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Notebook 4 - Circa 2020

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I'm pretty sure it was 2018 when I started working with alcohol markers, and like my last notebook, this one is the starting concepts for a comic book. This time rather than going directly to a laid out story, I began with a few character studies.  However, before we get to those bits, the first few pages set the context for the notebook. I can see an address which clearly suggests the year, because I was only living in that small town for 12 months, and some design layouts for some furniture I had intended to build because other pieces of furniture had died during moves of house.  Now we get to the character study... This was generally intended to be one of six characters that the comic was going to be centered around, where each of the characters interacted with two or three of the others, but none knew the whole group of six, and none knew the entire complexity of the story unfolding around them. The only people to know the whole story were a a narrator figure, and the audi...
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Notebook 3 - Circa 2001

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  In the late 1990s, I had a few friends who were writing up their own comics, and I was helping out with some layouts and some illustration work. I don't remember the specific date of this notebook, but it has a few ideas that I was having around the turn of the millenium. About the time I moved house from the outer western suburbs of Sydney to the inner western suburbs.   It was around this time that I was at the peak of my comic collecting, mostly focusing on independent stuff, like "Shi" (from Crusade), "Kabuki" (from Calibre Comics then Image), "The Crow" (which was from Kitchen Sink Press, if I remember correctly). Lots of stories that explore personal identity, a bit of action, some supernatural elements... often borderlining on the "Bad Girl" genre.  The bits that I remember of this story involved a character of mysterious and unknown origin waking up in a hospital or asylum. She has flashbacks or glimpses of something else happening ...
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I didn't expect to find that...

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I recently discovered gifcities.org , while building the new neocities website for vulpinoid studios (if you're interested, look here ). I've been interested in the concept of the underground resurgence of the free web as a backlash against Web3.0 which is awesomely punk in its aesthetic. Neocities feels like the way the web used to be before the rise of Facebook and other social media platforms, a bit of a wild west where people can lay claim to an address and just do whatever cool stuff they want.  As a part of this, there has been a reclaiming of the 88x31 gif button, which is how I got led to GifCities. There's argument about how this standardised size was developed, with folks pointing to an early Netscape Navigator button as the prototype.    But it moved beyond there to other programs, and other links between sites back in GeoCities and MySpace days.   It's not hard to make something like this, and the file format is pretty small, so I figured I'd make my own...
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Notebook 2a - Circa late 1990s

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 This is one of my oldest surviving notebooks, and it's so packed with ideas that I'll split the overview into 2 parts... It begins with an idea I had called "New Hope City", I can also see some old geocities web addresses written inside the front cover, so that's the first piece of evidence I'm using to pick my date of late 1990s for this notebook (I wonder if those links still work at any level).  "New Hope City" is an idea I've revisited a few times over the years, but it's never managed to get anywhere beyond a short campaign, and a couple of visits during various plane hopping and dimension jumping stories. We can start to see ideas that will be common through this notebook, where I had an absolute fascination with tying the Kabbalistic Tree of Life into a game system. This goes on for almost twenty pages, and there is a gradual shift from the "New Hope City" setting to the ethereal "Floating World" setting that I dev...
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