Not So Wild Review: Zebra Girl

It's been over a year since I did one of these so let's dive into:

ZEBRA GIRL

Trying to remember when I started Zebra Girl was kind of a challenge, since the most I could remember is recognizing a crossover within the Wotch once, and it turns out I basically started at the same time.  When I started, the comic was already 5 years old, so it was fairly mature by then.  Re-reading the comic for this review though put it's full development into perspective and resulted in me appreciating the comic that much more than I was before.

HUMOR

It started as a humor comic, using odd, narrative generated gags.  I think the goal was to stand out against the rash of comics that were nearing, or just past their peaks at the time, like Sluggy Freelance and such.  The jokes, as such, were more aggressive and took advantage of the fact that it WAS a comic.  So strange gags like "Find the error in this comic" and a whole panel would be turned on it's side would show up pretty frequently early on.  It didn't last forever though, and as time went on, the humor toned down more and more to the point that I almost forgot it was a gag comic at one point.

ART

This change is reflected in the art.  Early on it was very sketchy, slapped together by Joe (the artist) sitting at a table and drawing with a pen.  It got cleaner, but as the comic got less funny, it also got darker.  This caused all sorts of problems for Joe as the dark wasn't just flat black, but built from crosshatching, which took time to do with a pen.  Eventually he found a new way to do it and it comes out regularly every week now.  And it looks GORGEOUS.  It looks amazing, and is definitely the best black and white art I've seen in a comic to date.

STORY

I guess it was inevitable that the comic would shift from gag strip to something more dramatic.  After all, the main character has been turned into an actual demon from hell, that's bound to have consequences.  The transition has gone not quite to full on, supernatural drama, but more toward a kind of fairy tale.  A dark fairy tale, like one of the old ones that No Rest for the Wicked likes to bring up.  Perhaps even darker.  It's interesting how magic is quickly entering the world at large, yet the world doesn't seem to mind.  It's in the dark shadows, but the normal, real world, just looks to avoid these places, or it embraces whole heartedly and changes lives forever.  I know this sounds more like the setting, but really that's what the story has done, established setting for the characters to act out their roles.

CHARACTERS

Above all things, it's a comic about characters, their change and evolution as they find their place in the world, and more.  Jack starts the comic as a bit of a screwball and perv, and with one mistake begins to grow up.  Now he's an ascended wizard with all the power and mystery such beings have.  As Jack's twin, Crystal shared many of his traits, but ended up being more innocent and, well, normal than any of them.  Though without her friends, she would just be a normal person, and she is, in a sense, grateful for it, and eager to see more without ever crossing into that world totally..  Sam starts out in a bad place, homeless, hopeless, and possibly suicidal.  By the current storyline, he's attending fancy parties, which is quite feat for a 5 foot tall talking cartoon rabbit.  All 3 have grown from their starting points to become something more than they ever were, and all pale in comparison to what Sandra has experienced.  She became a literal demon from hell, and carries the weight of that, shifting her personality and desires as she comes to understand her new body, and cease hating it.  Her journey is the focal point, and the rest of the cast kind of sits back and waits for her to get the ball going again.  When they meet again, things will be interesting.

OVERALL

Re-reading Zebra Girl has actually made me like the comic much, much more than I did originally.  Yes, I did like the comic before, a lot, but seeing it evolve, again, and grow, I think it might be one of the best comics out there right now.  With the consistent update schedule, the amazing art, the wonderful fairy tale feel and the great characters, it is far greater than I think I originally rated the comic in my own mind.  I think everyone should read this comic.

Well, that's it for this week.  Hell of a struggle to get time to finish this damn thing, so hopefully next week I'll get more time to do more webcomic stuff.  Until then kiddies.

My Stuff

Before I get into posting a lot of my fiction, well more of it than I have, I think I need to give you guys some idea what to expect.

Which is a lot of incomplete work.  Seriously, Dreams of Stars is one of the few pieces I've actually completed, and that took a LONG time to do.  Most of my story ideas usually don't get even a fraction as far as that.  The reasons are many, but mostly because OOoo Shiny!

