduced later (as you invent them), but all contributers to a single story, would be an ideal balance between completed segments, durable reusable context, and the liberty to take the story anywhere and expand upon circumstances. One new dream could take place as dolphins in an aquarium, and still relate to two other dreams of finding work in skyscrapers on the verge of apocalypse, and of sacrificing stuffed bunnies to some island volcano deity. The important part (at least to me) is that all of these segments are both self contained and satisfyingly complete on one level, and yet each further the integrated mysterious abstract story of the whole work, such that each segment leaves one contemplating about the role of that segment in larger stories like the guys relationship, or his saving the world, finding his purpose and true reality, etc. etc. By making the meta story abstract, you can cheat a bit throwing in randomness and no one can objectively nit-pick that it doesn't fit in. It's role may be just to provide an opposite view, like one in which the main character hates everyone and destroys things. As the abstract story unfolds, you can revisit that setting, but starting off with him no longer hating everyone. The reader thus draws their own abstract conclusions about what has occurred and evolved in the general continuity for that to be the case. You need some sort of continuity though, as in a single character, regardless of form or world. Heck, the main character could even be persons of different genders, and yet the reader mistakenly imagines to start off that those segments are about a another character.
Your character doesn't have to be a character. It could even be about an animate land, and characters are just detail manifestations about how the land is coming along. Just evolving is boring though. Even land-character needs someone to interact with. Lands from different dreams interacting with each other would be interesting. Each dream could be a character, not unlike deities, and the dreamer is only a passive observor, like a 3rd person editor, watching the dreams interact, fight, assist, evolve, and seek redemption.
Like what you did with MDS, creating deep comic drama, pull off dreams as deity characters themselves, and you'll be on the leading edge of the evolution of genres. It's a worthy challenge, inventing ways to expose what such characters do and think, by means of the events, circumstances, and roles of their participants are. If you do it on a 'nothing to lose' basis, you can develop the craft wih each subsequent segment, towards future works, and have the luxury of editing without disturbing style continuity. If each segment is a character though, revising a character could mean having to edit all related segments.
Watch the movie 'Waking Life' in which animation changes the nature of the universe of every character biography segment. What I am suggesting is the very inverse, where the universes are not reflections of the characters, but the participants are reflections of the universe-characters. While the format is highly suited to heavy cosmological philosophical drama, there's no reason it can't take the form of emphasis on comedic exasperating mortality, and only allude in the background to the larger Olympian context. Now that I use the word 'Olympian' I realize that the ancients with their pantheistic roots were very close to developing this form. Oddyseus is just as much about the universe-characters he visits as about him. Same with The Little Prince. What hasn't been exploited much, (more so back then though) is these deities having stories of interacting with each other, not just being separate entities for the protaganist to experience. Bedazzled had all the seven deadly sins as characters, but they didn't really have story themselves, nor were they reflacted as universal paradigms. Having a universal paradigm as a character which experiences a story and evolves would be really quite new.
If nothing else, consider taking up play structure and mythological deities (with universe mirroring faculties) in your next works. The ingenuity of the classic formula is such that you can write about petty mortal foibles, and yet the unseen context of the deity interaction drives the meta-story on and gives the petty stuff greater depth. I think excellent authors do this somewhat subconsciously even when they have no deities or meta-story in mind. It's still their as a character, even if it takes the form of the gloom of dying society. The gloom is a character. In the end the gloom might either become death, or lighten up and become something else.
Doing something like that requires a great deal of continuity, aka an immersive plot energy. I don't think you have the style mesh for that sort of thing. You need to be able to jump around, thus I recommend at least several scene characters. You had much of that going with your snake dungeon, white totem crow castle, oasis desert, and crystal jungle room. It's a small step to deify those scenes. How to convey that they themselves are interacting characters is a bit more challenging, but could be done with interactions with mirrors and pools and mistral forces between the participants and deities which really are those realms. Turf expansion wars, like that between dark and light as is LOTR are the most basic story for such forces to have, but they can take on Olympus deity interactions as well, and evolve in character and how they interact with their local participants. Dreams competing to dominate a dreamer could be achievable story.
Your strengths are a mix of daydreaming and incidental mortal observations. You need a format which can support all of that, but is not in danger of being disjointed random meandering. The Odyssuess/Sinbad format allowed bards to maintain meta-story continuity, while inserting more and more individualized segments as the years went by.
Whatever you embark upon next, I recommend it have a serial format. Thus far it's looking that if you get published, it's probably an ongoing serial you'll be selling. You might have some demonstration, like your earlier comics, that you can keep up a serial, and have a few starters to choose from that you could sell to magazine publishers. If you catch on, you can hire your own inkers and colorists, or even pencilists to beef up production while you launch multiple series with different publishers.
This though is on the side to mainly looking for 9-5 employment. Publishing a serial will require knowing exactly how much you can offer for what price year after year, and probably being in 18 month delivery contracts. If a magazine loses readers because you drop out, they'll want to sue. On the other hand, the job security goes both ways. Just make sure they don't own you exclusively, and don't care if you subcontract out the content delivery.
Another avenue for you is selling serial storyboard delivery to video game producers. Thus far though I haven't seen you having enough rate of delivery for that. You could be on a writing team though, which is typically how it's done anyhow. That's one of the 9-5 sort of jobs you could be looking for here.
Unfortunately this is a business industry. It's not about what you love most or do best, it's about what you do in high volume and reasonable quality at a reasonable price. That might be fitting in visual gags or proofing facial expressions to match scenes. After you get your foot in the door they'll figure out how to get the most of you. The trick is getting yourself in the door.
With a large enough variety of talents, all itemized, you might be able to come in not as a specialist, but as someone useful for a variety of tasks. The thing to remember though is that your employer is also fulfilling a contract, and you are a line item on their expense sheet. Whatever role you fulfill, it also has to look good on paper. I once lost a good job because I had no official role on the budget. If I was more politically savvy then, I would have had them create a $40k 'Database systems integrator and ad-hoc PC reports specialist' position for me to fill. 'Clerks' get the axe at budget time. It's not unlikely that you'll imagine yourself as or even be indispensable to others and still get the axe because they don't have the political savvy to maintain your role in the budget to their superiors either. Large businesses don't work on family awareness and sensibility when it comes down to the reports which drive them.
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