Art Journal 029: On Writing, Regrets and Repair

If there is one major thing I learned from making a webcomic it’s how much things can change the longer you work on something.  Writing a story comic is a long-term endeavor whose length isn’t readily apparent from the start, or even at the halfway point, especially if you’re writing a single narrative as opposed to a daily strip.  And when you work on something for that long, inevitably you grow, your vision changes and your ideas change, and after a point you’re no longer the person you were when you started writing your project.  Growing as a creator is inevitable, and growing your work is a natural part of growing up, but when you commit to a project that spans multiple years you’ll find yourself working with committed ideas and content a younger and less-insightful you laid the groundwork for, and it’s up to you to take what’s there and make something great out of it.  This week I’d like to write a little bit about the duality of working as a long-term creator and the novice source of our work, how we can come to regret our old decisions and the way we steer them towards the future.  And by “we” I mostly mean “me”.  This is my story.  It might contain a few very minor thematic spoilers, but I’ll try to keep that to a minimum. I won’t ruin surprises, but I will talk about my intentions.

Dead Winter is a comic I started early in 2007. I’d been following webcomics for many years near the end of highschool and on through college, and I decided to make my own when an attempt at a career in freelance illustration had been having more downs than ups.  I decided I’d give working for myself a try and set out creating a comic that would be fun to work on and something that flows easily from my life experiences.  The early 2000’s were still the Wild West years of webcomics where you saw comics about every kind of thing, and I didn’t recall ever seeing a comic with a zombie setting so I decided I’d fill that niche!  In 2007 I was really big into playing World of Darkness and other tabletop games with my friends so “zombies” seemed like a good root genre to work from.  At the time I was working as a bowling alley mechanic, so the theme of “working-class survival protagonist” stemmed from those experience. This was who I was when I started and that’s the seed my comic story grew from.

In hindsight my biggest regret in writing my comic is “the z-word”.  I started Dead Winter shortly before the zombie thing took off and became ubiquitous and tiresome, and I believe that has definitely hurt me as someone writing what I write.  A lot of overdone zombie literature and media places a big emphasis on either the pits of despair, the enactment of violent revenge-fantasy or an almost pornographic focus on gore- I’ve had some early pages where I was finding my tone but in contrast I’ve always wanted my comic to be hopeful, energetic and genuinely fun.  This makes my comic a bit of a hard sell to a market who increasingly grew tired of “the zombie thing”, but I was always encouraged by people who read it “and don’t normally like zombie stuff”, but said they enjoy it!  I got this a lot, it told me I was on the right track so I pushed forward with it, but ultimately if I could go back in time and change one thing about my comic, it would be the zombies. I regret the zombies and the baggage that came with them.

I was never discouraged enough by my regrets to abandon my work, however.  I enjoy the setting and the characters are fun, and the people who read it tend to enjoy it, so I stuck with it, but I’ve always read people’s criticisms and comments and tried to adjust the ingredients in my recipe to make the best of what I started, and in the case of my number one regret, that meant downplaying the zombies a lot.  This was my first and biggest story “repair” decision, the zombies had to go. I don’t regret everything about the setting because I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of developing frontier civilizations and reconstructing a new world from the pieces of the old one- and that has been a theme from the start- but hitching zombies to it brought all the baggage in the world along with it.  So they became a background element, a catalyst or set pieces for the kinetic action I love to draw, and I started to flesh out the factional aspect of the world around our survivors.  The cops, the national guard, the Omnimart crew, the ponchos and even our heroes themselves, giving them iconic emblems to wear on their persons to reinforce the idea of groups over zombies.  Further down the line I wanted to develop the survivor-town of Tombstone and the social drama therein, and use that as a space to taper off the zombies entirely- the weaker ones die but successive generations of zombie are smarter and faster and more predatory, but far fewer in numbers. There’s a theme of reducing quantity and increasing quality, and that will play out in the near-future narrative, that way they can still play a useful role as narrative catalysts but I can also get away from the negative that comes with them.  That’s my repair solution for my zombie regret.  

