Not dead, just busy. Mostly been working on writing and planning, and the odd hasty sketch. Ah, but I have to post something, so here’s this.
Top right text is song lyrics from “Veneficium” by Lacuna Coil. Mostly just a mood note for myself.
I've been putting most of my effort into Threads and Instagram the past year, and it feels like pulling teeth; if I'm inactive for a day, nobody sees me, and the near 500 followers I supposedly have don't mean jack diddly squat if my art is still being seen there by a single-digit number of people. Meanwhile, I post a single-digit number of times on here, and somehow there's 50 to 100 notifications every time I come back. Feels like I've been beating my head against a brick wall instead of walking through an open door. Got me thinking I should change my posting priorities.
Social media is a chore and I hate doing it, but it feels like all the other avenues for artists have been walled off by our technocratic dystopian nightmare hellscape.
Well, I do like to write longer explanations and ramblings about what I'm working on, so I'll be a lot more active on here going forward. I'll also be tagging posts with the title of the related project. Not trying to make myself a hashtag or any other delusion of fame, I just think it's a good idea for the sake of organization.
I've had an idea for a cover or poster stuck in my head for a long time now. This isn't exactly what I envisioned, but the pose I was thinking of before felt more hopeless and world-weary, while the pose I'm moving toward in the sketches is more dangerous. Sadie is the sort of person who chooses violence, so this just wound up feeling more 'honest' to the character.
I started planning this comic way back in 2019, and it's been through some turbulent changes since then. It was supposed to be a short spoof of harem rom-coms like Bokuben, with a protagonist who was too blunt and direct to let any misunderstandings get out of hand. One of the heroines wound up being so dominant a personality that she wound up stealing away the Protagonist role. Inspired by Tristan & Isolde, it shifted into a darker comedy about people falling in love after one plotted to murder the other.
That plan also fell by the wayside. I've thought of ways to explain the transformation (and transformation certainly the word I think fits best) of my story. The word I've settled on is "honesty." Writing the characters as sources of comedy, and the circumstances as humorous (albeit amid grim topics) felt dishonest.
I'm aware some authors have described their characters as imaginary friends, or real people met through some communion with another world. I don't know that I would be so prosaic. Rather, as my pen is laying down a description of a scene, some quieter part of my mind speaks up and corrects me, tells me "no, that isn't what would happen, no she wouldn't do that, no no no, you're lying. This world and these people simply aren't the way you want them to be." That's what I mean by 'honest' writing. I am discovering, consciously, what my unconscious mind has already decided on.
I wanted to write a story that was light and fluffy and palatable and marketable, but if I did, I would be lying through my art. I'm ashamed, to some degree, of what I'm making. Sadie is an evil person in an evil world; a monster that can only be sympathized with by contrast of the monsters that surround her. It's edgy, and grim, and all the things I dislike as a reader, all the things that are too easy to lean on when writing shallow slop. I worry that my life's work will be looked at as a mistake, or the pathetic arrested juvenilia of a man too ignorant of his own limits to expand them. But to correct these things, to sand away the rough burrs of raw metal would be to bury the truth of it. An ugly, awful monster is clawing its bloody way into the world through me, and to persist in trying to change it is to lie about the nature of the thing.
The story begins in a setting that is familiar enough: a city. A wide, flat city built on industry, with veins full of crime and a beating heart of greed. At the outset, Sadie's world is figuratively destroyed. From there, she becomes a bottomless hole in the bottom of the world, pulling and tearing at reality until it crumbles and disappears. By the end of the story, she will have burned the world to the ground and swallowed a potion of its ashes. And, if I tell this ugly, honest story effectively, if my mad gambit pans out, I hope my readers will cheer for this monster.
For posterity, I want to acknowledge some influences. I mentioned Bokuben, and I'll shout out Nisekoi. They were still the first step, even if the final product might be unrecognizable, but their DNA is in here somewhere.
Next, H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Lovecraft for his namesake cosmic horrors, the fear of something beyond all comprehension noticing us, to our detriment. Howard for Conan The Barbarian, Sword and Sorcery, the progenitor of dark fantasy -- and personally, most of all, for the poem "The Symbol" the terrible apocalyptic mood of which seems most relevant of all.
Nadia Bulkin's story "Red Goat, Black Goat" provided a great deal to the existential threat at the core of the story, and also gave me the name and motif for my villain, "Mother." I won't spoil the story more than I have to, to make my point. Go read it, go buy Nadia's books, she is phenomenal. A character exclaims "The goat is our real mother! She is everyone's *real* mother!" This declaration follows some truly shocking violence, and that horror, that usurping, and that cruel sense of possession and ownership, was the seed that sprouted into my own monstrosity.
