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“A Love Letter to Home, from Home: Online Comic Artist Danielle Corsetto”

For Shepherdstown based comic artist Danielle Corsetto, home has been the basis for a lot in her life. It serves as the inspiration for her Patreon funded webcomic “Elephant Town”. As well as being where she works on it from.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, Danielle was luckily able to not let it get in the way of her work. Saying “I've been lucky not only because I've worked from home since 2005, but because I'd been planning my new project to launch online in May of 2020, which was a perfect time to share a free online story for people to begin reading. The biggest changes have been no conventions or signings, but I'd been weaning myself off of those for awhile anyway. I wound up selling a lot of [Girls With Slingshots] books and artwork online instead, which made up for some of the lost sales of conventions.”

Danielle gained popularity in the early 2000s with her critically successful comedic webcomic “Girls With Slingshots”. A comic about the trials and tribulations of adulthood, following the life of the sarcastic and humorous Hazel Tellington and the lovably goofy Jamie McJack. As well as their ever-growing group of friends. The comic, over the time of its 10 year run, has dealt with topics such as love and relationships, marriage, unemployment, and more. Her new webcomic series Elephant Town arrives about 6 years after the end of Girls With Slingshots. Elephant Town follows the lives of a cast of different characters in each of the first few chapters. Chapter 1 for instance, follows a couple by the name of Kris and Byran who live in seperate homes, with Kris having just moved into a new place. While chapter 2 follows the socially awkward Paul, who is struggling to find a relationship with women. He laments his failures online on social media to an audience of generally toxic users. By the time the story reaches chapter 5 it goes back to Kris. Slowly but surely, the characters come into each other's lives in one way or another.

The way people live their own personal separate lives while being connected under something such as a town or community is what ties Elephant Town together. When asked about what inspires her, Danielle said “[t]he idea that every individual person has a completely different perspective, lifestyle, and physical connection to the world than each other. I get most inspired when I read quotes, tweets, comments, forum posts by people who are not otherwise forthcoming about themselves; I really enjoy the mystery of piecing together the things they share online to form an idea about the kind of human they are. As a very public share-all myself, the life of someone who doesn't narrate their worldview on a public forum is fascinating to me, because I'm so public. Similarly - pre-pandemic, of course - I've always enjoyed going to a bar, restaurant, park, etc. alone and listening to the conversations around me to piece together what others' lives seem to be like.”

In regard to how the pandemic affected the creative process of the story, Danielle said “I've been writing about people while having to stay away from people, which I think has been a challenge to the dialogue writing. It's easy to make your characters all have the same voice if you're not hearing the voices of people outside of yourself & your friend group. But Elephant Town is very setting-specific and background-heavy, and I've been outdoors a lot more over the last couple of years. At the beginning of lockdown, [my partner] Luke and I went on walks throughout town every single day and really focused on which plants were in bloom at what times of the year, which has inspired a silent calendar effect in Elephant Town. Since the book takes place in Shepherdstown, I've been trying to stay true to the flora of the area, and showing the passing of time through background elements like weeds and blossoms.”

For Elephant Town, Shepherdstown, West Virginia is the lifeblood of the story. Danielle explained why Shepherdstown is so important to her and why it is the setting of the story. Saying “[t]he reason it takes place here is because, one, I love it here, and two, I think a lot of people don't know what life is like in a small town. The last few decades have allowed the Internet to replace or I guess become our sense of community, which I think is dangerous because it's so easy to only see what we want to, following and sharing and retweeting an echo chamber of views and opinions, muting and blocking people whose ideas challenge ours. In a small town, it's not as easy to avoid perspectives that challenge our own. Even the loud voices that stand out on the town's Facebook page are tempered when you meet the people in person.” She would go on to further add what influenced plot points of the story of Elephant Town. Saying “Elephant Town was inspired by the large awkward building at 304 West German Street that's been cut up into four apartments, one of which I almost moved into; my old housemate Kris moved in instead. It's a cool weird house, but Kris became immediately aware that you can hear every single other tenant through the walls and floors. This was back in 2006, and it planted the seed of the idea for Elephant Town. A big long graphic novel that follows each tenant of the house separately, but they hear each other through the walls of their apartments. [Also] aside from Shepherdstown being easy and fun to draw, since I can take photos for reference by walking a block or two from my home studio, it's also a lot easier to draw old crooked historic buildings than straight, perfect new ones. The imperfections of the buildings are a comfortable match for the imperfection of the characters, too.”

An approach Danielle has taken with Elephant Town different from Girls With Slingshot has been her use of the crowdfunding service Patreon. Patreon is an online service that content creators use as a means of funding their work. Where subscribers will pledge to donate a specific sum of money each month to content creators of their choice. Typically through Patreon, content creators will provide subscribers with exclusive content not found anywhere else. Whether it be behind the scenes material, exclusive content, services, offers, and so on. Danielle detailed her use of patreon, saying “[t]he only reason Elephant Town is coming out as thoughtfully as it is is because of Patreon. After I ended my webcomic Girls With Slingshots, hundreds of readers of the strip followed me on Patreon and most of them [subscribed] at a rate of $2 to $5 per month to keep me working on new comics. I pulled the trigger in 2019 and decided to lean on my patrons instead of looking for a publisher, to create the book by sharing a few pages every Monday with them as sort of an accountability partner exercise. So instead of having to hustle through making the book as quickly as I can, and instead of being told to cut the book down to half the page count, I'm writing the book the way I feel it's supposed to be written.” On Danielle’s Patreon, subscribers at the $2 tier can find themselves with access to weekly uploads of Elephant Town. At the $3 tier, subscribers can vote on polls that affect the course of the story. At the $5 tier, subscribers can have access to rough sketches, process shots, figure drawing sessions, and online art lessons.

To round out the discussion, when asked about why it was so important for her to give Shepherdstown representation through Elephant Town. Danielle said “[i]t's less about representation than it is about sharing my home with people who've never been here, but I was also mindful about the type of Shepherdstown atmosphere I wanted to represent in the book. Shepherdstown is a left-leaning college town in West Virginia that's [populated] by college students who've decided to root themselves here, locals whose roots already run deep, and a lot of well-off retired people who relocated from the DC area. I think the latter, with their refurbished historic homes and impeccably landscaped lawns and hobby boutiques and fancy dinner reservations, are the ones who are most easily seen by outsiders. I'm mostly friends with the not-rich people who run small businesses without financial safety nets, or keep the restaurants and shops running by working in them. I want readers to see the load-bearing beams that are the working class in my town, the people who keep the bar open late and restock the wine shelves.”

Danielle’s Patreon, along with her social media can be found below.

Patreon-https://www.patreon.com/dcorsetto/posts

Instagram-https://www.instagram.com/dcorsetto/

Twitter-https://twitter.com/dcorsetto