That said, there are a lot that is written, just not finished.  Most of it is opening stuff, the start, which is part of the problem in writing my stories as I think of the beginning and the end, not the middle so much.  That's why I stall out, the enormity of some of these project is, well, enormous.  Some stories are so big that the very prospect is terrifying (Dreams of Stars tops out at about 105 Word pages, many of the others should take even longer).

I also have a tendency to keep going with the story long after it should stop, so the goal posts keep getting further away, and I give up on it in despair.  I'm surprised I managed to lock down Dreams of Stars so well.

I will say this though:  Don't expect any poetry.  I have a little, from when I took a Creative Writing course (I went for the prose, they made me do poetry), but nothing worth sharing.  Little of what I wrote in that course will be posted, but some will.

Do expect a whole lot of ideas that didn't actually get made into stories.  These are like Brainstorming articles, only MORE, a lot more in some cases.  Mostly it's just ideas, trying to get my head around concepts and worlds to play in, some of them are more involved.

There will be some fan fiction, but not much really.  Most of my fan fiction is for Freespace, and it's mostly not very good.  That said, it did help me learn HOW to write, so I might post a little of it, just to poke fun at myself.

And I'll be talking a lot about the different stuff.  Why I chose certain things, the origins of different ideas, and my own journey through creative writing and such.  Nothing super exciting, but if you want to know more, it'll be here.

One of the three, either a story bit, an idea bit, or me talking about one or the other.  I'll try to keep them interesting, and alternating as much as I can.  I don't guarantee every week, the webcomic stuff will generally take priority (assuming I'm not too tired or bugged by something).

In any case, I hope you enjoy them.  Until next time kiddies.

Letting Go Part 3: Sinfest

I've been reading Sinfest for over a decade now.  Been a fan for just as long.  Letting Go, that's something I NEVER thought I'd do.  And yet, I find myself doing so.

It's not something I do lightly, of course.  There are now 3 articles with the phrase "Letting Go" and the one about Achewood was more about lack of updates than anything else.

Sinfest, though, this has been something I have been contemplating for a bit now.  Reading my original article has given me a framework for the decision, and I will play to that now.

I think what initially attracted me to the comic was how closely it resembled newspaper comics, but with an R rating.  The comic originally did try to get into newspapers, but was rejected repeatedly, likely because it was rather crude.  Sex and drugs were topics of discussion, though never really all that explicit.  You never saw nudity in the comic, for example, but toking was there.  It looked good too, and definitely reminded me of Calvin and Hobbes, something Tatsuya Ishida, the artist, made of point of commenting on in a strip.  It was a homage to one of the greats, and it really fit what he was going after.

What that was is hard to really put into words, but I think the idea was to comment on the concept of morality, good and evil, life, sex and sexuality, everything related.  The word "fest" in the title is "festival," a celebration of sin, sex, drugs and rock and roll.  It asked the question:  why is this stuff evil?  Then it took the symbols of good and evil, God and the Devil, and put them into a depowered light.  God is a goofball hand in the sky, only able to really communicate via hand puppets.  The Devil runs a booth out of Peanuts, offering to take you soul for "anything you want."  Never seemed that anyone was selling, oddly, even Slick, who frequented the booth, never really signed on the dotted line.

Then there was the Dragon and Budda, who offered a more balanced counterpoint to the good vs evil battle, bringing harmony and peace.  Through them and the rest of the cast, the world was full of sin, but it wasn't a bad thing, it was just the way the world is, and as long as you are happy and not harming others, is there anything wrong with that?  That and the jokes were pretty funny.  A few fell flat, but for a comic that updates almost as regularly as Schlock Mercenary, a missed joke or two is to be expected.

Re-reading my Not-So-Wild Review of the comic points out that this comic was still this way a mere 3 years ago.  Sometime after this, the comic changed course, and became something else.  I suspect it's part of the greater internet "social justice movement" (the timing is actually quite close to the emergence of the blogs/tumblers for it).  The ideas are fine, generally trying to get equal rights for all persons regardless of gender, race, sexual preference, religion and whatnot, the same ground Sinfest was already exploring.  However, many of these "social justice warriors" often are misinformed about what they're arguing about, parrot ideas that are merely popular rather than true.  And of course, this being the internet, they want the change now, now, NOW!  When usually such change can take years, if not generations.

