For most Secret Knots comics, I make a post with sources, references, and bits of world building. This is the dossier for the comic The Mesh.

Inspiration

This one comes straight from real life.

I had left here a placeholder for a photo of a stenciled ad over a manhole near my home, and then I went to take that picture, and it was gone. More Secret Knotsy shenanigans, I guess.

When I began to notice these stenciled ads on the sidewalks on my way to work, I couldn’t help wonder about the marketing aspects behind this operation. How effective it was as advertisement? Were they, perhaps, making the most of a great, underutilized part of the city to promote their thing? After all, lots of people have to stop there, staring at their fee while they wait for the traffic light to go green. Perhaps, at that moment, they focus briefly beyond their phones to see the markings on the curve. Or, rather, are they placed on what they used to call “the blind spot” of advertisement: those parts of websites, magazines, and walls that our brain learns to block out to keep us from the clutter? Is it maybe a message waiting for the initiates, the ones capable of recognizing it, like graffiti?

Regardless of efficiency, it actually became a story seed when I began to imagine the company behind it: I thought it was more fitting to imagine a modern, thriving enterprise, instead of the vintage circus, mind reading act aesthetic we often associate with tea leaves and Tarot. What if at the other end of the telephone number, there was an aggressive company employing some sort of Occult Bros fighting for regional accounts of hexes?

I had fun picturing gym-toned, millennial-gray-suited corpo execs, and their charismatic leader, Madame Elena. In the back of my mind, I always wanted to write the kind of character that says “Walk with me”.

I’s say spiritual cleansing gigs are common in Latin American culture; everyone I know knows someone who knows someone who has some vaguely convincing story about this. Whenever a person turns to an urban mystic to solve a mysterious sickness, or symptoms of a negatively charged home, the rationalization from the healer is more or less the same: that the origin of the problem is some commissioned magic job by a rival. Un trabajo. Le hicieron un trabajo. (They made a job on you; they put a spell on you). Someone who wishes you ill, someone who envies you; a justification that manages to be worrying and flattering at the same time. You are that important to someone. It has always made me think exactly what my fictional counterpart says in the comic: that the world we know, then, must be some sort of thin crust of rationality over a complex mesh of hexes and counterspells. If so, then the world is indeed tied by a tangle of (magical) secret knots. I was very tempted to put a big title drop of my series on this comic.

The way to solve this prompt as a story was to turn it into a Twilight Zone script. The answer to the initial question about who works advertising the urban mystic op is: It’s you. It’s you who will eventually paint the ads for us, because once you’re inside the scheme of the magical corporative structure, you become part of the chain. Remember that story about pushing a button and winning a lot of money, but somebody dies? I’m not sure if it’s actually a specific Twilight Zone story or if it’s many of them (or if it’s one at all), but that’s the general tone I was looking for, to give this tale a shape of something closed.

This one was a heavily revised script. The original story went way beyond the acceptable length for a single webcomic, so I had to edit a lot of the original scenes. I had, for example, a couple of extra panels where Madame Elena justified remembering my surname, because “it was odd”. There was also a line of hers that went something like: “It says here you are some kind of artist, right? We may have use for someone with your… talents”, in a very dismissive tone. It was funny, but it had to go away. The comic still ended up running a little longer than I’m used to, and that’s why it took longer too to be drawn —there’s also the fact that in the mid I decided to try a different coloring style, with more tones and some new brushes. On the other hand, this particular Secret Knots story allowed me to play with “comic book montage”, more dialogue and shots, so I think it makes for a fun episode, in this year in which I’ve been purposefully trying out new things.

References

Some of the architecture references I used.

Headcanon

Things that were considered, could be happening, or are definitely happening, in the background of the story

• The marketing department of Madame Elena’s company is pushing for the development of an app. Only, instead of a mere astrology app, they’re thinking on one that lets you balance anonymously the threats and opportunities on your network of IRL acquaintances and ask for spells accordingly, like an Evil(er) Facebook.

• What is “the code”? We can assume is some sort of discount, but it can also be a more complex scheme of gifts and promos, Temu-style. Maybe you get some points for dragging someone else in the mesh of fear of the company.

• Someone mentioned in the comments that the comic itself might be part of my own payment for the company’s services. If that’s the case, and considering this comic didn’t do as well as others on Reddit, —but it’s making some waves on Bsky and Mastodon—  will I get a code, finally?

  Probably not. 

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I hope you liked this post. Many thanks for your support and feedback during the making of the comic. I’ll see you soon with more stories and art. 

Juan.