at last, my uni comic

this last thursday, i finished printing a first edition of my uni comic, The Infinite Search for a Place to Belong. i got quite emotional looking through the printed sheets of this thing that i spent the past four months working on. i made this and now it's real. and you can read it (or give me 3€ for all my hard work and then read it). and i'm gonna tell you all about it now.

there it is. i made this.

when my prof first announced the topic for the course -- community -- i had a hard time turning this into something more specific i could write about. because the assignment would be to consider and research a real-world community/community-dynamic and then base a fictional narrative around that. but i felt alienated from community as a whole and didn't feel very drawn to any particular iteration of it, so i was sitting there like. what. do i write about? in an act of bravery i then pitched a vague idea of examining precisely this feeling of lack-of-community and just-not-feeling-very-drawn-to-socialise, specifically in a uni-context, and was told, sure do that sounds good.

there is something auto-biographical in this comic. obviously. fynn (our main character) is to some extend a self-insert because i love exploring difficult topics using characters that mirror me but aren't strictly. me. and so, like fynn, i too was torn between not really feeling the need to socialise at uni and frustration that i wasn't being social and a kind of envy that everyone else seemed to have their goups and to be doing all of this so easily. so i told myself that i would make this project meta. do in real life what fynn would be doing in the comic. force myself to #participate. not let myself isolate anymore. and the first step to this was interviews.

or, well. conversations, is how i framed it. an open call within my semester to talk with me about community and socialising. how do you do it? is it easy, does it come naturally to you? how do you fulfill your social needs, what kinds of socialising energise you, what drains you? why don't we talk about this more, when we all feel like everyone else is so much better at it than us but also all kind of know this can't be true? and a bunch of people responded to my call and sat down with me and we had some very very nice conversations that altogether really soothed my worries about being the only person in the world that feels bad at socialising. (if any of you are reading this: thank you!!!) these chats were also a very good excuse to hang out with and connect with people from uni, and as such a great jumping-off point in my real-life quest to socialise more.

i'm happy to report that this quest has been a great success. in the beginning, i did really have to slap myself on the back of the hand and force myself to just. gooo have lunch with people. despite my instinct that wanted to stay put in the classroom and listen to music. and i don't like the soundscape and openness of the cafeteria at all but you gotta do what you gotta do. and it's gotten easier. my issue is that i love and am very attached to people i care about but i mostly dgaf about and/or am intimidated to approach people i don't (quite) know yet, but obviously, there can't be a deeper relationship without getting through those first stages of not-quite-knowing someone. and i'm not sure whether i really got the hang of talking to (near-)strangers or i've just gotten to know the people in my semester better so i'm more comfortable around them, but either way i feel a little better equipped to get to know new people now. at least emotionally. like i'm less scared that people are gonna dislike me or that i'm a bother when i walk up to someone.

regardless, i now have more people that i feel comfy around at uni and some of them i even call my friends now and it's a very very good feeling to finally have friends in this stupid city! i'm even putting more effort into seeing them outside of school. and i'm quicker to catch myself when i feel lonely or like i don't belong and the rabbit in my chest tells me to isolate when really that just makes me feel worse, actually. who would have thought that talking to people who like you and who you like is actually the thing that makes you feel less alien. mind-blown emoji.

anyway. the comic.

i spent a bunch of time working on that. many hours actually. something around 45 just drawing the pages, so not including scripting, storyboarding, postproduction and printing. can't wait to do it all over again for the rest of my life.

i drew it all traditionally because i love working on paper. because i would have several printing-layers, i got some nice transparent paper and did my two-layered lineart on that. i had this idea of using my accent colour (fluo pink, my beloved) to depict fynn's emotional state (and narrative monologue) -- where the more uncomfortable he feels, the less in-line with his physical body his emotional double is. like so:

fynn is in b&w on the left. his very angry alter ego who just wants him to socialise is pulling him, but really, shown in pink, fynn does not want to go anywhere with this guy.

this little vignette was an option for the back cover but i ended up doing something different with that. in the comic, the emotion thing looks like this:

so anyways, i had two lineart layers that i drew with my beautiful wife, faber castell 4b pencil. the shading i did on paper with ink-wash, which was very nice. i finished all that sometime around january 10th. scanning took 90 minutes, which is (or maybe just felt like) less than i had feared it would take. digital clean-up was boring as shit and took two whole days. but i was comfortably and well finished by january 29th, which was when we would be showing and reading our comics to a room full of students from three separate courses.

the comic-reading was fine. i previously wondered how the hell you might best perform a comic reading and at the time i felt very awkward about it and thought i might narrate through any silent (non-dialogue) scenes but i had a very good and helpful practise-phonecall with my friend and ended up doing the reading as though i would just read the comic for myself (except aloud), so i did not narrate through the silent scenes but still had a good measure of how long to leave them up for people to take in and understand. it did still feel awkward but i powered through, managed without any real stumbling and got good feedback afterwards. so that was fine.

printing the first layer in fluorescent pink.

riso-printing a comic is a lot of work. it takes one million years and you need to keep a bunch of things in mind. i printed mine across two sessions that both lasted well into the evening, and i made a bunch of mistakes and i definitely should have left everything out to dry properly for another few days before folding and binding but i was eager to get done, so here we are. there are some smudges and the margins aren't quite right and i ended up with 20 instead of the ideal 25 copies but it's whatever. it's done. i'm very proud of it. 

printing the second layer in black.

my beautiful comic, all done.

if the cover-art reminds you of something then you're right but also a bit of a nerd. because i did totally just rip off Albin Grau's Nosferatu poster:

what can i say? i just love this drawing. and i always feel very melancholic looking at it. count orlok just seems so lonely and yearny here. so i do think it's a relevant artistic reference. because fynn, too, is lonely and yearny in a way. etc.

i have nothing more to say, really, but i do have some more pictures:

the printing-sheets, all spread out. this is where it dawns on me, emotionally, that this thang is real.

another page from within. i included some things my interviewees said (with permission of course). idk why the page looks so dirty here, it isn't actually. i think it might just be shadows getting caught in the paper texture.

the back cover. i'm very bad at blurbs, so this time, i didn't really include one at all. just this little tagline. and fynn and his bestie. 

that's it. i loved working on this. i want to do this for a living so bad. maybe one day. we will see. i love you.