In T.E.D. Klein's novella, "Nadelman's God," the title character (in his youth) conjectures that God is not loving, but cruel. That He must delight in pain and suffering, that the world is a torture chamber fashioned by an omnipotent sadist. As a middle-aged man, Nadelman experiences a series of inexplicable episodes involving a rock band, a stalker, and a golem of garbage that compound to suggest his younger self may have been closer to the truth than he ever believed. He has, indirectly, created an avatar through which this Hungering God can directly inflict pain and suffering on victims, no longer trapped outside and forced to suggest its cruelty, it is now free to walk the world and distribute its murderous miracles in a more intimate fashion. The story ends with Nadelman in a mad panic to escape the deity he prophesied, running into a synagogue and hiding among the people attending Sunday service. I was underwhelmed by the conclusion, but came to appreciate it more as I thought about it in the days and years after. Is he only looking to escape the physical threat, or is he desperately trying to find the faith he rejected now that he's been exposed to something that makes it impossible? While Nadia Bulkin provided me with an aesthetic and motif for my villain, Klein inspired her motivations. I am, at this point, spoiling a story I plan to tell over the course of the next decade of my life. Oh well.
A small aside, the choice of a spear is inspired by Moby Dick, first and foremost. Ahab challenges God, with a spear forged from the steel of horseshoe nails and used razor blades, tempered in fire stoked by the oil of dead flesh and quenched not in water but human blood, and set to its purpose with the dedication "Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!" -- I baptize you not in the name of The Father, but in the name of The Devil. Have you read Moby Dick? It's the most Heavy Metal thing I've ever seen, it's absolutely apocalyptic.
Lastly, I want to mention a broader concept. Not the work of one author, but a religious motif I find fascinating. Chaos, and Chaoskampf. Chaos, in the Greek Cosmogony, was the Prime Material from which all of reality was forged. All that we can observe, all that exists in our world, our universe, our reality, is Order. All the infinite bottomless darkness beyond our comprehension, is Chaos. It is a difficult concept to describe because, as beings of Order, we cannot observe or comprehend Chaos. Perhaps understanding it would destroy us outright, tear apart our material and return it to the Absolute Nothing the creator sculpted into us. Chaoskampf, then, is an extrapolated concept, tell me if you've heard this one before: a great dragon or serpent, rising from water and breathing fire, does battle with a warrior god, who wields lightning, at the outset of the world. The god destroys the dragon, and uses its bones and blood as the foundation of the world. When the time comes for the world to end, the dragon returns, destroys the warrior that had vanquished it and proceeds to burn, break, drown or swallow the world. Chaoskampf is not exclusive the Greeks and Romans, but also found in Judaism Christianity and Islam, as well as Shintoism, Hinduism, Norse Odinism, Dynastic Egypt, virtually every civilization that descended from the migration out of Africa along the Kurgan Hypothesis. I am, by no means, writing an exhaustive list of the cultures that exhibit the motif. Please understand that I'm not intending to besmirch anyone's culture, history or faith, nor am I implying that the events hinted at truly happened in my grossly simplified description; I am, in broad strokes, gushing about something so vast and obscure that it feels truly Lovecraftian, truly Cosmic, while still very much being a part of our material reality. Whether you believe any of these accounts directly, it is readily observable that these parallels exist. And what I find most compelling is the conflict itself.
Post script, I've realized that Moby Dick invokes the motif of Chaoskampf, even directly referring to the whale with the title "Leviathan," the name of the sea-serpent that God recalls battling in the book of Job; but has Ahab and the Whale reflecting one another, both of them being great Destroyers, both of them being things of the primordial sea.
And, as I'm sure some readers will have realized, Chaoskampf is also the inspiration for Dragon's Dogma, The Elder Scrolls, and (I'm sure) countless other works of fantasy fiction and their mythological frameworks. It's an infectious idea. A memetic virus that replicates, mutates, and transmits. The tendency to repeat and shift while remaining recognizable across languages and cultures and whole millennia, that's what I love about the whole thing.
Hinduism, in particular, holds that the world begins and ends with the Naga, Ananta Shesha, swallowing the world. The world exists in cycles, or Kalpas, wherein the creation of a world cannot begin without the destruction of its predecessor. Unpleasant perhaps for the people alive at the end, but an inevitable and inextricable component of creation.
So here is Sadie Doherty. An ordinary girl, and the end of the world. A dragon whose rage and hate is beyond all mete and fathom. To write her as anything else would be a lie.
turnnoffyourmind
areudirty
origamiaround
prguitarman
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
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