My Six Projects

So, I don’t wanna show my hand too much, but I wanted to introduce the comics I had in mind. There are six ideas I am playing around with. So, um, SPOILER ALERT, but I will say I am not giving away to much -- just the conceit of each of these stories. 

• Some Glad Mourning -- Basically, it’s the Twilight Zone meets The Spoonriver Anthology. It’s a story about a small Illinois town filled with different variations on ghosts, immortals, and the damned. It’s my Franzen-esque American dream comic as there are a number of “deaths” that occur in the backstory of the comic and in the past lives of the main characters (each of whom will be obfuscated by Dickensian rigamarole). These will range between actual historical events and figures to important turning points in the national consciousness. And! It’s a bit of a puzzle game. There will be clues to who the immortals are, and it will be revealed in the context of two simultaneous small town disruptions -- a man killed by his wife rising from the dead and a recent abduction of a twelve-year old girl. This sounds like... well, a lot! But it’s really just the frame. What I want to do with this project is write vignettes -- some funny, some sorrowful, and some true-to-life. It will be black and white, ink on paper, save for flashbacks which will be in full color. It will live online! When I post, it will live here www.somegladmourning.com 

• Flightless Birds -- In college, I wrote a horrible, stupid play called American Scholastic Bowl which I unceremoniously scrapped, but now, I am reviving it in a graphic novel. It is the story of Mr. Jay Fawn -- the Peoria Baptist Academy’s scholastic bowl coach -- and his student Catherine Cliffton -- a resoundingly high-strung junior aiming towards the Ivy league. The cast of characters comprises four other students: Drew Sands, a pants-wetting tech enthusiast who specializes in math and science questions; Bobby Grünbaum, a history wiz whose overbearing parents lead him to a mental breakdown; Kelley Vern, an artist who obsesses over Brancusi and her specialty is arts, economics, and sports; Denise Ivanovich, actress manqué but forcefully competitive and dramatic, she covers the gaps in theatre, arts, literature, and science; And the odd man out, Wayne Bellows -- his personality is only apparent in answers to questions and via a scene with a karaoke bar. Anyway, the story revolves around Fawn’s teaching contract not being renewed and his desperate attempt to get his team of high-strung highschoolers to the state championship level. And the trite metaphor of flightless birds will come in many shapes and sizes. The comic will have 20 chapters or so (each beginning with a question from the semi-final match). It will be in black and white, ink on paper

• Shit Kitten -- It’s an epic poem, full color (watercolor) done in the style of many of the paintings I’ve done on twitter and elsewhere online. It follows the fates of two demigods -- the dog -- a pink puppy who rises up in the world and is an irresistible force in that he can produce huge waves of the most powerful energy -- and the cat -- a golem created from all the literal fecal matter in the world whose sole magical quality is not being able to be destroyed as an immoveable object. They were created by two full blown gods on a bet, and the poem follows their rise and fall in the world around them and culminates in an epic battle at the end of the story. It sorta has a video game feel in that each of them takes on different enemies throughout their respective quests and also friends they meet on the way. It will live online here! www.shitkitten.com (never mind the little comics I have there right now - this story arc is a recent development) 

• Spoofatally -- based on a kite I made in middle school (god, I wish that was a joke) on which I drew random cartoon characters in a Homestarrunner-ish style. Whenever I was doing odd jobs or yard work over the years, I developed a story around them. In a small mountain plateau, there is this sorta surreal, Krazy-katty town filled with various globby people including  General Direction, Orky the Oracle, a monk, a scarecrow, and a ghost. And one day, the tally, a small black conical spud thing, comes to the town as a lost child -- and reveal itself to be something ominous (not gonna say too much here). ANYWHO! The ragtag group of toony taters has to find the thing that makes the other BAD thing like ... stop. haha. It’s basically my take on wizard of oz! yeah. Well, it probably will live on line, it’s full ... maybe full color? Definitely gonna be more quintessentially my inky style.

• New Houses on the Moon -- You may remember the short comic I did with the same name. This isn’t really a continuation on that as I have decided to make its scope larger and a bit more schticky (still kind of bittersweet too though). It revolves around Skip Sorenson Facto (goes by ipso) -- a rabbit in a red jumper who’s from a country called the Midwest (yeah! Like the song!) who is paid by that government to live on the moon, keep it in its phases (so they don’t have to print new almanacs), keep it from falling out of the sky, and keep it from being stolen by other governments. He intends to use his solitude on the moon to pen the great Midwestern novel and his only companion is a blue robot he calls quid. But of course, his solitude is often disrupted by all manner of “foreign” moon-fanciers including an Elba’ed space emperor and a cosmonaut bear. Definitely full color. Definitely online maybe actually shit I dunno. Ummm. Yeah! This get progressively goofier, as you may see. Link to the comic on which this based! NEW HOUSES PDF

• A Room Without Books -- is like a body without a soul! So said Cicero! This is part autobiography, part magical mystery tour of the peculiarities of famous and obscure literary figures. I’ll talk about my coming out of the closet juxtaposed against the wet dreams of a 17th century Puritan blockbuster poet -- My inability to read a book in college paired with Leonardo DaVinci drawing dicks-with-legs in the margins of his Codex Atlanticus. Definitely gonna rip on Hawthorne, Pound, and any other literary figure who might give credence to the dictum that we are all faking it to an extent, but we’re all capable of having really interesting things to say over coffee at a whole in the wall diner. Black and white, probably wouldn’t publish it, but it does kind of scratch and itch I have for obscure trivia (see, also, Flightless Birds).

So! That’s all she wrote! Lemme know what you think! 

-- Bill