filler 58

(EDIT: fixed the number from 57 to 58, forgot about that last comic i drew for a second.)

so i started this on tuesday on a burst of inspiration (hence another folie a dupe comic) and i wrote up a nice, big comment section on this, eventually that got accidentally deleted trying to fix a tablet malfunction, which felt like sucking the motivation out of me to finish, but here it is because i feel like i will never finish this if i start something else and it was 70% done on the first day. i'll just try to recreate what i said before.

i really, really like non-linear storytelling, but it's hard to pull off -- high risk, high reward and all. this particular comic wasn't scripted at all, but a collection of memories and events that were all related to, you know, some sort of cumulative understanding or belief.
i'm going to see if drawing this gave me any kind of meaningful experience trying to draw the comic with izzi and a squirrel that i drew on-stream this month. i'm still not sure how i would script something like this in advance, but i'd go out on a limb and say it'd probably be useful to write out the general theme process in narrative form, outline the threads following that structure, then weave them together... which isn't really as intelligible as the way i expressed it the first time.
this comic, i want to say, for example, had about 6 "threads" -- 1) memories and remembering, both literally and thematically; 2) "the red voice"; 3) question-and-answer motif through interactions with contra and The Internet as well as interactions between gray and dupe; 4) relatedly, repetition without exactness, maybe more simply described as "noticing patterns"; 5) animals as a theme; and 6) i don't remember what the sixth one was now and i'm sure it'll be super obvious what it was as soon as i publish this but we'll say it's observable behavior contrasted against internal experience or something.
i was happy with most of this when working on it, but i think the worst parts were figuring out how to end it in a satisfying way when i felt exhausted (i've noticed that i seem to fall flat on my endings a lot just because i am completely run ragged by the end and just want it to be over >_>) and the part where dupe is ripping out pages in a book -- it's supposed to show after that dupe noticing that even though every page is destroyed the same way, they end up ripping in different ways... but it came out just looking like they were just ripping up a book emotionlessly for no reason.
although i am still very, very upset about losing what i wrote as commentary originally because this is all not nearly as thoughtful and i had explicitly done it so i didn't lose the thoughts and this didn't happen by putting it off... i'd recommend if anybody wants to try less linear storytelling to not try to make sure every part is woven together equally for the sake of some kind of narrative symmetry.

as a side note, drawing dupe at different ages is... interesting. i usually reference how i drew them at any given age and mimic the style for teenage and early 20s ages, but for small kid ages, it's kind of a free-for-all. i tend to mimic how they looked on early refs (kind of a torpedo shape profile) but with the childishness turned up.
i also did the static overlay here again, but tried something different by just airbrushing away some of the static in places of visual interest, to try leading the eye more naturally, which i think worked well enough.

i'm hoping practicing with the weirder stuff now gives me some skills to make the real stories i do more interesting... again, i really do like non-linear narratives, which i feel like i've grown to like more as my brain starts to finish all of its development, because the tone feels more introspective and understanding how so many factors add up to even small things in life.
COMICS i feel are especially good for this kind of narrative mode because your reader already has to piece together scraps of information just due to how comics are constructed, but it has the benefit of VISUAL motifs that prose can sometimes fail to pull off subtly (first example off the top of my head is the pill-to-moon transition on drop-out). you can draw attention to relations between themes or objects or events just by giving them a similar shape or even color and putting them side-by-side in a pretty unique way to comics.
anyway, sorry for the stumbling already, money's been tight, which means food's been tight and stress has been high, me and my wife have been looking for apartments and coordinating with a third person in another state, and i'm still getting back into the swing of things. the good news is i finished my backlog of commissions and thank-you doodles this week, too, so i wasn't doing nothing!