There’s not much time left in the ShortBox Comics Fair this year so I wanted to write a little note about A Little Beauty and why I made it.
A Little Beauty is a horror short story about a son whose mother becomes obsessed with making art after she buys a bouquet of mysterious flowers.
I started having this thought last year that feeling called to make art, something I considered a positive force in my life, was actually a curse in disguise. Whenever I felt really inspired, it didn’t feel ecstatic like it used to, it felt heavy. There’s too many factors going on here for me to get into, and it’s too personal, but I wanted to use that sad and scary feeling as the basis for a story.
I also had the very silly thought of “What if a bouquet of flowers could be evil?” which I simply had too much fun thinking about to not adapt into comic. I designed the flowers in the comic to be evil sunflowers. I love sunflowers and using their image as a metaphor for lightness and cheer. I’ve drawn a lot of illustrations of the Bug Boys with sunflowers.
Readers who also follow my latest Bug Boys stories will notice I’m repeating an image I used in The Poet, one of a person sitting at a table in front of a bouquet, trying to make art. It’s very important that the flowers be in a clear vase, so we can see the stems submerged in the water. For me, a bouquet in a clear vase is the perfect encapsulation of art and art-making. The “upper layer” of the bouquet, the flowers, are the visual art. They’re beautiful and move hearts. Their value to the viewer is immediately obvious. The “lower level” of the stems in water is the unconscious part of creation. It’s ever-present and necessary for creativity, but it’s only ever relevant to the artist, not the viewer. The stems of a bouquet get gross really fast: they get slimy, the water gets green with mold. You have to wash out the vase and re-cut the stems to keep flowers fresh for a while. It’s nasty but necessary upkeep. But the stems are what allow the flowers to exist in the first place, they’re how the flowers soak up water so they can stay beautiful as long as they can. To get flowers, one has to tend to the stems and the water. To get art, one has to reach into the subconscious. I also love using water to represent the unconscious mind or primordial soup of creation. I of course had to make both The Poet and A Little Beauty before I could put any of this into words (lmao).
To bring the bouquet metaphor into the horror genre, I cast the beautiful flowers as a corrupting influence and the art-making they inspire as a frightening mania. What is a person to do when their home is infected by them? A bouquet that never wilts or requires upkeep is a cheat, an abomination. The mother in the story is getting something (creative bliss) without giving in return (the hard study of what makes good art or considering the role of the artist in society), and therefore she’s wading into isolation and madness.
So what about the son character? He wonders if trying to understand the nature of his mother’s obsession will help him solve it, but it’s just procrastination. There’s something unspoken in this family (note the three kitchen table chairs for a family of two) but I wanted to leave the exact nature of that to the reader’s imagination.
As for the ending, which I won’t spoil, I learned from reading tons of Junji Ito’s short stories to end horror stories right at the climax. The best denouement in the world can’t beat whatever the reader imagines as what happens next. This level of creative ecstasy is probably the climax of both mother and son’s life, and the true horror story is living the rest of their lives without it.
There’s actually another comic I made this year that I consider a sister story to A Little Beauty that I haven’t released yet and maybe never will. After I wrote the synopses for both stories separately, I realized that they were the same story told from different perspectives. The unreleased story is really dark and I want to just sit on it for now.
Anyway, who cares about all that lol. Please check out the ShortBox Comics Fair before it’s over and support comics from around the globe. The work this year is crazy hot. Thanks for reading.