Sinfest delved in with the Sisterhood, a group of young women who were fighting the patriarchy, the male domination of the world, as led by the Devil, who moved from goofy neighbor type character, to actual villain.  They brought change with them, Monique went from being "It Girl" to being androgynous, Fuchsia left the employ of the Devil to pursue her love of the geeky book worm, and Lil'E drank from the Leth, and forgot who he was.  These are great changes, really, as they explored different aspects of their characters and what has been explored with them has been quite entertaining in and of themselves.  However, the Sisterhood itself has left a bad taste in the mouths of many, including me.

I reviewed a comic called Luz:  Girl of the Knowing, a comic about shifting to sustainable production in the face of peak oil, and I didn't like it because it beat it's message over the reader's head.  The Sisterhood within Sinfest did the same thing, and that annoys me even more.  I didn't care about Luz's message, but I had nearly a decade invested in Sinfest, and I KNOW Tatsuya can do better, but instead he chose a hammer.  Literally beating the ideas out, and I do mean literally as one of the Sisterhood bashes on a test dummy with a stick declaring "what else do you do to oppressors?"

The point that he can do better is why I kept reading, hoping to see the real message.  I remember back in the day, he did a storyline in which, in an alternative universe, the male characters fought against the Matriarchy, battling to drink beer, watch porn and eat fatty food.  Yes, these were real bits, and they were fun to read, which is why I didn't immediately think things were going to go this way, and even afterwards, I thought maybe there was something else being planned.

When the Dragon and Budda made a reappearance (including Budda turning that stick into flowers), I thought that FINALLY they were going to turn things around.  That was almost a year ago, and I think the one comment I got on that article is probably right.

I'm not sure it's going to right itself either.  Oh, I can think of ways, including the bit I wrote in that old article about the leader of the Sisterhood, Xanthe, turning out to be an androgynous man.  I can see the divide that would cause within the Sisterhood being, well, amazing, and break the hold it has on the comic.  I'm just not sure Tatsuya is going to try something like that.  The more I read, the less I want to read.

So it is with a heavy heart that I let this comic go.  Perhaps it will get better after I stop reading, but I think I may have given it far more time than I should have in the first place.  I once had this comic as an honorable mention for Can't Live Without and even gave it a Quasi-Award.  I've had Slick's favicon head in my bookmark file for so long I'm not sure what it would look like without it.  I want to follow it to see the side characters I love, but I just don't enjoy the rest of it enough to continue.

Until next time kiddies.  Hopefully I'll be less depressed then.

Post Dreams of Stars: Sequels and Spinoffs

As I said before, Dreams of Stars was meant to be an origin story for Deborah, but I quickly found that writing new stories for her was, um, basically impossible.  The root of the problem was her nature: she was just TOO damn powerful.  There was never any danger for her, any drama.  The only way to tell any story with her was to reduce her power in some way.

Dreams of Stars was the easiest, because it was set BEFORE she was fully powered, and I found ways to limit L'lorne and Ritch 'arrd in the process.  After that, things got hairy.  One story had Deborah deliberately cutting herself off from her power and most of her memories, but really that was just interesting for moments, nothing more.  Any other story could easily swap out any member of the Order with Deborah and have the story work exactly the same, so there was nothing unique there.

I did come up with a sequel to Dreams of Stars, however, a direct one even.  Hawk Wings is the current title and it is not the same story as Dreams of Stars, at all.  So much so I suspect that if you really enjoyed Dreams of Stars as a story, Hawk Wings would probably be a disappointment.  Still, it's goal is very clear:  wrap up Deborah's life on Earth before moving on.  It fills in some holes, solves some mysteries and helps better define her relationship with L'lorne.  When I get to writing it is another story.

