New Secret Knots! It’s here.
And this is the Patreon exclusive dossier about it.
1. Inspiration
As stated in the intro, I loved the movie poster and without any research into it I wrote a fast and absurd plot involving the elements and the mood it suggested to me at the time. It’s mostly stream of consciousness under the general shape of a story. (In my opinion, a trick in David Lynch’s bag: a train of thought that leaves you with the feeling of having been told a story because it has the curve of most stories, even when you could hardly tell what it was all about. As with most Lynchian things, one can only guess this is what is going on, though)
I’ve been wanting to make a character out of Wilhelm Reich for a while and this psychedelic mini world seemed a good fit, there are of course many other interesting and spectacular aspects about Reich’s life such as cold war espionage and kidnapping, different flavors of weird science and even UFOs, so I definitely recommend to dig into his story in better, less cartoonish representations.
Speaking of cartoons, I also enjoyed making the characters speak in absurdly expository lines, probably something closer to the comic-book-like tone many people assume it’s inherent to the medium. Turns out it’s really fun and useful for exotic ideas, and something I’d like to try again, maybe with another entry in the “making up plots for movie posters” exercise.
2. The hotel in two planes
This came from the silliness of taking the skewed hotel sign literally. I thought the sideways plane could represent a different mind frame suggested by Reich as therapy and I liked the idea of requiring a certain movement from the reader or their devices in order to read that part.
As I’m rather bad at spatial projection, I had to make this model to figure out the shots and the direction of speech balloons:
3. References
I saved some stage designs from the German expressionist movie Cabinet of Dr Caligari, which I ended up using only as a vague mood inspiration and not a direct reference, but I’ll post them here anyway because they are great.
If you haven’t seen the film, there’s a story reason for the world in skewed planes. Apparently it’s considered as one of the first movies with plot twist ending. I think you’ll like it.
4. Head Canon
Secret knowledge or fancy lies
The twilight dimension as Laura calls it, is a world of opium dens, cabarets and exotic hotels that allows physical manifestations of psychic phenomena. Ideas, intense memories and desire release shapes and colors into the open space. It’s an ideal plane for the orgone technology of W. Reich.
The orgone gun, as per the Orgone term coined by Reich referring to some sort of etheric, accumulable discharge that comes mainly from sex and orgasms, is particularly deadly in this ideas-as-tangible-forces plane of existence. That’s why the barman decides to start his vindictive career out of his own frustrations. It will hardly make him a god, though. That’s only his poorly planned comic-book villain manifesto.
When a human dies, they go through an inscrutable process the radio waves ladies in the comic call The Labyrinth-game. Your actions in this maze made of interconnected spiral stairways take you to one of 72 fates, as per the 72 fabled steps in Jacob’s ladder. Some of those involve reincarnation or living in the confined mind space of your strongest memories, others, to survive as ghosts, pale shadows stuck to the etheric fabric that divides the dimensions.
That is not the original W. Reich, but an astral projection from an orgone-fueled artifact he devised when he feared he was about to be imprisoned. There are other historical figures roaming this world, all of them related in some way or another to innovative views of sexuality.
I hope you enjoyed the comic. Please leave likes and comments if you did, remember you are my reference group zero.
Thanks for your support and have a great day.
J.
Along with this new ongoing comic, I’m making new Patreon portraits related to its world. This time it’s open for pledges from $3 and above to get yourself drawn as a teacher of this school at the end of time, higher pledges let you choose a specific course for your character. Check out my Patreon here and keep in mind you can edit your pledge at any time to be part of these treats. 
