Current music:	lies (the swell season)
Entry tags:	cartoonland, felix culpa, in a half shell, odds and ends

Good morning! It's snowing here in Vermont (already. again.) ... and finally, I have a longer comic to share! A fantasy comic at that, which I've been wanting to do for ages.

The following was my answer to our "bibliomancy" assignment: we had to put our fingers down at random in three places in a reference book (loosely defined), and use what we found (words, phrases, even images) at predetermined points in a four(ish) page comic to move the story along. I'll list mine for you after the comic!

I don't have a proper cover for this at present (I'll make one later, for the print version), but this is called "The Swamp Bride."













Also here's the ... unofficial epilogue. (I'm not sure I'll include it in a print version.) I had two endings for the story and couldn't decide between them, so I wound up polling quite a large selection of my friends and classmates. While I eventually decided on the above, several people (including me) really enjoyed the alternative, so I finished it as well:



I came to the conclusion that, fun as that is, it also kind of takes away from the main thrust of the story by making the Swamp Bride back into a sexual object. Sex is great, but this really wasn't the comic for it, alas ... I'll have to see what I can come up with in future!

Anyway, the book I used for this assignment was Marina Warner's From The Beast To The Blonde, a text on fairy tales leftover from my undergraduate studies. My three story elements were:

1. "quoth I" (the beginning of the comic)
2. "a nervous or even anxious woman" (the entrance of the girl at the bottom of page one)
3. a cropped version of this painting (our first sight of the real swamp bride)

None of these gave me a subject, really, and as I was in something of a rush, I grabbed a random illustration I made a few weeks back and ran with that. I'm fairly happy with the way the art on all this came out, but I'm a little shaky on the storytelling ... various classmates had difficulty following some of the things I was trying to say. I may wind up considering this a draft; I've grown attached enough to the story that it'd be nice to make a slower, more careful attempt at telling it well.

If any generous commentors have a minute and wouldn't mind leaving me their take on what's happening in the above pages, I'd be deeply appreciative! ♥

Apart from the above, I'm mostly wrapped up in finishing a twelve-page story and helping to design and edit the anthology it'll be a part of, but here are a couple of odds and ends.



I pulled a ridiculous all-nighter to get the Swamp Bride comic done, and then I had to do my diary assignment for the week ... ironically, the above was a compositional rush job with a whole bunch of cut corners on the inking. Can anyone even tell, I wonder? The truth is, I do need to find a bit more balance, while remaining dedicated.

And finally, I actually drew some of my ongoing characters for a change:


Luce and Mickey, patiently waiting their turn (it'll come, I swear). Drawn for a postcard exchange with my amazing friend Dea (you can see us walking & talking in the background).

That'll do for the moment, I hope ... back, quite literally, to the drawing board with me. If you're in the U.S., have a lovely Thanksgiving; if not, just have a great week!