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Less notes more spaces
In this edition of the newsletter, we share some progress on the new Secret Knots comic and sketches from a game.
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Comic: in progress
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The new story I’m working on is called The River. This is the start of the sequence.
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With this story, I’m taking a turn to a webtoon style strip. It’s a story about inspiration, how books, tales and anecdotes lit the spark in other people to form new stories of their own. This long strip shows connections going back in time, in the stream of the titular river. A drawing is inspired by a movie, adapted from a book, which in turn was inspired by oral stories and travels, and so on. Something happens in the end (or “the beginning)”, but I won’t spoil it yet. It was a script that begged for a vertical display.
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Thematic needs aside, I mentioned before how I wasn’t that happy with the cluttering of the text boxes and the art in the last comic. The long, spacious webtoon format offers a way out of these problems by splitting the text boxes from the drawings entirely. The pacing I imagine for this story called for more air, more room between text boxes and balloons. I’m enjoying playing in this fluid path, and at the same time, I still don’t think I’m getting everything I could from this format. I feel like I keep clinging to regular comic conventions, but this may be a nice first experiment.
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““Why do I want to play much slower than before?” Because I wanted to hear the resonance. I want to have less notes and more spaces. Spaces, not silence. Space is resonant, is still ringing. I want to enjoy that resonance, to hear it growing, then the next sound, and the next note or harmony can come. That’s exactly what I want.”
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I’ve been finding synchronically inspiring sources that seem to signal the way in these latest few days of working on this little tale, that also include reading for the first time the story The Willows by Algernon Blackwood. Another river-shaped tale. There is always something astonishing and sublime at the end of the most famous Blackwood’s tales, and this one doesn’t disappoint. Here, the pacing also allows for the invisible world to slowly creep in the trip of the characters into the amazing. A build up of the weird, marked by spaces, not silence, as Sakamoto said. I hope some of this inspiration trespasses to the experience of reading my own river story.
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I’m sharing weekly progress pages of this comic on Patreon.
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Sketches
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I’ve been playing a lot of rpg games lately. Mostly over Discord, and some in person. Sometimes I make sketches of the characters, to use as tokens in online games, or paper tokens in a physical tabletop game.
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These are from my Wraith The Oblivion chronicle. Three young YouTubers/ ghost hunters, that the player characters met:
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These ones were from a Call of Cthulhu game I ran last week. A pulpy mystery with travelling carnival performers and gangsters, that were fun to play (and draw).
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That’s all for now. I go back to work on that river comic now, and wish you the best for this week. Thanks a lot for reading, and I’ll see you soon with new things.
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