Okay, I’m going to level with you. I don’t know what this is. I wanted to write something. Straight up off-beat sci-fi comic. So as I was surveying the road all around New Zealand, from Cape Reinga to Dunedin, I wrote. Characters came. Infinity Girl. Random Man. Puzzleships. Enlightenment Guns. Space Elephants. Slowly they all formed, into arcs, and areas to explore.
But I didn’t really know how to write comics. So I wrote how I could. Stream of consciousness, wordplays, rhyming, resonants, made up words, idioms and automatic writings, that filled pages and pages of hand-scrawled notebooks, written in cafes and idle moments, mornings, mostly. And ultimately, I had the first issue in my head, but not in script-erred prose. And although I could draw scribbles and first positions, I had no real style or syncopation. Then someone told me about National Novel Writing month in the states every November. And I thought, I’ll give that a go. 50,000 words. In a month. November. 2009. Originally, I had a plan to highlight the best bits from the journals and type them up. Partly because of time constraints (was that when I had 5 jobs and in 2 bands?) partly the rules of the endeavour – new words only, I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. Did I have enough at the end of the month. No, maybe 35,000 words. It didn’t matter. I kept writing, until the end, until they petered out. I don’t even know how long it is anymore. No, this was the bedrock, this was the ore, this was the food, the fuel of the story, the gaseous clouds that would form into suns and planets. This would be the central point, of everything that would come next. Music, art, literature.
And so it sat. And waited. Until I’d left New Zealand, hot on the heels of the girl-of-my-dreams, but that’s another story. Still no comic script. Where to start. Again with the time constraints. Scratched moments, snatched. I know. Break it into chunks. Tweet it. Daily. Then draw it. Ponder it. Chew on the chunks. Make something based on it every day. A photograph, a scribble, a colour. Something. Meanwhile, I’d been drawing on the ipad, mixing layers, of photographs, tracing, replacing, pencils, inks, colours, background colours, vectorised, surprised. Something emerged, a style, a trend, a way, a path through, and although abstract, meaningless, (meaningful) and also along the way, I decided to trust my instincts. Go where they told me, feel it like music, push it to the edge, but not over. And post 7 days worth, every week. A web comic. Of sorts. An oracle. A post-rock arty-fact, immersible, like music. A starting point, and ending, a door, something that is incomplete but is made complete by the viewer, as it reads you, as you read it. Where do ideas come from? Where do they go? A PO Box in Netherdene? Or the Enlightenment Gun.