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Per the last message.
I began a comic in January of 2002. (For reference: I knew nothing of magic, fiction suits, or The Invisibles at the time). It was the first one I intended as a "serious" work. From this intention came three titles that I didn't understand at the time but sounded like working ideas. I draughted these down and began to flesh out each story (one for each title). The result was a three-episode 16-page book, largely freewritten (a lot of sitting in clubs and the library letting ideas pour out).
The stories all focused on a late-teenage girl named Sam, who was vaguely an alter-ego character. Each story also involved some circumstances of my own life: a family death, a 'meditation' of daily activity, questions of androgeny. The strongest narrative of them all was a story I had heard from a family member, that I then projected Sam into and fleshed out.
(Copies of this book, self-published w/ one spot color, are still available if anyone wants it...)
That spring I followed it up with a sequel, much less intensely done. It was more of a pastiche of influences: Joyce Carol Oates, Tori Amos, other comic authors, and my own ruminations, but still using Sam and her story-world as a foundation. This one I worked through with a professor to get a more coherent narrative structure, and wound up being less impressive than the first. Part of the challenge was dealing with three different timelines, each overlapping and supposedly complementing each other. It wasn't much of a success in my own mind, so I saved the money and didn't self-publish it and didn't think much of it afterwards.
Until I sat down to write a third book, last summer. This was after the Invisibles had rekindled my interest in comics, not to mention deranged my world and introduced chaos magic into my life. I read of Grant's experiences with the King Mob fiction suit and decided to play with that. I was in a hot, tumultuous job situation at the time with a lot of repressed anger towards my co-workers. So I wrote a third comic, consciously using Sam as a fiction suit now, putting her in the job situation. This was a much more linear story than the first two, and it ended with an "epiphany" moment as I wanted to have. Out of the three this was the most conscious of the books and the one I deliberately spiked with the most personal detail. It took several months to finish (ink and all I mean).
Before it was inked, though (pencils were done), Sam showed up at the job.
She walked in with a boyfriend figure who didn't much resemble the comic's figure. But she herself was IDENTICAL to the character. Save for a blue wig (underneath which was identical hair, however). The job was a restaurant in a tourist town; lots of coming and going. She walked in, ordered, ate, left. Made eye contact with me a few times, a smile or two. No words.
Much of that summer was heat-addled, especially at the job. Heat's been known to make me hallucinate before and I don't doubt that this, and the stress of that day (big), were factors in the experience. But it wasn't JUST my own loopiness.
That's one of the strangest things to happen so far. |
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