#ffak faq

[kosmicdream]

I got this ask on curiouscat but.. the site wont let me post my reply?? so i just decided to put it here since i dont get a lot of questions these days. so i like to answer them when i actually have something more to say. this one also went kinda off topic but w/e.

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Q: How do you keep the motivation to work on all your long comics? I always start and then abandon a project cause another distracts me or I feel unsatisfied with the result... I admire your commitment so much!

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Aw, thank you! I really appreciate it. But don’t get too discouraged.. I get distracted too! I currently have 9 ongoing comic projects with 2 more i eagerly want to start drawing, and at least a dozen concepts on the backburner that have been around for sometimes over a decade. I think that what I’ve found, is that starting a new comic takes so much time. It takes a lot of time to get a story really rolling, time to learn how to draw the story how you want and in a weird way - having a longer comic you’ve had more experience with, you can pull a lot more things from. I generally find that FFAK and NRD are much easier comics for me to work on because of all those years of experience with them. But it still can get demoralizing if i focus too much on the faults or how long I still have to go. Sometimes its easy to feel that readers have lost interest and moved on, or its just not as good as you wanted it to be, ect. If you look for reasons like that, reasons to demotivate you, you’ll find them in spades.So i try my best to NOT do that, because working on a comic is hard enough.

In a weird way, when i sometimes find myself in the pit of struggles like this - i realize every author ive ever read has been in the same shoes as me. There is no artist that just magically has it easier and never runs into some challenges like this, some challenges can never be overcome because they’re part of the experience of making the project. There’s limitations involved and things change overtime. You won’t always have the same experience with the same story as you make it, or the same feelings involved. Sometimes that's really hard to let go of, if you feel the earlier years were so much better than the struggles you have now. I know I faced that hurdle with FFAK and I am currently going through that with NRD, but even the harder times do change too. It never gets easy to make a comic, but it changes. 

With FFAK, i don’t honestly know how I will finish the complete story. I often struggle too, especially with the third (final) arc, if it really is good enough. In a way, a lot of places of it feel incomplete and rushed, so I tend to worry a lot about how that will go. However, I never thought i’d have a comic like FFAK in the first place, so i feel really lucky to have made it this far at all. Endings do scare me, as there’s just so much pressure involved to deliver and even reach it at all, that it feels almost like an impossible fantasy to pull off in a satisfying manner to yourself or the readers. However, I do think I’ve gotten more excited to reach endings than I used to be even a couple years ago, and I have gotten more forgiving of myself for not being perfect at it. No matter what I manage to make, I’m going to have my own critiques of it because there’s improvements to be made in all aspects of the story. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can actually do so I can learn from it and be more confident in the future. 

FFAK also has such a huge cast, it can be a technical nightmare to figure out. I dont envy authors like GRRM that have a seemingly endless cast to deal with. I already have so much of my hands full with what is essentially one family. And I know for my other comics that I’ve made, the cast has never gotten as out of hand as FFAK’s. But I dont mind having FFAK be like this, because it has been part of my enjoyment of writing the story too. FFAK is generally very motivating because I always have something I’m excited to share about it, and every small progress is a big reward for me. I’ve put a lot of years of work into ARC2 and i am desperate to get to share it with everyone, so I hope readers will enjoy what is to come for the future of the story even though it already is a decade old at this point.

[kosmicdream]

I think you might have answered this one but how much time has passed in the current events of ffak since the beginning of the comic?

the way i see it, there's two answers to this question. """technically""" speaking, its only been about two weeks since the comic started on page 1 and we are now on chapter 16. but since the story of FFAK is largely nonlinear (im not sure the exact page number, but i wouldnt be surprised if more than 50% of it is the past) - and most of the comic has been set in the past at some stage - its been about 1100 years since the story or "plot" of FFAK began. The "First day" i joke about is finished now. It ended on 7862. No i wont be doing any more days that long, that was largely unplanned but i decided to fully commit to it several years ago. but now its done.. w00t! ARC2 will be largely "in the present" but there will still be some scenes, but mostly not covering any totally "unknown" material and more just to illustrate more in depth what happened during certain times for clarity and entertainment.

[kosmicdream]

which character do you think is the most failgirl (does not have to be a girl)

normally id say aeschylus, but i think ducky actually is the one with the crown right now

[kosmicdream]

Also another BURNING question

Would you say that Knife, in the current point in time, dislikes Leadman, or still sees him as his dad, or is it more like indifference/he’s put their history behind him, or neither

