Monday, May 12, 2008

New City Arts comic novella



My new comic is under way! City Arts magazine was so happy with the response to "The Flitcraft Parable" and the way it turned out that they asked me shortly after it was finished if I'd be interested in doing a 12 part story. They are increasing publication to go monthly and cover Seattle and Bellevue/Eastside as well as Tacoma. Who could resist. Cartoonist accepts offer, comedy ensues!
My first idea was to do another detective strip like Flitcraft, but a good friend of mine said,"You've done two, people know you for tat. You do another and you'll be BRANDED!" So I went the other way, and after months of working on ideas I finally came up with a romance story. Ahh, sweet love!
Of course that was just the start. Initially it was to be a sort of romance ala Philip K. Dick story, with a somewhat circular plot mimicking song structure (say wha!?)
Yeah, well, that was a thought. So over the course of developing the story characters disappeared, merged, split,grew and shrunk. I also fell into the trap of desperately holding onto bits of dialog. So back and forth with the editor, me, and my "In-House-Art Director", till me likkle head was in a whirl! But now the characters are set, all 12 parts outlined, the first strip is written and on the drawing board.
The title is "Near Art", which oddly enough is part of a line of dialog that was pried from my cold dead hands (how to really mangle a metaphor!). It was used as sort of a joke placeholder and has really taken on a greater value and added more meaning to the strip.
So this is the first bit. I plan to post more "Near Art" art in the future.

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