For every new Secret Knots comic I make a Patreon exclusive post with sources, references and bits of world building that were left only as background. This is the dossier for the comic “Chapter 6”, you can read the comic here.
1. Inspiration
I’ve had versions of this story, going in different directions and taking various shapes in google drive files and sketchbooks for quite some time now, maybe years. The idea of the building-book contains some of the topics I keep going back to in tales about art and creation; among them and most important, a work of fiction where someone could get lost into.
In 2019, I was invited to be part of an online book club about some of my comics. Among many interesting bits of feedback I got from this experience, I was asked about something that should have been very noticeable for me, and it wasn’t until then: a common thread of disappearances in the stories. People, (and places, and words) sure fade and disappear a lot in the Secret Knots series. In How We Forgot Ursula Miller, a movie star begins to vanish from the public memory after she’s bitten by a vampire. In How to find happiness in a video game, blending as a non-player character behind the facade of a video game world is presented as a secret to a hopeless, quiet state of relief. Some of these characters sink into nothingness, others hide in some unreachable plane, and sometimes, as with this story, they run away into a piece of fiction.
It’s a bit strange to make this analysis myself, but again, this was an external commentary that made me aware of topics I go keep going back to. Even stranger is trying to pinpoint why this is a recurrent theme to me, but at least in terms of mood I can recognize it has to do with some of my own anxieties, and how fiction and art in general as served me as shelter in different times, specially when I was as a kid. In this comic, “Chapter 6”, there’s a young girl of whom we don’t know much, except that she probably fancied a particular episode in a novel, and decided it was a good place to run away into, and stay, for a while. There’s a bit about the book itself ahead, in the “Headcanon” section, but regarding the character of Claire, I didn’t go into why she ran away from her home; this was left as a blank background where every personal projection may be true. This is the point when the author can only hope that the premise he’s working on might be not so niche after all, and end up having a personal meaning for someone.
In the end, we don’t know if she moved from there to the next chapter, if she ultimately became the protagonist of that, or some other story. And if we wonder how she ever got out of there, I guess the only possible answer is “in the same way she entered”. I leave you to this 1874 painting by Spanish artist Pere Borrell del Caso, that I happened to see on twitter yesterday, as a possible epilogue. It’s called Escaping Criticism.
2. References
I abandoned early the idea of having the building occupy a specific place and time, which originally was in my own Santiago, in the mid 00s, but the Chilean cops remained, so their uniforms are based on that. The very impractical clothing of regular police here makes me think of a cross between Latin American dictatorship fashion and fantasy guards from some retro game rpg imperial city, with the over sized hats and leather strips and belt. (And also, now that I think about it, M. Bison/Vega from Street Fighter) I think they could use a cavalry sable or a scimitar and it wouldn’t be at all out of place.
Once I had decided that the setting was an ambiguous location, I used two photos from different origins as reference for the visible city behind it, one from Karachi, Pakistan, one from Bruselas in the 1920’s.
I’m always fantasizing about using brutalist architecture in a story…and then I start doing the art, and end up with Art Noveau. It may have a lot to do with the fact that I’m currently drawing with dip pen and brushes, which lend much better to draw organic lines than steady sides and angles. This is the foundation for the book-building, (which, as they always say in movie production reels, “needed to be a character on its own”) a low building in Istanbul that I made grow up a few stores to fit the story:
I didn’t have precise references for the characters, and only thought about Claire as a quiet girl. Some character sketches from when I was trying to define her face:
And of course I had to think a while about the book itself, which gets its own section:
3. The Novel
I imagined the book as a Brontë sisters novel in an alternative reality. I had to actually put some of it on the walls, so I wrote a couple of paragraphs in Spanish and then machine-translated them using DeepL Translator, without much checking. Here they are:
“Vorlicek stopped in the shadow of the bridge as if the interstice allowed him to take refuge in between two seconds, to enter a pocket of time or a distant country, where he could get lost among unknown and fragrant fairs, wrap himself in unusual clothes, stroll through ports where his name meant nothing, and only respond to some nickname that would eventually be given by employers, who, in his fantasy, were only characterized by a baleful look and an unrefined and honest absence of words. Just as in his youth, the ringing of a bell or the cry of a bird was enough to immerse him in sudden and intense dreams that dissolved like waves in the water. “Instead of resolving, my mind sends me away to be left to chance,” he thought, before correcting himself. “Instead of action I choose illusion. Enough.
From the shadows, Vorlicek, master of his property and keen advisor to judges, reappeared, and the remnants of his imagination retreated into the brief shadows that were cast beneath his eyes.”
And
“Liv’s dog had had six different owners and names in his short life, which had somehow accumulated in his memory as the commands he obediently learned in each of the episodes of his journey, codes that marked the time to eat and walk, the pirouettes that made Liv laugh, and the buffoonery that had also made Jonn, one of his former masters, happy. Poor Jonn, consumed by incurable melancholy at first, and by indecipherable mania towards the end. Jonn had called him Sasha. He had also, as with pets, given him other private nicknames that dogs and cats learn, and form part of their identity, and make them happy in secret. In his case, “buddy”
Aaand I filled some walls with Lorem Ipsum as well 😉
4. Headcanon
Things that were thought, could happen, or definitely happen, in the background of the story .
For this comic I wrote a list of rumors and facts that form a sort of story of their own. It was left unused in the end, but this is definitely the section to share it.
It goes like this:
The following theories circulate about the unknown author of the book:
He was a son of millionaires who squandered his fortune in the purchase of the building.
It was a homeless man, who received the building in a strange inheritance.
There is some consensus, however, that:
He started writing on the walls of the empty building around 1998.
It took him three years to complete a novel that spans the walls of 32 apartments.
He suffered from a rare skin condition.
No one knows about his whereabouts after 2001.
Those who knew the building, mention a locked room on the top floor, which gave rise to some conjecture:
It was the author’s private room, the only room without wall writings.
It contained the author’s strangely dissected body.
It contained an alternative ending to the novel written on the strangely desiccated body of the author.
It was the the junk room.
On the literary virtues of the novel itself, it has been said:
Jarome Gonzalez, Paris Review: “Intriguing and pretentious.”
The Guardian: “Irregular and monstrous.”
JonSnow69, Amazon reviewer: “Incredibly long and tedious”
After the building went into legal limbo and unsuccessful attempts were made to preserve it, it was demolished in 2007 and the site was occupied, successively, by
A bookstore called “Chapter One”
A cyber cafe called “Cyber-1”
A starbucks
The End.
I hope you enjoyed these notes and further fantasies! If you got this far please leave a like, feel free to comment, add to, or contradict the headcanon as you wish. There’s a Discord channel where we can hang out and discuss this story as well.
Your support make The Secret Knots stories possible. Without it, they would be nothing but a growing pile of notebooks. Thanks, once more!
Juan.