Of course, I never really viewed Dreams of Stars as a pure standalone story, it was meant to be grouped with two others.  The first is What We Leave Behind, Roxanne's story.  My problems with this story are many fold, but primarily attempting to fit the description of it that L'lorne and Ritch 'arrd each give, as it is meant to be a love story in a sense.  It is far more actiony than Dreams is, by a lot (Roxanne fights off aliens invading her version of Earth), but it also needs to be more subtile and emotional than Dreams.  Roxanne is NOT the same level as L'lorne in this story, as it is merely the first chapter of the the much larger in-universe book that is What We Leave Behind (the version I write is the "short-short" version).  I have found some ways to make it work rather recently, so I hope to be writing it soon.

The other is currently called Unconditional, and takes place far into the future.  Deborah is actually in this story, but isn't the main character, though she does play an important role, a mentor/parental figure to young Maia, who was born into the Order.  Maia describes herself as having "the body of an 8 year old, the mind of a 30 year old and the powers of a god" but she isn't happy, at all.  The story is how such a person finds how to grow up and be happy.  It is actually more like Hawk Wings than anything else, but not quite.

Then, of course, is the larger collection of stories about members of the Order, of which currently there's only one complete, and I'll post that in the coming weeks.  There are other ideas for stories, including ones that originally featured Deborah but really don't need her, stories about the philosophy and power of being part of the Order and other things like that.  World building stuff.  Don't expect to see much of that any time soon, it was hard enough getting Dreams of Stars out the door.

Finally there's the larger meta-universe in which the Order, Deborah and everything else takes place, the story of Quinn and Delphi and the grander journey they're both on.  It's all about the nature of immortality, multiple universes, alternate realities and how it effects the one person that has to suffer it alone.  Quinn's story is something that I can't really write as it is, effectively, a string of self-insert fanfictions (Quinn is a replacement for me) that takes place over a portion of time that makes Deborah's insanely long lifetime look short by comparison (seriously, her lifespan covers 1/12th of Quinn's).

But we'll get to some of those stories in the future.  Next time, I'll have something up in the story part, I've got enough bits and pieces to do it pretty regularly.  In the meantime, I need to get back to writing webcomic stuff.  Until next time kiddies and thanks for reading.

More Nothing

This week is due to laziness and wonky work schedule (why am I working Sunday?  WHY?).  Hopefully more next week.  Until then.

Post Dreams of Stars: The Writing Process

Dreams of Stars has been in the works for a LONG time now.  Well over a decade, perhaps more, which probably makes it seem like I'm a lazy writer or something.  Well I am to the point that sitting down and writing (even this thing) is something I really have to force myself to do, and be in the mood for.  It also helps if I have a computer with a terrible net connection, I get a lot of work done then.

That means, though, that the early parts of the story came LONG before the later ones.  Much of my work in editing it to the condition it is now is to bring one half of the story up to speed with the other half.  I think I've done a pretty good job of it so far, but there are things I do want to get back to.

For example, at the end of nearly every post I put here, I asked the question:   Does the setting seem fitting? Would you like to know more?  The reason for that question (pair of questions) is that I have issues with settings, and back when I started the story, it was even worse than it is now.  But I wanted the story to go through, so I made the decision to forgo writing details into the setting and leave it as, well, generic and empty as I could so I could focus on the action.  As the story went on, you do see more setting details fill in, but often it's very brief or not very detailed.  I could argue that its a stylistic choice, of course, as for L'lorn and Ritch 'arrd, the world around them really didn't matter and was unimportant, but mostly it was because I didn't want to get bogged down.

The result is the fact that there are no names for places.  The capitol is just that, and nothing more.  Hell, I don't even have a name for the city where Deborah, the character the entire story was built to support, was even born or lived.  There's no background and outside of a few references to places that might exist, for all practical purposes, the story could be anywhere.

The only real hints as to where is the clues to where L'lorne is from (the answer is Cahokia, BTW), and the fact that it's "out west" from where Deborah lives, but close enough to appear on a TV weather map.  It could be anywhere along the east coast of the United States, if there is a United States.  Eventually I did work up a quick alternate history for Deborah's world, but I have yet to decide whether or not to include it in the story, and if so, how.

