Fall break was pretty perfect, even if I did end up with an oozy knee wound. I wasn't running or performing any kind of physically complex maneuver, just walking, and I fell over. On my knee. Good news! I didn't cry. And now I have a pair of tights with some legitimate battle damage. I wonder if I get marked down for talking about things like this on my blog. But in all seriousness- oozy.
So a little while ago Erica brought up a good point- what's so wrong with autobiographical stories? I guess I don't want to talk about myself and get credit for it, yo know? I do it enough already. And so many people do it. So many boring boring people. But oh well. It's easy, and I have loads I could say.
So here are my ideas as far as fictional stories go:
1. The Renter- Which I did last year, and I plan on re-doing. It's about a girl who has to move out of her house due to her landlord's wishes, and while she's packing and stuff she encounters this little creature. And she tries to kill it but then doesn't. Yeah it works better as a comic than it does as a summary.
2. Untitled snow castle project- This is also a story I did earlier but never finished and I want to re-do. It's about a woman who lives across an alleyway from an empty lot. In the wintertime, two awful children build an impenetrable snow castle and constantly attack the woman with snowballs anytime she passes. In the end she melts the snow castle with her hair dryer. And then something else happens- I don't want to ruin it.
3. Backwards story- I really want to do a story that runs backwards. And while I was thinking about this, I decided it would be fun it it happened on a train. I keep randomly developing this one, bit by bit. I think it's going to be the most fantastical- Like, the train is the only way to get to this small village in the mountains where a masquerade is held annually, and people are allowed to come by special invitation only. Fun, right? It would be set in the fall. Honestly every time I think of a crazy fun fantastic story like this it is always always set in the fall. I love fall.
Nonfiction. Well, semi-non-fiction.
1. Googling Your Name- a story about the dangers of girlish obsession. This won't be exactly true-to-life, but it will be derived from real elements...
2. Another untitled project. This one is going to be about artistic frustration. Much along the lines of Adaptation, except for comics. How art just isn't a fun time for some people, but we have to do it anyway.
3. I'm not so sure about this last one. I thought I would tell this story about a really bad night I had after eating too many mushrooms. Uh....but that's kind of annoying, isn't it? The thing is, I think my reaction to them really says something about me. I don't know, I might change this.
Pshhh.
I just watched The Ring for the zillionth time. I really want to write horror comics someday.
EDIT: I just remembered Jenny asked me why I don't like manga. Well, I do. I mean, some of it I do. I've had a rough relationship with manga and anime, we'll say. I think there's a lot of good stuff out there. Everyone knows that. (That's right, everyone.) But for a period of my creative life I got really sucked into not only drawing in a manga/anime style, but writing in that style. Really melodramatic stuff. Emo kids that could turn into giant animals. Oh my God, I shouldn't say things like that in a public space.
I think I maybe gave anime and manga up because I was sick of being so weird, and I never wanted to look back. I just have bad associations with it, it's nothing personal. (It's not you, anime/manga, it's me) And now if I try to watch it or get into it I can't. anime tends to be really poorly produced. Oh, what about Miyazaki movies, they say. The only thing that makes a Miyazaki movie "anime" is its being made in Japan. Did that sentence make sense? Plus when I spent all that time drawing girls who were also part...dragon and had huge eyes and tiny noses and big old boobies, I was ignoring what people actually look like. Which a mistake a lot of kids who want to go around drawing anime make. Actual anime makers don't start out their art careers drawing cartoons. They start by drawing real people.
Illustrators build success on having a distinct style. Is anime-style distinct to me? Uh, no. I don't care how popular drawing anime fart porn would make me among the plebs of deviantart. I want an actual sort of career. Can you name a lot of American cartoonists who are making bank on drawing in a manga style? Fred Gallagher doesn't count. (What a fucker.)
Speaking of American anime, I do love love love Avatar. I don't know what to say about that.
The original the Ring? or the one with Naomi Watts. I remember not liking TVs for a while after I watched it.
ReplyDeleteI like the train and masquerade one.
The snow castle story and the one about Googling yourself sound the most interesting to me. Mostly because I relate to those the most and they sound like they could be really entertaining. With the Google story I would worry about too many frames being the character in front of a computer screen. I don't know the details but I would hope the affects of the googling would work its way into real life situations?
ReplyDeleteI agree with Erica that there's nothing wrong with autobiographical stories if you do them right, and I agree with Maggie's comments about the Googling story. So far that one sounds like it's interesting as a story, but I'm having trouble picturing it how it would go as a comic.
ReplyDeleteNon-fiction story #2 sounds like a theme running through a story, rather than a full-fledged story in itself. That may be just the quick description here. For #3, I'd say, if it's a fun story, go ahead and do it.
What really struck me is that the fiction stories feel more developed as stories in your descriptions, as though you've already thought about how they'll look, where the non-fiction ones feel more like initial ideas. Is that true, or are you just not going into detail on the non-fiction ideas?