It might be weird for a reader to hear but one of my other major regrets with my story is Black Monday.  When I was initially planning the comic I had drawn up Liz and Monday as a contrasting pair, but admittedly Liz had a bit more fleshing-out since her story was more directly from my own experiences- educated artist unable to find work, relying on a low-level labor job to make ends meet. That was basically me when I started, so that gave me plenty of ground to flesh Liz out into a whole-person character. But I also wanted to let her be someone who deplores violence and does not descend into the gung-ho shoot-em-up pits so many other zombie protagonists fall into.  But on the other hand, I really liked drawing shootouts! I like action movies, I played tons of actiony tabletop games and I admittedly grew up in a home where I became acquainted with firearms very early- I know a lot about how they work and the laws and culture surrounding them, and the responsibility that comes with them. I grew up around gun culture and I liked snappy movie shootouts, so I wanted to draw something like that and I didn’t want to compromise or discredit a character voice who opposes the grievous misuse of these tools- which was an angle I didn’t think had been explored in post-civilization stories where might often simply meant right.  Black Monday was created to be a vessel for drawing the action-movie shootout scenes in my comic, a man with a cold, deplorable personality who people seemed to have latched onto in spite of.  It’s always been a bit of a deconstruction of the gunslinger trope to keep his expression dead-neutral and emotionless, only smiling when something plot-relevant came up, to contrast Liz and her lively love of life and living.  They were always meant to snip back and forth at each other, stuck together but not overly fond of one another, so an exercise in contrasts worked well towards these ends.

What I regret about Monday in particular is the job I gave him.  When I started writing the comic I did not have “hired gun” in mind for this character, that actually came up after I’d drawn a few pages and thought “okay, who is this guy, why does he carry these guns and why would someone be chasing him around?”  One of my early original thoughts was to cast him as a disgruntled stockbroker who lost everything to deception, but at the time I was also a big fan of Trigun of all things (ha ha), and the idea of themed killers was fresh on my mind, so I went the assassin route and that planted the seeds for characters like Yuri and Derek and Sixgun Johnny Rhythm.  The big regret here is when you describe the central cast you have a waitress, a nurse, a plumber… and a contract killer.  He’s a bit of an odd man out in the plot, and it throws a bit of a wrench into the “ordinary working job” theme I’d started with, so as I grew older and my story fleshed out, I thought, damn, why did I give this guy such an action-movie job in the first place?  

This wasn’t an unfixable problem, however.  Like my other regrets, I took what 2007 Me gave me and thought how I could wrangle it in the best direction, so I got to fine-tuning his story, his involvement in the main story and his relationship with Lizzie.  They’d always been meant to begrudgingly work together towards a common end, but I’d only loosely defined what that end actually was.  My narrative fix for Monday as the odd man out of the group, but still the other important character with red, was to basically make him the story’s true antagonist.  Lizzie is looking for her father, but Monday is also looking for her father.  The group’s bad guy is actually the story’s “bad guy”, but he’s not played up as an overt Disney villain. He’s a professional killer, he’s emotionally distant but clever and has integrated himself into a group of travelers; he basically has the perfect cover to do his thing and Lizzie is leading him right along with her.  The way I play with their relationship includes more “tells” and subtle cues as to Monday’s true purpose, and Lizzie’s dislike of him skirting just on the border of the truth.  In the long run I think it’ll be an interesting take on a protagonist/antagonist relationship in a story, but it was largely born out of a need to figure out what to do with the guy whose shtick is he’s not a good person who does bad things.  I brought him on as an excuse to draw shootouts, but as the story evolved he became a much more valuable true-villain character, one who doesn’t fit with the group in more ways than just his occupational theme.  I just had to a bit of tinkering and retooling to link his occupation background as a killer with Lizzie’s primary goal of finding her father to make a more compelling overarching storyline than what I started with.

I’ve come a long way from where I started making comics, and I’ve grown both as a writer and a person since then. My comic as it began and my comic as it currently stands are also fairly different comics, but in the process of getting here I recognized changes I wanted to make and thought of ways I could seamlessly- or as smoothly as possible- take what I started with and build something bigger out of it without scrapping the work and starting something totally new from the ground up.  I’ve always tried to keep my setting lively and filled with potential so I’d have plenty of thread to draw from when weaving future stories, so I had some scrap cloth to work with when patching together what I ultimately wanted to do with my comic, even when that ultimate end shifted with time. I believe this is an important writing skill for any long-term project where pieces are rather locked in time, to be able to work not with the ideal setting but with the one you’ve created for yourself.  We all have regrets, even as creators, but a regret is not the end of the line for your work, but rather an opportunity to make the work yet to come even better than you’d originally planned!