It doesn't feel like it's been two-- oh, wow, THREE years since I got back into using Newgrounds after an almost ten-year gap. Shortly after posting all those Inktober drawings, I graduated college, moved, and fun kinda got away from me! Still been doing my best to give back to the wonderful Newgrounds community, one which has always inspired me.
In these three years, though, I've been working hard on getting closer to my dream of being a narrative artist or visual storyteller of sorts. I'm in a good solid place now with plenty of room to make art, and honestly, I really have been! I've always dreamed of writing a kind of long-running story-focused webcomic, and I'm proud to say I'm making progress on a little thing I'm calling Kakopolis.
A wannabe museum curator in the titular ancient city, Pauline is surrounded by evidence that the world is the responsibility of mythological figures whose sole aim is to make life terrible. Though seemingly everyone in the city is ready for an apocalypse, Pauline's expertise and frustration, along with an antiquated flyer left with a local courier, may be able to help break Kakopolis out of its dark era before tensions turn fears into reality.
Kakopolis is a story about attempting to gather all of the scraps of motivation at ones disposal and direct them into one big, name-making, history-saving act. Why wallow in futility when you can be lauded for eternity? Surely this time it'll work, you're special... right?
I have plenty done for it already; the ~13 most central characters have at least one design solidified, and all have their main arcs established and personalities fleshed out; I have rough drafts drawn for the first ~30 pages (1.5 ish issues); story beats written for the first four or five issues; and of course the overarching plot is sketched out - I wouldn't dare start a long-runner with no ending!
This thing has been rotating on my mental hot-dog warmer for what feels like my entire adult life. A lot of me is scared but a lot of me wants to do it scared because I know doing it scared and imperfect is the only way it gets done.
At this point my primary hangup is format; the mental hamster wheel goes fastest when I'm thinking about webcomics because I'm a fan of Scott McCloud's approach to the medium - it's the internet, go crazy! why stick to the constraints of print? - but don't we all dream of that perfect Platonic Form of our work, fully animated, musical, possibly even interactive?
...And every time I go down that mental rabbit hole, I decide to stick to what I know - drawing with a little writing, maybe some peripherals depending on what I can offer - and we come back to webcomics. Then I look at my desktop background, from page 151 of Making Comics by the aforementioned Scott McCloud:
Kakopolis will make it out there, it's already put smiles on the face of those who've put up with me showing them the unpolished tidbits that are going into it. I just gotta draw!
Anyway, I'd love to interact with other webcomic/story artists, just not sure where or how to reach out :]