As the writing went on, scenes developed almost independent of the plot.  The scene at the farm, the ghost, the CDPC (I love that name, BTW), all were built in my mind long before they went on paper and grew up as the scene went on.  There's several scenes that had to be rewritten from the ground up because they just weren't very good (including the last scene between Deborah and Delphi).  The fact that the story flows so well, thanks in no small part to the flashbacks to L'lorne's past, is amazing to me.

And I had fun writing many scenes.  The invention of Bar Theory, which starts the story, was a fun exercise (I was mostly thinking of Lord of the Rings there, BTW), but more fun was including little things L'lorne does long before the reader is told outright that she has amazing powers.  Her first act in the story is not freezing the poor drunk in place, for example, but looking through the floor of the bar and noting there was no basement.  The whole nature of L'lorne's power was gradually ramped up as the story went along, so that when the final description of it came through, it wasn't exactly a surprise, but still shocking how much more powerful she really was.

I also built mysteries into the story.  Who is Deborah's father is a good example that I don't even approach in this story (see next week for more on that).  Also who and what Quinn and Delphi are isn't really given more than a brief moment of conversation (again, next week).  The big mystery though, and one that really only stands out for me because even I don't know the answer is why did Ritch 'arrd die?

L'lorne is clear that they can only die when they want to, and it's pretty obvious a little pinprick like what the axe caused wasn't likely going to kill him, yet he died anyway.  I leave this as a mystery because I'm not quite sure of the answer, and in-universe it is just as much a mystery to those who are far more powerful and knowledgeable than me.  Only Deborah in her advanced years might know why, and she never says.

I took my time to write this, too much time perhaps, but even in it's current form, which still has several small edits to make (I want to switch a scene and a flashback during the deaths of the mothers), I am happy with it.  Will I write more?  Well, let me talk to you about that next week.

Until then kiddies.

Post-Dreams of Stars: Back to the Point

Back in May I brought up, briefly, the original point of my story Dreams of Stars, but there was always more to the story than that.  The grand quote at the beginning of that article was the original point, but not the sole point and in the end, not really the point of the story at all.

As I said,  the idea was to define the bounds of power, extreme power, power beyond what most people can possibly imagine, including me.  And it all began because of the forums for a site called Spacebattles, where they love to debate various fictitious elements fighting each other.  There's also a tradition of one-ups-man-ship, and people tend to add their own fictional creations to the pile in an attempt to outdo everyone else.  I decided I wanted to join the fray and started designing a character that was unbelieveably powerful, one that wouldn't even need to fight to win, but couldn't be beaten, ever.  Then I gave up on introducing it to the board because I realized it would be outdone by someone else.  Still, I went forward with the character and gave it a name:  Deborah Ignigus.

Which means, effectively, that Dreams of Stars is actually an origin story for that one character, but it was also meant to set up a baseline in which Deborah's full power could be established.  The problem is that as the story went on, I started thinking about what adventures Deborah would go on in the future and ran into a stumbling block:

She was too powerful.  Even if she was only at the same level as L'lorne (and she's much more powerful at her peak), what could stop her?  The only thing keeping L'lorne in check is the fact that everything else didn't work, but for Deborah, that wouldn't be an issue.  She basically could NOT lose, making any story featuring her kind of dull, with no mystery, no suspense, no danger.  Mary Sues face greater dangers than what Deborah would have faced.

So the point of the story was to establish a character with an origin story, a character I couldn't really do anything with without making some serious compromises and even then, it wouldn't work.  By the time the story was finished the point of it was, well, gone.

With the original point gone, what is the point of the story now?  I don't know.  I know what I originally intended, but it's not there much any more.  It's just a story, a story that really has no point other than simply being something I wrote.

Even without a point, I'm still glad I could finish it and share it with those of you who read it.  Next Wednesday I'll have more to say about Dreams of Stars, and the Wednesday after that, but in the future, I think I'll post some more of my writings.  Very little is as complete as Dreams of Stars, so expect half finished pieces, or fits and starts.

Next week, back to webcomics.  See you then kiddies.