![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
About that webcomic.
Jun. 21st, 2011 10:24 amLike I said in my post last night, one of the things keeping me busy right now is the fruition of a webcomic project. By this point, even a casual reader of my blog probably knows that I am a huge comic fan, and people may or may not know that I have loved webcomics longer than I have loved comic books -- longer than I have had a livejournal -- and that it sometimes takes me half an hour in the morning to catch up on all the webcomics I follow. Webcomics are a big deal to me. They're very exciting. And I've been trying to start up my own for eleven years, with a lot of delays and frustrations and one big success.
A few years ago,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
channel and I collaborated on Self-Loathing, a story about existential identity crises and clones, and the brief time for which it ran is still extremely satisfying to me. But in the end, it was less a webcomic and more a comic book being put up on the web one page at a time, and that contributed to its eventual demise.
People may also know that I have very strong feelings about the storytelling process in serial comics, and have been a vehement objector to editorial interference since Brand New Day in Spider-Man tore the guts out of two decades of storytelling and left Peter Parker single and pathetic. DC Comics has done just as poorly. My most-posted essay is my Comics Theses, my own little Lars Von Trier Dogme 95 moment, where I make a few strongly worded suggestions about what storytelling tropes would give comics some verisimilitude and weight that I feel mainstream superhero comics are lacking. After that essay, I worked with several friends to cobble together the notion of an indie comic imprint, called Zeitgeist Comics, which would tell superhero stories in a universe that followed the Theses rules. Eventually we realized we were five writers and the only two artists we had talked to were too busy, and drifted away.
(I am going somewhere with this recitation, trust me).
Still afire with the ideological purity of my Lutheran Reformation of Superhero Comics, I then stumbled across Warren Ellis' Planetary.
It blew me away. It was a superhero comic, and a commentary about superhero comics, and the way it employed and wove together comics tropes to create this wondrous, luminary portrait of a strange world left me speechless. Warren Ellis is known for his cranky cynicism, but for all its dark moments and jaded characters, Planetary was a love song, was the world seen anew through the eyes of a child.
It occurred to me that there was something missing on my list of Theses, with their stringent adherence to realism. I had never said anything about a sense of wonder. And it is that exact sense of wonder that makes comics so great, the reason words and images together can be more powerful than they are separately.
While I was stuck in a long pharmaceutical study thinking about all this... that's when I wrote the script for my upcoming webcomics, Madcap Archaeology. It adheres solely and religiously to the Cool Stuff Theory of Literature -- I took every cool visual or storytelling notion I had in my head at the time, threw them all on the page, and then later tried to create an explanation for the coexistence of all these things.
Madcap Archaeology is set in a world where reality is unstable, and flux-storms rewrite the landscape at unpredictable intervals. A crew of four adventurers who salvage the detritus of the storms for valuables are hired for an even more dangerous and lucrative job -- to track down a legendary artifact which could help to stabilize the world. Fighting macro-sized microbes, riding dinosaurs, and dodging annoyed magnet-wielding wizards, rival squads of bounty hunters, and their own checkered pasts, our four heroes -- an escaped slave with a head full of magical secrets, an abdicated royal, a heretical paladin, and a carefree bard with absolutely no worries -- range across a surreal landscape and try to decide whether this mission of theirs is a noble quest or just another paycheck.
It's going to be pretty great.
A few years ago,
channel and I collaborated on Self-Loathing, a story about existential identity crises and clones, and the brief time for which it ran is still extremely satisfying to me. But in the end, it was less a webcomic and more a comic book being put up on the web one page at a time, and that contributed to its eventual demise.People may also know that I have very strong feelings about the storytelling process in serial comics, and have been a vehement objector to editorial interference since Brand New Day in Spider-Man tore the guts out of two decades of storytelling and left Peter Parker single and pathetic. DC Comics has done just as poorly. My most-posted essay is my Comics Theses, my own little Lars Von Trier Dogme 95 moment, where I make a few strongly worded suggestions about what storytelling tropes would give comics some verisimilitude and weight that I feel mainstream superhero comics are lacking. After that essay, I worked with several friends to cobble together the notion of an indie comic imprint, called Zeitgeist Comics, which would tell superhero stories in a universe that followed the Theses rules. Eventually we realized we were five writers and the only two artists we had talked to were too busy, and drifted away.
(I am going somewhere with this recitation, trust me).
Still afire with the ideological purity of my Lutheran Reformation of Superhero Comics, I then stumbled across Warren Ellis' Planetary.
It blew me away. It was a superhero comic, and a commentary about superhero comics, and the way it employed and wove together comics tropes to create this wondrous, luminary portrait of a strange world left me speechless. Warren Ellis is known for his cranky cynicism, but for all its dark moments and jaded characters, Planetary was a love song, was the world seen anew through the eyes of a child.
It occurred to me that there was something missing on my list of Theses, with their stringent adherence to realism. I had never said anything about a sense of wonder. And it is that exact sense of wonder that makes comics so great, the reason words and images together can be more powerful than they are separately.
While I was stuck in a long pharmaceutical study thinking about all this... that's when I wrote the script for my upcoming webcomics, Madcap Archaeology. It adheres solely and religiously to the Cool Stuff Theory of Literature -- I took every cool visual or storytelling notion I had in my head at the time, threw them all on the page, and then later tried to create an explanation for the coexistence of all these things.
Madcap Archaeology is set in a world where reality is unstable, and flux-storms rewrite the landscape at unpredictable intervals. A crew of four adventurers who salvage the detritus of the storms for valuables are hired for an even more dangerous and lucrative job -- to track down a legendary artifact which could help to stabilize the world. Fighting macro-sized microbes, riding dinosaurs, and dodging annoyed magnet-wielding wizards, rival squads of bounty hunters, and their own checkered pasts, our four heroes -- an escaped slave with a head full of magical secrets, an abdicated royal, a heretical paladin, and a carefree bard with absolutely no worries -- range across a surreal landscape and try to decide whether this mission of theirs is a noble quest or just another paycheck.
It's going to be pretty great.
