· the cover

I was too lazy when I wrote my last post to scan the cover for Ochre Ellipse, but here it is now. Somebody at APE said it looked like something by Souther Salazar, which is cool I guess, but actually what I was trying to do was copy some children’s drawings from an old issue of Highlights I found at SCRAP.

I will add this and a couple other things to the Family Style catalog for online purchase soon, but I want to redo the whole thing in PHP first, and I don't really know what I'm doing yet. For now, if you want one, just leave a comment here or email me. It's $3.00.

· afterthoughts

Now that the first issue of my comic is completed and the creative process is over with, I would like to take a moment to share some of my thoughts about it. Overall, I am very happy with the way it turned out. The printing and the covers came out great, and I get real pleasure just from holding a copy in my hands. And now that it’s behind me, I feel much more creatively open-minded, so to speak—I can do whatever I want right now instead of putting it all into one thing.
I think that the comic suffered somewhat from the fact that I constructed it episodically, while I really wanted it to read straight through as a single narrative. The transitions from one part to another seem clumsy and unsubtle to me. There were some sections that didn’t make it in, and some concepts I couldn’t really figure out how I wanted to communicate them. For instance, in addition to having a story in which my character grows and becomes giant, I wanted to do one in which I shrink to a tiny size and have some adventure a la The Incredible Shrinking Man. That didn’t happen, but I did hint at it on the last page.

I mentioned to a friend a couple months ago that I would probably just work on it for a while and then publish whatever I had done up to that point, which is pretty much how it worked out.
Ultimately, this issue was supposed to be about childhood, and I don’t think that really came across. Perhaps I was too subtle. For your edification, a brief guide to the symbols I attempted to employ:

mynah=me (Jonas)
clouds=nature/truth
airplane=society
migration=growth
giant=child/puberty
growing/shrinking=growing/shrinking

Discuss.