my beautiful qpr propaganda comic

i made a comic about my beautiful friendship with my best friend. you know this. but let me talk about it a bunch.

to catch you up real quick about this project: Die Systematik Einer Freundschaft [The Taxonomy of a Friendship] is my uni comic for this semester. the overarching topic for our storytelling projects was friendship, and first, i didn't even wanna write abt my real life experiences, really, because my last best friendship ended on a bit of a bummer note, and my current one is so intimate i want to kill myself go into the woods if i think too much about other people looking in on that. so initially, i came up with this cute little story about my OCs August and Gabriel in their childhood friends AU where they get lost in the forest, captured by fae and can only escape if they trade off the secrets they've been keeping from each other. i even made a little cover illustration for it:

#mythem. handheart

and a few alt versions i also like:

this cover art exercise was part of an illustration workshop we did before ever starting the actual comic, so Freunde [Friends] was the working title for these.

but then my prof said we should draw from real life experiences and i took that way too seriously and got insecure abt my augustgabriel thing, so on a whim i said i was gonna write abt this qpr ass thang my friend and i got going on. and my prof loved that and my friend agreed to the project so now here we are.

the beautiful cover

i don't even know anymore how i landed on fungi as a metaphor. my prof was talking about using textually unconnected phenomena as a reflection of the story/emotions we're trying to tell and i was clamoring for something like that to reflect this friendship and idkkk i think it was the mycelium maybe. the fruit bodies of the mushroom being connected over vast distances by the mycelium, like my friend and i have been/stayed connected even despite the physical distance between us over the last year. something like that kicked it off, i think. and when i started thinking and reading more about fungi, so many things just kept playing really well into this analogy/reflection. especially this idea about categories and categorization, fungi being their own category but not always/only recently being recognised as such, and this friendship blurring the lines between/doing away with categories of relationships. so that ended up working really well.

i did want to dive deep-ish into fungi for this, and not only create a visual but also a textual secondary level about them in the comic. so i did some reading. the entire fungi wikipedia, for a start. Pilze: Lebewesen zwischen Pflanze und Tier by Georg Schön. a beautiful Arte documentary. awesome.

i think it is somewhat a bold move to have the majority of the text in a comic about a beautiful friendship be a rather matter-of-factual rundown of what fungi are. but idk, i wanted that in there. Joris Bas Backer, who did a couple of guest-classes with us this semester (so awesome. he's very sweet) said to make it more...engaging i guess? like, tell the audience to feel excited abt fungi. but i uhh i did not wanna do that, i did not wanna tell my readers how to feel. besides, the text about fungi isn't about how awesome fungi are. i mean, kind of it is, but in the context of the comic, it isn't. it's really about the friendship that the narrative part of the comic portrays. we were really good for each other's growth. our relationship is difficult to define and keeps getting incorrectly categorised by others based on what it looks like. we are strongly connected even across distances. etc. anyway, so i took that advice Joris gave me, i considered it, i talked it over with my prof and then i made zero changes of that sort to my script.

scripting, for this one, at least for the narrative, was a bit rough. with The Infinite Search, my scripting/storyboarding process was very straight-forward and it was easy plotting out a story. but this time, i struggled finding a starting point. i didn't have a story to tell as much as just a portrait of this friendship that i wanted to convey, and a few events that felt significant in forming/developing the relationship, so i couldn't really do this point A to point B type scripting.

i ended up doing an exercise we did last semester, where you draw a panel a minute for an hour (or however long you want). you stop having time to think much about what you're doing and where you're going, you just have to. do it. draw the next panel. that really helped me get started, and i ended up with a set of fully storyboarded scenes that i then could piece together in a way that made sense narratively and visually. it's awesome in how many different ways you can get the work done.

my big visual concept for this one was a double-layered effect with one layer being the normal narrative-based character-focused comic, and the second layer being fungi structures and drawings and stuff in a different style/texture.

and it worked out well! we don't talk about how the green turned out way too dark in print and ended up overpowering the b&w a bit. it worked out great.

anyway. my awesome qpr comic.

having it out in the world (in a small way, but still. strangers bought this thang last week at Erlangen) is a strange feeling if i think about it too much, because it is really really personal. i tweaked locations and chronology a little for narrative effect but everything in there is autobiographical, and it's really...idk, not scary, but but just...vulnerable to let other people know these things that happened between us, to let them see things that were really just between us until now. and i was very careful about getting everything approved by my friend, so none of it is there when it shouldn't be. but well. i will blush very much when i have to read this to my class in a few weeks. especially because i still can't say kiss genuinely out loud without feeling embarassed. gah.

but uh. it was really important to me to make this. to talk about friendships that blur the categories, to show what we have to the world. it's really special. and people don't understand it. a while ago, we joked about needing to start taking a tax from people who ask if we're romantically involved because it happens so much and it's funny but it's also kind of frustrating because man. can a guy not just really love their friend? does everything have to be romantic? leave me alone.

and i love love, including romantic love, it's so awesome to love people in whatever way!! but i also lowkey dgaf about romantic relationships anymore. they don't mean anything. they're just a kind of formalisation of the love and committment two people have for each other already anyways. a labelling. plus, traditionally, a agreement on exclusivity. WHICH IS FINE if you're into that, i'm just saying, it's all arbitrary. you can just not have that label, or not have that exclusivity, and still be committed to one-another all the same. in my head, i joke about how my friend is like a boyfriend to me, which just means that i am committed to caring for and about him for the time being, and that he's really special to me -- what it does not mean is that i feel romantically towards him.

idk what i'm even getting at. i think i just want everyone to think about relationships and love a little more in terms of what you actually want out of the relationship, what you want the relationship to look like, rather than categorising your very complex and individual feelings into very narrow boxes and basing the relationship on preconcieved notions on what "that kind of relationship" is supposed to look like. you can do whatever you want with whomever wants to forever, actually. and absolutely you can love your friends gigantuously like lovers.

ok that's it. it's so late. good night, people in my puter. read my comic.