Notebook 3 - Circa 2001

 

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 in the world. I thought it was awesomely edgy to have these glimpses appear as broken panes of glass intersecting the reality of the mundane world, but was experimenting with the best way to do this.  

I was experimenting with artistic techniques, and wanted to get a look for the story that was different from other visual storytelling techniques I was seeing at the time. I went with my standard black outlining, and watercolour pencils for the colouring. I think I was also aiming for the idea that the "mundane" world and the "shattered" mystical reality would be shaded (and even illustrated) in two completely different ways, I think that one of the reasons why I never got much traction with this project was my inability to decide on the exact nature of the illustration styles I wanted to use.   

There were hints before this page that the character was blonde from the perspective of the mystical world, while she was brunette from the view of the mundane citizens of reality. I don't know if this was a clever reveal over the opening pages of the story, or just blatant from that very first page. By the time we get to this point, the character is running through the mystic world and the shattered fragments of overlapping paradigm are the mundane world.

Like a lot of the incomplete project ideas I had at the time, I wanted to fuse a few concepts, and wasn't really sure of the best way to do it. The ideas came flowing thick and fast, and I rushed to get them down onto the page, rather than plotting things slowly and methodically. Here we get the idea of the character running through the corridors of the hospital in the real world while in the mystical reflections of her mental shattered dreamscape she is running through a surreal sunset land. She climbs up and other something... maybe representing an obstacle in the "real" world...

...then falls down the other side.

The fall becomes flight when she sprouts dragonfly wings.

Thee character with the dragonfly wings has been a common theme across a lot of my pieces, often related to a dreamlike goddess that exists on the edges of reality, and entity that might be recognised as the Discordian "Eris", some kind of child of the Dream-God "Morpheus", a banished being cursed to walk the dreamlands as a punishment for activities in the mortal world, or a self-defined spark of consciousness bootstrapped into existence by the infinite chaos of the void, and drawn to our reality like a moth to a flame. 

We write what we know and what we identify with... 

The opening pages came to a climax with a shattered page where all realities coalesce. 

Thus begins the second part of the story. The character awakens in the mundane world, not knowing whether their escape and run through the dreamscape is real or imagined, but knowing that something just isn't quite right. I think I was using the idea that there would be a recurring cycle of the character walking an unstable path between mystic and mundane worlds... and things going wrong when one side or the other gained too much influence over her.

The next page was a direct homage to the first issue of the Spawn comic (or perhaps a blatant rip off). A scattered collection of news presenters reading stories about strange events in the local city, some of these events might reflect things that have happened in these opening pages. Some might provide context for story elements that haven't appeared in the comic yet.

Then, to match the vibe of comics in this genre, we need to escalate the tension by introducing a hunter. 

Maps of a city underworld. Sewer pipes and utility tunnels, subway lines and other criss-crossing networks beneath the world, with a typical "helpless" pose for our heroine... it's hard to remember exactly where I was going with this when there isn't a lot of writing to provide context.

To counterbalance the hunter, a bearded figure is introduced, perhaps as some kind of mentor or assistnt to guide the heroine through her journey or help her learn her powers 

The incomplete nature of this story drops off even further after this point. The next few pages are hastily sketched with pencil, and over time many of these sketches have started to fade away. Photos of these pages don't show much. I vaguely remember this coinciding with moving house and losing the sketchbook for a while. By the time I had refound the notebook, my mind had wandered into new stories and ideas, but I always wanted to come back to this one...

...eventually.

My art has evolved since then, but I still think this could be an interesting basis for a story.