Oh boy. Let me tell you, certifiedcuntboy, knife is all kinds of messed up in the present day due to leadman. Of course, they’ve always had a bit of a challenging dynamic - knife himself has always struggled with either trying to be “the mature one” while also deeply idolizing leadman’s choices, and in the end being one of the driving forces to keep Leadman in power as a “good king.” I think for a long time, he really did believe in a hope that leadman would be a person who could see and empathize with anyone, and would be a great leader because of that. But watching him crumble from the responsibility of the position (which honestly, was never right for him in the first place), as well as not being able to handle his immortality, was both deeply painful and disappointing to watch. Knife has long considered Leadman, as his father, or even Leadman as a person to be dead - which is odd considering leadman .. isn’t. Obviously leadman is not all there! But sometimes he still is, a bit. but Knife also refuses to believe the kind of person Leadman has become now - so he refuses to really believe that he really is like, who he is. And you know when Knife’s kinda made up his mind about something like that, he sees it as an absolute fact lol. Knife has considered killing him, of course, but its always something he’s “put off” in a way that, i mean, for a person who has killed so much of his family - its a bit weird that he would delay that inevitable outcome. There’s a lot of feelings Knife is avoiding there, but in the end i think it boils down to that Knife doesnt know what to do with the world or what to do about the outcome of the world without Leadman there. He might be effectively, kinda useless as a “real” leader, but his symbolic power and hold on the kingdom is still very strong. He is a foundational block for a lot of systems that keep things together, so removing him would certainly be a radical change and doesnt seem like one Knife has decided is worth going for yet. Plus like leadman is crazy strong, and there’s also a lot of crazy strong people who would retaliate for him doing something like that. So it would basically be a murder suicide, at best. If Knife didn’t have spoon and fork in his life, I think it would have happened by now. But obviously, he has his own family to consider too. Even if he’s been avoiding them by faking his own death, i think in a way he expects that to one day happen, that he’d give them that kind of pain. He’s trying his best to let go of them and “do the right thing”, but also cant commit cuz i think deep down he also knows it isn’t the right thing. He has no idea what the right thing is to do in this situation, he's stuck. So Knife repeats the cycle of his own father by being there, but also not. Being dead, but also not.

[kosmicdream]

How did 3 become Galore? Did celadon eat her? I dont know if this was explained already or is yet to be revealed, but I always wondered !

If unable to answer, what inspired you to make hekatons in the first place? :]

Yup, Celadon ate Galore. While it was never shown on screen (although I do plan to show more of the “crimson past” timeline in the future) - #2 reveals this fact in this scene in chapter 14.

The hekatons were inspired because I wanted to have a species that "were created on the spot" like a bolt of lightning from god. i wanted to understand how something like that might feel, and what problems would happen because of it, because that is a very unnatural way for life to happen. 

As the idea developed for hekatons, i wanted it to be about a close family - originally there was only going to be 3 hekatons - Knife, Fork, Spoon - where Knife was actually the youngest sibling, Spoon was the oldest brother and Fork was the middle child. Fork was a lot more crude & cruel (which is why his personality is that more in the early chapters) and Spoon’s personality was ONLY that of the deadpan one in the start of the comic. Knife was a curious, goofy, but also deeply cynical and the strongest of the three. Then, I started to feel conflicted about Fork/Knife’s position in the ages, and wanted Fork to be the youngest. As I thought about their dynamic, it felt a lot more natural to me that Knife adopted fork, and fork was very young at the time. That made me think, if they were father and adopted son, that must mean there might be a lot more hekatons than just 3. That kind of blew my mind, so I started to consider the idea that hekatons had already BEEN around - and for a long time! That changed a lot haha. OH! And, originally, the king worm that made the hekatons was actually Dollop’s King, and Dollop was going to be sort of their “cousins” (not actually cousins, but just both species would be made by the same worm.) I also always imagined the hekatons as being eggs, like answering the "what came first, the chicken or the egg?" where it actually had an answer. the egg, of course! which creates a consequence, since a choice was made. Just as "the chicken" would also have consequence, just a different one. (if this makes sense lmao) I got into more of the idea that the three of them were just a family, but all of them had experienced a type of.. Deep loss. Or some kind of pain in their hearts that they were dealing with. Which informed me on how I wanted them to look. Spoon’s design was the first one that came to me, as I wanted to write a man that was half a man, and so I kind of built the “rules” of a hekaton body based on the premise of like.. A species that works in a way where you can survive being cut down the middle. Much about spoon and his story, and what i wanted to achieve with his story, informed the “powers” and physiology of the hekaton’s body. Fork’s story, where he has no eyes, informed the sex/gender themes for hekatons, how they breed and sight/hearing aspects of a Hekaton.. And knife carries more of the like, history and thematic struggles of the species, which is the foundational aspect. Ahha, i feel like i kind of got off track with this answer, but that’s sort of the beginning block stages for how the hekaton species were invented, and what pushed them to look and be written as they do now.

[kosmicdream]

Do any characters have canonical birthdays aside from Knife....

n.. not really.. sorry.............. i know some of the characters signs so i'll know the month and year, but i dont think i ever decided exact days for a lot of characters. for other signs i can remember off the top of my head, simon is a scorpio, fork is a leo (altho i think i also used to say he was a libra too lol) , rome is a capricorn and crimson is a sagittarius, paper is gemini and king is aries.

[kosmicdream]

i dont have a question but ffak enriches my life, thankyou for scrawling tomes of hideous beasts and tortured machines. its my favorite comic and ive reread it like 4 times. heres a pixel celadon based on page 6473 to show my appreciation

omg yes. thank you for a pixel of my awful triangle child. she looks beautiful. i will now continue to draw 424234872934823428471948172948124124 more pages of my hideous beasts and tortured machines with no end in sight

[kosmicdream]

I'm asking dumb questions now because I'm not good at thinking critically.

How does like, pop culture (?) work when a chunk of the population is shape-shifting, worm fighting, stretchy, explody people? i forget if humans like, know the hekatons exist....

do they make tv shows with them? documentaries? music? are there products just for hekatons..."shirts that stretch With you!" "bomb insurance for when your loved one bites the big nuclear blast" "this fleshlight will suck all this skin off your face ;)"

like, does the World know and acknowledge them.

I hope you get my Qs okk bye bye 👋

I'd answer this question but.. actually its a lot of things that i will be covering in arc 2! We will be getting more of the perspective of human civilians & their everyday life, as well as a deeper look at cultures of various places and the differences of their perspective on things. Depending on where you are, a lot changes.