Some of you may know that the comic I’m working on now is a project born from the ashes of a film project that my friends and I undertook in High School. It was our second movie, a medieval comedy designed to let us use a tiny set for most of the scenes and play to the strengths of my cast. We had a whole lot of fun making it, and also learned a lot about pacing, shot composition, editing, and visual vs. verbal storytelling. I can’t find my copy of the movie, but today I stumbled across an interview I recorded of myself several months after we’d finished filming. I don’t know how it found it’s way onto my new computer–It must have been hidden away in a folder with other film clips and moved from hard drive to hard drive without my noticing.
It was interesting to listen to myself almost five years ago talk about that project. I haven’t watched that interview in years, but whenever video Allison was searching for a word, viewing Allison was able to supply it. I impersonated characters, talked about filming challenges and how we overcame them, how the script evolved over time, the jokes we had to cut, the process we went through. It was strange to be back there, and yet, here I am, drawing a comic built on the foundations we laid in that project.
At times I worry that by resurrecting this project in this new form, I’m allowing myself to fall victim to nostalgia, that I’m moving backwards and not forwards, that I should maybe move on. But I did move on–The following summer I filmed A Plate of Escargot. I started and completed my first web comic, Emma and the Fairy Queen. I wrote short stories, filmed a duck tape commercial and some fan films, drew editorial cartoons for the Index, wrote two thirds of a novel, made a bunch of comics, learned from everything I did, and now, roughly five years after the release of Wits End, I’m back, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
It feels like coming home. I went away to learn and grow and study, to make serious work, about real people and broken hearts and occasionally dinosaurs. I enjoyed the non-genre stories I worked on, at one point becoming so absorbed in a short story I was working on that I missed a class without realizing it, but writing silly, absurd fantasy is more central to who I am than I wanted to admit as a serious student of the written word.
This project is tapping into the love I had for that film, five years ago, and the people who worked with me to make it everything it was. I’m rebuilding it with all the skills I’ve developed in the intervening years, doing all of the different projects in different forms and genres. It’s honoring who I was, but it’s a product who I am now, and who I hope to be.
I look forward to sharing some sample pages in the upcoming weeks.