Hello, all. It’s Smug again. A month and a half later since the last news update, what’s changed?
Well, I went to the @DeuceLeGoose Game Gallery meetup. I saw some ugly, stupid, skinny, and dumb-looking guy in a pink shirt there. Met a lot of faces, new and old. Got absorbed in pinball. Went to a Round 1 afterwards with @Tamago and found out I’m bad at singing Pantera. Y’know, the usual.
Other than that. Biggest thing that’s happened is me getting back into reading comics. Right now, I’m making my way through both famous mangas as well as comics I’ve always had eyes on. (Immortal Hulk is great if you enjoy body horror and horror in general.) Connecting back to my roots, reading comics both in issues and in paperback, has made me more motivated to start doing better in a lot of areas of my life. Especially in art.
Something nagging at me was the feeling that I wasn’t going in the right direction for some of my characters. I’ve got ideas for some backstories for some of my characters, some of whom I felt did need it, and some of whom barely needed anything at all to work for me.
I’ll let you all in on a behind-the-scenes thing I’ve mulled over for literal months. Zaaru and Xandi, the big red man and the black girl, have changed a lot since their original inception. And not just because they’re shapeshifters.
Zaaru was an eldritch horror alien space pirate dad, running from the law. Xandi only existed to say Zaaru was a dad. And then there was a wife who I never did much with. Then, as time went on, I got interested in making Zaaru a single dad. I also made Xandi human, which was a spur of the moment thing. But it fit her really well.
But then the paranoia sets in. Thoughts about how others would see her, how the human-alien child-parent thing would work. And so on and so forth. I wasn’t having fun with it, because I was trying to turn something I loved and cared for that WASN’T designed for mass appeal into a product. Something I could sell to you. And that was wrong of me, because my characters are mine. They’re not meant for sale.
Could I do it? Sure, if I gave enough of a shit about that. I could make a grand story like Marvel does with its characters. But that’s Marvel. That’s not just one man. That’s the work of several people, sometimes dozens. And I’m just one guy having fun on his own, making it up as I go along. You can’t commodify that. You can’t force the fun to happen.
That was my biggest problem. The thought that I was obligated, even forced to make something as a product to be accepted produced some serious stress and anxiety. I began hating drawing my characters, because I wasn’t thinking of stuff for them to do, but how I’d be able to “maximize their potential.”
And it’s funny I mention Marvel. Because I’ve been reading and learning more about the Fantastic Four. How they were made, how the characters grew as the decades went by, and how different authors handled their origins and history. As my favorite team, the Four helped me understand that you don’t always get it right the first time, and art is more than just making something for other people. It’s about sharing your creativity with others, and encouraging them to do the same. It’s about sharing your positivity with others. That’s what the FF are about. That’s why they’re my favorite comic book characters.
That was one of the many trivial and pointless paranoid thought-storms that’ve been keeping me held back. There’s times when you really don’t need to overcomplicate things. Sometimes, the solution is just to have some fun and stop pretending you care.
Long story short, more art that isn’t the usual Ryl’Athels and Klash soon. And whoever that pink shirt guy was, if you see him out in the wild, tell him he sucks and he smells bad.